In Europe the notion of someone being a African Frenchmen or a African English is absurd. You are your nationality.
Unfortunately this export from America is starting to take root in Europe.
Unfortunately this export from America is starting to take root in Europe.
The faction of people that don't believe you are British if you aren't white has to be minority of people. Most of the people that may have brought up the subject are in their Winter years now. Pretending that Enoch Powell is still popular is a nonsense and tbh is nothing more than virtue signalling IME.
She's the perfect example. If a full on British person like Nigel Farage does a heinous crime (or make it apples to apples, he joins ISIS) would they take his citizenship away?
If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
The case went through all the legal proceeding and she is not allowed back in the UK. Good!
> If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
The citizenship concept is a requirement for modern life. If a person has their citizenship revoked, what are they to do?
They are illegal where they are, and they are illegal where they go. To my knowledge, there's no processes in any country for becoming a citizen without a preexisting citizenship from another country.
Back to this specific example, if she had wanted to come back and denounce ISIS; what should the UK offer her?
What about if she wanted to come back and face trial; what should the UK offer her?
In the end, just to point out the obvious, revoking citizenship is completely unneeded. If she comes back, charge her with her crimes. If she travels, extradite her. If she stays, let the leopards eat her face.
A lot of ISIS members came back, they faced persecution, some even death sentence but none had their citizenship stripped.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k-strips-citizenship-is...
> If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
Well they shouldn't have been let back in anyway. I also have no sympathy for a woman that said she felt nothing when she saw severed heads (of people executed by ISIS). Also there are claims that she enforced some of the Sharia laws and wasn't a passive member of the Caliphate.
She revoked her citizenship when she left.
> Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
No there is a different legal treatment for people that join a rogue state which literally wants to destroy yours. I don't care about these people. Her supporters can cry racism all they want, It isn't racism. We don't want terrorists back in the country.
While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?
Anyone born in New York is American, not everyone born in London is British.
The empire caused all sorts of citizenships to appear; citizens of the Empire were "British" right up until the point where they actually started moving to Britain, causing that right to be taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand...
It is an American import and it is absurd. It also causes division. e.g Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
Many developers don't spend time with the lower classes / those that aren't university educated which have to deal with the worse parts of immigration. They only see the positive aspects of it.
BTW the same happens with the British in the South of Spain btw. The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This old nonsense. This is the problem people like you will constantly bring up the past and won't let anyone forget about it. None of the people that were involved with that are alive today. Also BTW every country and people have invaded and colonised one another if you go far back enough in time. Are we going to start blaming the Italians for Caesar massacring the Celts and the Gauls? When do you want to stop? 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?
> I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility
When did I claim I had a problem with people having another flag up? I didn't say that. I said the labourers in the pub tend to and it has nothing to do with xenophobia (which is you basically euphemism calling them/me racist btw).
If you re-read my comment I actually said that someone would just claim it was racism and not actually try to understand what the real issue is. You did exactly that and you didn't even direct it at the right person. You can never have a sensible discussion about these issues because mid-wits will scream racism almost as it were some Pavlovian reaction.
BTW I am actually a xeno-phile. I actually have lived all over the globe and have only recently come back to the UK.
> Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia.
Nope. I never insisted that at all. I never even mentioned foreigners. You keep on twisting what I am trying to explain and trying to pervert it into something you wish it to be.
I said that this sub dividing people in the *same nationality* by *race* is an American import to the UK (and from what some of my Belgian and French friends have told me) a import into some parts of Europe as well. It isn't typically done in the UK, France, Belgium and I suspect it is the same in many of the other European countries.
Then I said that working class labourers (not all of them white btw) don't like it when 2nd/3rd or 4th generation immigrants aren't patriotic or don't try to assimilate (like their parents did). I then said these concerns / complaints will always get hand-waived away by people as "racism" when the real problem is a feeling of disrespect. Just like you have.
It got nothing to do with xenophobia as the people I am talking about are British.
> If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
I do. So if you could actually respond to what I said and refrain from this behaviour (which you are now accusing me of) that would be great. Pointing the finger at me, when it is actually you is disingenuous.
How HN works is that commenters need to resist provocation and focus on substantive, thoughtful discussion no matter how divisive the topic is. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is something we're working on learning to do as a community. Most commenters in this thread are demonstrating that it is possible. Accounts that fuck with that process by casually setting fires or stoking them are particularly harmful, so please don't do that here.
In terms of whether an article is on topic, the criterion is not "might someone take it as flamebait", but "is it intellectually interesting and substantive enough to support thoughtful discussion". More explanation about that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross.
That's not anti-foreign culture, but it is insulting to be born in the UK and not see it as your homeland. Or would you be okay with me raising a British flag in India and claiming I was British, if my parents happened to move there before I was born?
No that's absolutely racism.
> The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This is also their racism.
A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
> No that's absolutely racism.
Why? Care to explain? I never mentioned the race many weren't white btw that were making a similar complaint.
> This is also their racism.
So Spanish people who are basically white are being racist against other white people? Is that what you mean? That isn't racism.
Or British (not all British people are white) are people being racist against Spanish people? Or are you using Hitler's definition of what "white" is which means Northern European.
Either way this is non-sensical.
> A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
What are you on about? Nobody said anything about that. I said there are people in Spain that are English that don't assimilate with the local population which is Spanish.
I'm actually sympathetic to your views, and feel strongly that immigrants should respect and participate in the host culture as much as possible. That requires effort on both sides, of course, and the blame doesn't always lie with the host Western culture as is often unfairly characterised.
My only point was that I don't see that maintaining a link to your heritage and cultural/ethnic distinctiveness as _necessarily_ incompatible with assimilating and participating fully into the host nation and enriching it in the process. This isn't an argument for neoliberal multiculturalism by the way, which I view as mostly a policy disaster, that hurts the working classes and immigrants the most.
Some of it is imported, but the UK is quite capable of its own characteristically British racism, most recently directed against Poles and Romanians.
Tell that to the Balkans.
Yes, but
> You are your nationality.
Only if you're a nationalist. Many believe in cross-national or non-national collective identities, e.g. the identity of being a wage worker.
In other cases - it's groups oppressed by the state. The Catalan and Basque come to mind; and there are the Roma ("gypsies"), who are not territorially-defined.
etc.
Nope. That is how the law and the state sees it.
Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
I never claimed there were Romanians Europeans living in France. I claimed that if you were happened to be Black and British you were still seen as simply British (until relatively recently). The same is generally true in other parts of Northern Europe as well, I have discussed this with Belgians, Germans and Frenchmen online and they all tell me similar things.
I am complaining that this nonsense of saying you are a White <Nationality> or a Chinese <Nationality> or Black <Nationality> idea has been imported from America. It doesn't make sense here.
> "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
I don't care what they do in the USA. That is their business. It isn't a thing here and it shouldn't be. Just because we speak English in the UK, doesn't mean we are like Americans.
> Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
I understand this and never claimed the opposite.
Thanks to EU freedom of movement, that is absolutely what you do have.
Why is race necessary or useful in the same way?