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Comment by grunder_advice | Hacker News Reader

To people callously saying that immigration is the solution, I want to ask: don't you care at all if within a few generations your home country loses its culture and becomes inhabited by other people of a different ethnicity? To me, what makes a country is the constitution of the local ethnicities. If I live in Germany, and nobody if having kids anymore and we compensate by importing Australians. It's not like I have something against Australians, but I did not choose to go live in Australia. I expect people to be German not Australian. Maybe people who grew up in places like New York City cannot understand this, but not everywhere is like NYC.

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I completely understand this point and I think it is very valid. However, part of what makes Germany German is having a socially oriented economy. For example, having a pension system based on solidarity, without which a German custom like having a beer at the local pub could become difficult if you don't have a social net to protect you in your old age.

Now the question is: can this work without immigrants? If Germany's population shrinks, you can also kiss the culture goodbye.

I am not against immigration, neither as a stop-gap measure nor in general. I believe limited immigration can even be beneficial, even with regards to cultural aspects. I also do not believe that cultures are static but rather living and evolving. And I also believe that input from foreign cultures can also improve local cultures.

But I also do not believe that we should give up on birthrates and just resign to let our cultures fade away to be completely replaced in short order by completely foreign cultures. I also do not believe that a planet Earth with one global monoculture would be as resilient as the one we have today. I also would NOT want the whole world to share the same cultural aspects that I embrace.

This mentality is generally frowned upon in the US. Aside from Native Americans, nobody has any more inherent right to live here than another; everyone either immigrated here or descends from someone who did. Thinking otherwise is seen as backwards at best. There's a Ronald Reagan quote I'm quite fond of that encapsulates the perspective:

> America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, 'You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won't become a German or a Turk.' But then he added, 'Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.'

Who's to say which mentality is better, but, don't be surprised if you get a lot of pushback from people from the US when you talk about maintaining ethnic purity as it has only negative connotations here.

I'll start with the pushback. I'm a huge critic of my own country (USA) but that's one thing I think we get really right, and that many other countries get really wrong. I don't care what the "ethnicity" of my neighbors is. I don't give someone a blood test before I decide to be friends with them, or to welcome them into my family. This whole "I am the pure German, and you are only living here!" ethnic purity attitude is so gross and really not something I can even remotely relate to.

Okay, but like, Will Japan be more Japanese when the last fully Japanese person dies, or will it be more Japanese if people move and live there and melt into the culture.

Yes, there will necessarily be parts of your culture that get lost (in Japan's case it will be the part where they don't like immigrants), but not as much as if you fold people into the culture and teach them about it.

And yes, change is scary, but sometimes it's good for us. Sometimes change makes us more resilient as a species. Also, Japanese culture isn't going to disappear just because they allow immigrants in. In the same way that other cultures haven't disappeared just because they allow immigrants in.

American culture used to be so exciting because you can experience any kind of culture in the world just by meeting your neighbors. I miss meeting new people and experiencing their local cultures through them.

> but not everywhere is like NYC.

Not yet, but that's the way the world is heading with increased inter-connectivity and mixing. I expect cultures will not be so widespread at the nation level and more at the 'tribe' level, where tribe can be a subculture or political affiliation or whatever.

If you look at history at large enough scale, concepts of patriotism or keeping one's culture are completely meaningless. Or to phrase it better - there is as much meaning as you give it to, can be from 0 to extreme and only you decide what it is, or your emotions if you can't control them. There is nothing strictly rational about this. You can tie your identity to it or not, in 21st century western world one can truly forge one's own destiny, mind, identity and so on. What a true freedom!

For me personally, I couldn't care less about cultural or religious origins of people living around me, or color of their skin. I've met people of very diverse cultures at their home countries and can't say my own culture is better, sometimes glaringly worse.

And I come from extremely homogeneous eastern European bloc country with rich cultural background, ie I saw first black person in my late teens for example and started traveling only in my 20s.

What I care utmost about is that they are good moral people who follow rules and respect others, just like I respect them. We can disagree on certain topics, but not on basic moral ones. And at least basic language level.

For me, Switzerland wins above all in this, hence I moved here. Not perfect place by any means, but darn good not only in aspects above.

The future you would like, or at least wouldn’t mind, would be one where there was no Japan, no Australia, no Switzerland, to go to?

Just a place with slightly different geography, but everywhere you went the culture would be largely indistinguishable from a place half a world away, where there were no Japanese, no Swiss, no Aussies, just, what? Earthers?

I don't care about that, I truly don't. What for? Traditions worth their salt survive and thrive to these days and will continue to do so. The rest can disappear, just like endless stream of such disappeared over millennia. Its not that I want to push for this ASAP, but its eventually inevitable with the way we live our lives and move around.

Life for me is about more important matters - family, friends, my own happiness going back to everything. And yes eventually world will over-mingle, the only way this won't happen is some proper catastrophe that will return whole humanity, or tiny remainder of it back to caves.

