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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

There are many horror stories indeed. Xenofobia is a big thing here, but unlike the US where racism is direct and in your face, here it is subtle. People are polite, but that won't help you get that raise that native Austrians colleagues would get.

While all these things are important, my main issue is far deeper, see my reply to alangibson.

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I live in village so small the streets don't have names, but today I talked to an Ethiopian guy living around here and said Servus to a couple of kids adopted from Tanzania walking down the street. The chances of them getting shot by a police officer rounds off to 0%. Austria has racism, but the US has Racism.

Very few people are racist, although you will find that if immigrants come from eastern europe instead of exotic countries like Ethiopia and Tanzania, the percentage of racist people towards them increases dramatically. Even so, few are overtly racist, yet somehow the society behaves in a way that precludes true integration.

My friends from Romania are paid significantly less than their native Austrian collegues. Are their bosses racist? I don't know, I don't necessarily think so, yet the society somehow converged to this state.

People are to polite to be overtly racist. You're totally right about eastern Europeans though. Hungarians, Romanians, etc. do a lot of the crap work so they get looked down on. (Pretty standard Marxist analysis there). What I mean about Racism vs racism though is they don't get red lined put of home ownership or disproportionately harassed by the cops though. At least as far as I am aware.

> true integration

I don't believe full integration happens until the second generation. We immigrants will always be from somewhere else. Their kids have a foot in both worlds. Their kids are fully from where they live. I could be wrong; these were my observations living with a large number of immigrants in Seattle.

Here in Germany the BLM protest marches were tolerated in the middle of the pandemic.

News orgs would fall over themselves trying to dredge something to be offended about in Germany’s colonial past or discussing any triviality regarding black people.

I saw this one article about people from Eastern Europe working in Germany, lodged together like cattle, passports taken by the employer for safe keeping. Modern slavery happening in 2021 on German soil. Few comments online if any condemning the perpetrators and zero empathy, no marches, no protests.

A certain degree of xenophobia, like in the example you mention is present everywhere. Or where are foreigners treated just like the locals in this world?

Don't want to be incendiary here. Anecdote to illustrate that racism/anti-immigration can be individual and come with highly diverse flavour.

I was having a beer with friends in a bar in western Austria a while back. A middle aged local was loudly, but in a friendly tone, proclaiming the horrors of immigration to us. We were from Sweden, Ghana, China. I asked (in my broken german) why he thought we three would be a good audience for this monologue, considering our obvious non-Austrian-ness? He quickly countered that "you guys are not real immigrants. In his mind a real immigrant does not contribute to society, misbehave, and whatnot.

I think at least some racism have foundations stemming from other issues.

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