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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.

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That is the point isn't it? European countries finally start catching up to the US in the size of their immigrant population, and all of a sudden you're seeing massive social upheaval and populist movements popping up everywhere.

> European countries finally start catching up to the US in the size of their immigrant population,

No. Several European countries have had significant foreign-born populations for a long time.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/549292/foreign-born-popu...

Those stats count an immigrant from any neighboring Western European country as foreign born. That makes them highly misleading compared to the US. In the US, a person from a different state does not count as an immigrant.

Of course not, but a state is not a country. Germany has 16 states, for example, and the statistics don't count people from different states as immigrants.

However, a person from a neighbouring country (e.g. Mexico) would count as an immigrant in the US.

Just because states are massive in the US doesn't make them equivalent to different countries in Europe, which all have their own language, ethnic background, and culture. A German person moving 350 miles to Italy (from Munich to Venice) is definitely an immigrant, with a completely different background, even though the distance itself isn't even enough to go between Austin and Houston in Texas.

I think GP's point is more that there are many more surrounding countries from which immigration is easier, than in the U.S.

There may be more cultural distance between Austin and Houston than you think :-)

Percent foreign born isn’t really a good metric of the level of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.

... yeah, I don't think those Syrian refugees are vacationing on the Rhine with OP. He doesn't see them on the bus because they can't even afford the bus he takes...

I have Syrian refugee neighbors, we live almost a stone's throw from the Rhine, they seem fine

It was, I think, correct until relatively recently. Certainly, the countries of Western Europe of the 80s were, for the most part, each very homogeneous.

It's no longer the case (I read today that 1 in 4 Swedish schoolchidren wasn't born in Sweden!), and I wonder very much what that will mean for the future of Europe. The mass influx of Germans, Irish, Scandinavians & Italians in the 19th century radically changed what it meant to be an American, and it seems to me that Europe is about to go through an even larger-scale change.

I think you may only be looking at immigrant based visas in the US. Whereas you need to look at permenant residents (ie green card holders = 13.2M of which 8.9M are eligible for citizenship).

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