Edit to add: everyone says they never noticed it while living there. They only noticed it after the first few months/years when it was no longer present.
(This isn't just a skin color thing, even white people in America have such diverse in-cultures that it feels bizarre to speak to some of them. Go down five houses in a richer white neighborhood and you will not typically find neighbors that share really common understanding among one another.)
> A big part of American fear is knowing that nearly every single person you interact with that isn't a friend of yours doesn't really consider you their "people".
The other side of this coin: America actually accepts people from other places. Most of the world will always see you as foreign if you come from abroad, even if you have lived there your whole life.
The American ideal is now a civic society that's not predicated on the idea of having a "people" who the nation-state is created for. Citizens still often think that they have a "people", but that delineation does not extend to all Americans. As an example a second-gen Mexican person is not particularly likely to consider me part of their "clan" even though we are both American. When everyone's foreign, no one is.
Not been my experience in NYC and other places. Quite the opposite. Also have you seen European integration of foreigners up close? Middle East? Asia?
My guess is no, because these places make it far more difficult to assimilate (if not impossible)
I suspect we're disagreeing over what it means to "assimilate" or "be accepted as" one of an ethnic group. Imagine a stirring speech where a speaker says "I have dreamed of a respite from the trials our people have undergone". When the audience hears "our people", they are going to think of a certain group that they imagine themselves belonging to. In America, a miniscule fraction of the population thinks of "everyone who is legally an American" when they hear the phrase "our people".
However, some other place like Paris, the massive city-state of the white Franks, has a carefully guarded culture that they gatekeep as a majority ethnic group. You can live in France, and you can speak French, but you can't "become French" because many of the people who call themselves "French" think specifically of white Frankish/Gaulish/Roman descendents. That's just not happening in major American cities.
So, ghettos. I'm not saying there's not a "little Italy" in most American cities, but a Turkish person living in Germany their whole life is still Turkish. American in Japan, same. These places don't even allow the possibility of assimilation.
Or as my English friend put it, "there's a difference between tolerance and acceptance."
So your selection bias includes only people that have made the decision to leave. Do you not see the issue ?
Even if you didn't select into people who left presumably for a reason, this is still an anecdote. It's your opinion, your reality. It's not shared.
For example, I have an anecdote of living in the EU. It's cloudy 10 months out of the year, everywhere except in the south. No one told me that. Winters were harsh. Foreigners in general were not accepted, most social interactions were with other ex-pats. Salary was much lower and that limited my ability to buy property and save for retirement.
I could go on. But what I wouldn't do is broadcast all of this as if it's some kind of universal truth. It's just my experience.
As someone that has lived in a police state before, I can't tell you that your feelings in the US aren't valid. They are yours alone. But perhaps travel somewhere were actual security forces search you randomly, harass you for no reason, etc. Experiences I have never had in the US, not once.
> Main thing I notice is the fear I sense in people whenever cops are nearby, and definitely the sense of this security state hovering over everyone
You should know what that feels like, when it actually occurs. Similarly when someone rushes to declare their country has become "Nazi Germany", they ought to read a history book or two.