You want benefits of travel trivially globally but forbid people falling in love elsewhere and making kids, moving for better life or simply location/climate/culture they feel is much better for them?

In 1000 years most if not all countries we know now will not exist, maybe even memories and records of it will be vague and incorrect. Thats the lens I use to judge what is worthy of an effort and what is not.

What exactly do you think culture is?

It’s a lot more than food and traditions. If it all became the same, chances are we would all live in a giant Dubai. No thanks(though I loved it there for 2 years).

I’ve picked my place, where people work hard and party hard, but with quiet streets at 10pm.

I don't think the idea that even human cultures change over geological time is a coherent argument for immediately allowing free travel across borders.

Dude, I am not talking about patriotism, nationalism, ethnowhatthefuckism or any such notions. I am simply talking about cultures. Are you going to tell that you have no preference with regards to living in Germany, France, Poland, Argentina, or Canada? That is obviously not true.

> What I care utmost about is that they are good moral people who follow rules and respect others

What counts as rules and morals is dependent on culture. I would never live in Switzerland for example. I would utterly detest living there. And I was not even talking about rules or morals or any of these big differences that might arise between wildly different cultures. I'm talking about normal everyday stuff.

Maybe some of you should take a course in cross-cultural communication, to really understand what I am talking about. People have different expectations and conventions in their everyday lives. It is not like one is better than the other, but they are different and those form a way of thinking that is at the core of what the culture of the place is.

Hi grunder it would be great if you could enlighten us as to what you think is wrong with Australians and with Switzerland. Is it too high-up, too down-under? ;-D

Hmm not sure why the offensive tone, you make a lot of assumptions about ie me while knowing 0 about me, and obviously you are wrong here.

> Are you going to tell that you have no preference with regards to living in Germany, France, Poland, Argentina, or Canada? That is obviously not true.

That is certainly true for me. Please add some more diverse cultures, your list is pretty narrow-minded. And it already had happened so not talking theory here, and it was and still is properly enriching for me and my family.

But you highlight an interesting point - I wouldn't mind living in same country as people like you as long as they can handle those basic requirements, but I would certainly prefer not having to spend any time around such people.

Even within Switzerland there are multiple different cultures. I am from Sweden(another country with different cultures, like most countries) and live in Zürich. It is unlikely I would fit in in Graubünden or even Basel…

But I loved Antwerpen, Belgium.

I’ve traveled extensively for work and love to witness the different places and how cool it is how diverse the world is.

I'm American, I'm actually writing this from NYC, but I understand where you're coming from.

But at the end of the day, your approach isn't working. No country seems to have made really any progress on this issue aside from immigration, despite incredible amounts of money and focus being put on this issue for decades from different angles.

So I guess I view the comfort with diversity and skill at assimilation as another cultural aspect that makes some cultures more competitive and resilient than others.

Well, I'm in the US. In my view, what makes it the US is not particular ethnicities, it's particular ideals. The US isn't "X% white, Y% black, Z% hispanic, W% oriental"; it's the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. If you hold to those ideals, you belong, no matter what your ethnicity or skin color or language of origin.

(Yeah, I know, the US fails to live up to the ideals as well as it should. I'm painfully aware. Still, the attempt produces a culture that is different from not making that attempt, and I like the result.)

You forgot the /s next to Australians.

No, I did not. My point holds just as well for any ethnicity. If I choose to live in Germany it is because I like being around Germans. Australia is not Germany. They behave and think very differently.

Do Germans choose to live in Germany, or are they born there by some cosmic accident? If you chose to live in Germany, native Germans let you in. You have no right to stop them letting another person in.

You’re right, being born in a place is a violent act perpetrated against you.

Anyway, if you move to, say Germany, and are naturalised, or otherwise granted voting rights, and you vote for a regime that tightens immigration control, then do you not, in a sense, have a right to stop them letting other people in.

Elsewise, would you mind if someone had an opinion different to yours, and expressed that opinion, here in this forum, which, if I understand correctly, is based in the USA, a country known for its elevation of the principal of free speech?

They expressed an opinion. I expressed a different opinion in response. Whose free speech has been hurt?

> You have no right to stop them letting another person in.

What exactly did you mean by this? Let’s follow it to its logical conclusion.

It's just a figure of speech. Obviously, citizens have the right to vote for whatever immigration policy they would like. Maybe I should have said "ethically, you should not deny others a benefit that was granted to you", which is what I meant.

Even if doing so is a net negative? Remember when Tunisian and Saudi nationals didn't drive cars through crowds at Christmas markets in Germany?

I picked Germany and Australia as the example, because they are two countries with a similiar standard of living, both considered western, and culturally Christian, and yet, to anyone who is acquainted with both, they are quite culturally dissimilar. Because my point is not that some cultures are somehow inferior to an extent that they do not belong in western countries, but rather that people have a preference for living with others of the same culture, because that is literally the whole point of having a culture in the first place.

I do not understand why discussion about this topic has to be so uncharitable.

I thought they meant /s because Australians are notoriously sarcastic.

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