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Comment by impossiblefork | Hacker News Reader

Even so, this particular statement is factual: Belgians are about 50% of the newborn in Belgium. In Sweden numbers are less certain, but it's less than 60%, somewhere between 50% and 60%, so Swedes are likely to end up being a minority in Sweden, possibly a quite small minority, and the same with Belgians in Belgium.

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The idea that there would be something like a 'pure Belgian', or Dutch or French or whatever, is an illusion.

How many of those 50% new Belgians had all Belgian ancestors? And not some French, Dutch, German, Italian .. person somewhere up in their family tree?

A pure French exist!

A pure French has "core values". He is proud to be French, a bit arrogant, a bit thinking like his country is big ("la Grande Nation"), the source of all the enlightenment philosophers, that English has more than 30% of its words directly taken from French and that without French cuisine and mode, and his magnificent country for the people to visit, the world would not be a place to live, can discuss without start and end on any subject and do not listen anyway to your answers. (I think there are many more core values, but I forgot them)

It means that you can be pure French with Algerian, Moroccan, Chinese, whatever you want and have, roots. You just need to believe the core values and you are definitely French.

Sometimes my wife tells me that I am a stupid French.

;-)

You make the EU actually use French as a working language, even though German has far more native speakers in Europe and is also a working language nobody insists on using. You also make the whole parliament move to Strasbourg every other week for no reason.

But at least you are comitted to the EU, so as long as the ECB stays in Frankfurt, we are fine with your special treatment. Although you could tip better ...

The pure french of 100 years ago is very different than the pure french of today. Which is a good thing.

When it happened in the United States we called it the land of the free and the melting pot, but somehow it's bad when it happens in Europe.

Fuck racial and cultural purity. Get on with the times.

The US almost completely wiped out the native population, so everyone was an immigrant, and united by the idea of a free country. That’s a form of cultural uniformity, just like cultural heritage in Europe.

How was having people from all over Europe cultural uniformity? They could not even agree which version of Christianity to believe in. They arrived as Germans, Brits, Irishmen and Italians and now they're all indistinguishably Americans, and still are able to celebrate their heritage.

Wiping out the native population is a very sad moment of US history that doesn't invalidate my point.

As parent said, all those Europeans went to America because they shared roughly the same ideals about what America could be. That's the foundation of any culture, and because it's shared it's "uniform". This is not the case in Europe, where people in different regions (never mind countries) can have very different ideals formed over the course of sometimes thousands of years

I disagree. Some went to America because of the ideals, but others went there because they had no choice (exile), or they wanted to start anew because of shady past or just because. The land of the free is a nickname that has been slapped on the USA after the fact.

Who says immigrants with a different skin colour don't move to Europe because of the ideals? That is bollocks and borderline discriminates other cultures with the assumption that they do not care about becoming European. The incorrect assumption being that it's never been the people that convert to a culture, but instead the culture evolves over time to accommodate the change in demographics. Racial and cultural purity is an ideal that never really existed. It's easy to imagine the citizens of Rome complaining about the Celts and, yikes, the Barbarians ruining the pure Roman blood two thousand years ago.

The future of Europe, and the rest of the world, culturally and genetically, is a melting pot of people from all over the world. To me it is an absolute win, especially since history proved time and time again that the more people with different experiences and lives come together, the more society advances.

Disclaimer: I am definitely biased as a European-born mixed race citizen. The more you mix the cultures, the more arbitrary those borders and ideals seem.

Are these 50% of newborns Belgians/Swedes by some divine right? Why aren't the rest Belgians/Swedes?

Their skin is too dark.

(/s or whatever the appropriate way is of disassociating myself from this idea)

The very thing you are saying here is inherently and deeply racist.

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