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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

There are huge problems with immigration in France and it's been a growing problem for the past 40 years.

But contrarely to what people think, crime isn't IMHO the worst of them. The worst is the feeling that the cultural norm of the country, as well as its "visual" identity has shifted from a european country to a (mostly) african one ( and please read the rest before making hasty judgments on what i'm saying).

To understand the problem, imagine going to a few remote rural areas in japan in 40 years and each time only see tall 7 feet blond and blue eyes people, speaking swedish and not finding sushis or ramen anywhere.

I like all cultures, and i believe there's great things everywhere, but that's why i'm also a bit sad to see "traditional" France (whatever that means) disappear.

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"the cultural norm of the country, as well as its "visual" identity has shifted from a european country to a (mostly) african one"

This is delusional, and yes, I did read the rest of your comment.

not a native english so i'm not sure what you mean by delusional ?

We can't legally compile ethnics statistics in France, so all we have to rely on is our personal feeling, which is of course very subjective ( and this has been the counter argument to my type of argument for a very long time). But it has reached such a level now that nobody is contesting that diagnosis. People give it different names depending on their political orientation ( "creolisation" for the left, "grand remplacement" for the right), but it's basically the same conclusion.

>We can't legally compile ethnics statistics in France

This is bullshit, because even if France made it illegal (it's obviously not) other groups would definitely still do it. France is still 86% white people, mostly french. Nobody is being replaced anywhere, because immigration is tiny everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France

"France is still 86% white people, mostly french." Now look forward 30-50 years, and see who is more: the native population who has no kids or very few ones, or the immigrant cultures that encourage 3-5+ kids per family. It's just basic population maths.

From your own article :

"Due to a law dating from 1872 at the start of the Third Republic, France has prohibited the collection of data on a citizens race, ethnicity or their beliefs such as religion through national censuses,[47][48] however estimates have been made of the ethnic and racial demography of the country in the present"

We're talking estimation as it is indeed illegal, no matter how crazy it may sound like. Estimation is highly dependant on who's doing the estimation, and for what purpose, and as you can see in the article itself, the topic is highly controversial among specialist.

Now, if you were living in france for the past 40 years, and had regularely travelled across the country, you would see that in that particular case, the situation is very obvious, and the only circle left still debating the issue is demographic specialists.

Politicians and media used to deny the issue and flagged anyone mentioning it as racist, but things have recently changed and we finally start talking about it like grown ups.

I have lived and travelled in France for around 40 years and I don't at all recognize what you are describing.

Your claims appear to be based on suggesting that you (and, in a laughable falsehood, the wide range of opinion in French society) knows for a fact that this situation exists, but if anyone does not agree with you, that is merely their opinion, since it is impossible to measure.

may i ask where you have lived and travelled in france ?

Have you ever been to any suburb, not just in Paris ( which already has some suburbs with close to 99% non-french inhabitants) but in pretty much any average sized city in the country ?

based on your saying I can only assume you only lived in the central part of paris, and went on holidays in the west coast such as bordeaux or brest. Because all the rest of the country is pretty much in transition.

What do you mean by "non-french"?

The same i would mean if i said "non-japanese ", only applied to france.

I understand your reluctance to answer a straightforward question: you know exactly what you are, and yet you are ashamed to admit to it.

This is not the political culture of Vercingetorix, nor of Charles de Gaulle ;)

You'd be surprised. Since we seem to have moved to ad-hominem argumentation :

I think your categories and your political reflexes prevent you from thinking straight. Everybody in the world would have a broad understanding of what "french" means (or "japanese", "americans", "italian", etc). For some reason you pretend to ignore there are some cultural norms that are associated to a nation ("cultural" in the broadest sense, which includes the way you look). I believe because this fact scares you or have been associated to a taboo.

Those taboos prevent you from addressing questions, and not addressing the issues don't make them magically disappear. Worst, you risk leaving those questions to people that have a political agenda.

You seem to be the one subject to taboos. You don't want to say what you mean by 'French' or 'non-French'.

I am perfectly capable of understanding and discussing what can be meant by 'Frenchness', and what I mean by it.

I've already had this conversation many times with people arguing against the obvious situation, and it inevitably leads to absurd conclusions that defy the immediate cognitive conclusions and intuition of anyone looking at a given city landscape (you could tell just by looking at a picture if a city looks european, african or asian, for example).

However this is most of the time a total waste of time, because the reason the person is arguing against the obvious is not because of intelligent caution, but rather out of scare.

So sorry if i'm not going this route with you. If you're sincerely curious i suggest you go on a bike ride in Argenteuil on a friday.

What do you mean when you say "French" or "non-French"?

What are the words you are scared of using if you answered this question?

Why won't you use them?

not sure you understood my point. I rely on immediate cognitive understanding of what "french" means.

It's a mix of the way you dress, your body features (yes, skin color is one of them obviously but that's far from the only one), your language, all your daily habits, the food you eat, author you've read, etc.

It's the general picture people have in their mind when they think of an archetypal "french". Doesn't mean all french are like that, obviously. Much like i'm pretty sure you could find japanese with natural blond hair who never eat raw fish.

You may also argue that this image of french people is completely outdated, and that the metropolitan french population has evolved in the past 50 years. But that's precisely my point.

But even from an economic point of view, the French immigration is mostly an uneducated when not illiterate, african, immigration, in a country that has deindustrialised like all other major western economies. It's not a like for like replacement for the local birth rate. You start to see convergence at the second generation. That's a long time.

> imagine going to a few remote rural areas in japan in 40 years and each time only see tall 7 feet blond and blue eyes people, speaking swedish and not finding sushis or ramen anywhere.

to me, that sounds great actually

https://en.japantravel.com/shizuoka/izu-shuzenji-british-vil...

What makes French (or Japanese) culture something we need to keep ideologically pure?

The movement of people causes an interchange of culture.

This is 2023. I can get plenty of interchange on netflix, or hop on a plane and try the interchange in person.

I wasn't talking about keeping it pure. Just keeping it alive.

Why does it die with immigrants? French/Japanese culture exists in the French/Japanese homelands.

of course, it doesn't have to. And france has dealt with immigration in the past quite successfully, with newcomers melting their identity completely as to become almost undistinguishable from the french one after just a few generations.

For some reasons it doesn't seem to having worked that way in the last decades (and it would be really interesting to know why).

What you're doing is called "True Scotsman" and you're missing the point. French culture is whatever happens in France. It's not some ideologically sterile idea that you make it out to be. Same for Japan. French and Japanese culture evolve with time and influence, just as the rest of the world. However it is still French/Japanese culture.

In some far distant world where people in France no longer eat baguettes or people in Japan are not synonymous with Sushi, those people still exist in French and Japanese culture. (And those ideological totems still exist as legacies in French and Japanese culture, they're just no longer practiced).

And I'm not even going to begin to address the influences that France and Japan have had on other cultures (the entirety of Africa and Asia). The cultures of the places that France and Japan have influence have not been "superseded". They are still the culture's of those lands. They just have outside influence.

"French culture is whatever happens in France"

This sounds to me as a bit tautological. If we move 200 millions from china in 1 month, you wouldn't say "french culture is about eating rice, and french people generally look like chinese".

Culture sometimes change intrinsically, but sometimes because of huge foreign influence or demographics ( invasion being historically the most influencial one). Doesn't mean you can't observe the change when it happens and judge it.

Being reverse colonized must really suck. Almost as bad as the people who were originally trampled by French boots.

all of those countries must have been utopian wonderlands before the French came…

...and after they left.

i'm not sure if your comment means you're looking forward to support the "anti-colonizers" side in a potential upcoming civil war ?

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