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What’s going on in France is the product of specific policies and antipathies dating back to the colonial era, just as in the United States our problems date back to the way we never finished dealing with the impacts of slavery, but that doesn’t mean that immigration as a concept is flawed any more than, say, the British Post Office scandal means IT projects cannot produce trustworthy systems.
Common sense was that Ocitanians and Bretons could never integrate into France.
Common sense was that hundreds of independent principalities with mutually unintelligible languages could never integrate into Germany and Italy.
Common sense was that Samnium and Lucanium could never integrate into Rome.
Except all of them did and those countries were stronger for it.
That's the belief. The reality is that the onus is not accepted and largely does not resolve for a couple generations. In the short term, the effect is obvious. Pure disruption from an economical and cultural perspective. A melting pot of the worst and best of both worlds. The worst effects necessarily dwarfing the short term benefits.
However, in the long term, a melting pot/diversity is believed to always be a net benefit. I'm not sure why the belief persists, other than convenience (can't really unmix populations after generations) and confirmation bias. Economies improve over time or nation economic models disappear, making it moot. I believe how a nation specifically deals with immigration has influenced the outcomes a great deal, for the better. Not dealing with immigration as a serious, ongoing concern, is a crap shoot.
As someone born in that area, wow, is this ignorant. Yes, a lot of people speak Spanish but that doesn’t mean that most of them don’t identify as American – even the ones whose ancestors lived in that area for centuries before they became part of the United States. Trying to separate that out makes no more sense than trying to split out any other culture which contributed to us - for example, the Texan identity has included Mexican identity since before it was a state and trying to strip that out would produce a result as unrecognizable as it would if you tried to have Texas without the barbecue traditions brought over by German and Czech settlers.
Also, let’s be honest here that the American traditions haven’t exactly been uniformly good – in the Texas example, they seceded from Mexico and petitioned for statehood to protect the institution of slavery. If there’d been a popular vote, there were many thousands of enslaved people who would have enthusiastically stayed part of Mexico if that had meant their freedom decades earlier.
Rather ironic to bring this up as an example. Mexico opened its doors to unlimited mass migration from the US, the migrants did not adapt to the local culture, and then they seceded in an armed rebellion. Not exactly a success story when it comes to immigration policy.
If there is a large migrant population that is not integrating (eg. France, with the banlieues), that should be an indication to slow down or pause immigration while figuring out what went wrong. Meanwhile most Western governments see warning signs and then double or triple down to keep those raw GDP numbers up for another election cycle.
Yeah, it’s messy and nowhere near as simple as that – for example, the Mexican civil war is more significant than the immigration aspect (Tejanos joined the pro-secession side over that), the filibusteros weren’t normal immigrants, and arguably both the Mexican and American settlers were unwelcome immigrants from the perspective of the indigenous people.
More to the point, note that I did not recommend the Mexican Republic as a model but was instead rejecting the claim that the American south hasn’t been a complex interplay with Hispanic and other cultures since the beginning. That kind of brown horde rhetoric belongs on Stormfront, not HN.
Ask anyone who was born in the U.S. with an immigrant background if they feel at home in their parents country, chances are they will say no and they will feel like a foreigner there.