Prior generations of Europeans were also xenophobic as hell, to the point of going to war with each other. I really don't understand which idyllic past you refer to here.
If you go live in a country (long-term, which 10 years is), you should learn the language and not expect the locals to try to conform to your not-knowing the language... you're there, it's their country, their language, not vice-versa. How can you expect a country where people employed there don't know the local language to even work? Imagine a postman, a service worker, etc. not knowing german.. how is that going to work? When stuff like this happens, you get immiggrant ghettos and yes, in turn xenophobia, because people there cannot get normal jobs and expect the germans to adapt to them instead of vice-versa.
Do you guys know how every language came to be? It was through the interaction of people from different cultures, and it is an ongoing process. Germany was not even a country not so long ago. I reject the normative notion that learning a language is central to being a positive member of a community.
Imagine a brit going to france, driving his car on the "wrong" side of the road and saying "it doesn't matter, people just drive around me, it's not an issue".
Lol no. You’re not a sovereign individual. You’re part of a society, and every society is the product of people who have a culture that’s been cultivated over generations. Japan is a creation of the Japanese—the fruit of generations of Japanese people building a society according to their culture—not some foreigner who’s lived there for a fraction of a lifetime.
Let's just take one example. John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s. Should America make some silly rule like you propose, and say that people like him are not welcome there, or that America does not "belong" to them? I suppose you support giving back the land to indigenous tribes then?
Not at all. Bangladesh, where I’m from, has computers too, but its government, institutions, infrastructure, constitution, etc., are still what Bangladeshis and the British created. Society is a product of culture, and culture runs deep and is extremely sticky.
The same is true of Germany or America. My wife’s family fought in the American revolution and were among the first pioneers to settle the Oregon coast. The culture of those pioneers—the rugged individualism, etc.—was passed down over the generations and has had a manifest influence on American culture and identity. My ancestors “didn’t build that.” I wasn’t socialized into those values growing up. My ancestors were from somewhere completely different that’s had civilization for a millennium and has completely different values and attitudes. My family came here in 1989 to a country that was fully formed in its modern incarnation by, among other people, my wife’s family. It strikes me as absurd when people assert out of misplaced political correctness that America is my country just as much as it is her country. It reduces culture and nationhood and citizenship to a shallow and impoverished concept.
Why is that alright? Were the anti-miscegenation laws wrong, but the newspapers not?
If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American. The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.
I definitely feel American (on the same level as my white cousins I guess if that's how you want to pin it) and my dad did too. He rebuked my oldest brother once very strongly for suggesting he was first generation.
That’s just a state of affairs that arises when people immigrate. Nobody gives up the culture of old country completely in a single generation, nor do they fully maintain that culture either. Desire for belonging can’t change who you are, which is a product of your parents and their parents and their parents.
> If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American.
That defines “American-ness” as an individual characteristic, but nationality is a group concept. When you go visit America and say Japan you can easily observe aggregate group differences in culture, customs, attitudes, etc. That’s what makes one place america and the other place Japan. And if your ancestors were the ones who cultivated that culture, customs, and attitudes, and you were born and socialized into them, you’re more American or Japanese than someone who wasn’t.
> The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.
You’re conflating race with culture and national origin. For example, most Bangladeshis wouldn’t consider me Bangladeshi, because I was raised in the US. Obviously that’s not “racist”—I’m the same race as 95% of that country. It’s because I was raised in a foreign cultural environment that’s alien to Bangladesh. For the same reason, it’s not “racist” for Americans not to consider me American. Because I’m not. As a first generation immigrant there’s huge swaths of my socialization and world view that comes from old country, not from America.
And that’s true of my kids too, who are being socialized very differently than the cousins from my American wife’s side of the family. Maybe generations from now their grandkids will be American, both in the sense that they’ll be assimilated into the dominant culture, but also in the sense that continuing south Asian immigration to America will have changed American culture, the same way that Germans and Italians did. But in the meantime there is no better way to describe them than observing that they have one foot in each world.
... and don't get me wrong that is pretty rad. I have driven to and from St. Louis and the West coast a few times on different routes, and it is insane that anyone ever packed their family and shit from there to there in anything less than a huge truck/family minivan with cruise control air conditioning and radio all set to maximum.
It's a massive trend in Europe again and it will not end well for the expats.