To be fair, I have continued learning German—not because I want to pass the B1 examination and obtain permanent residence, but because I feel my children need to be protected and guided, and I want to teach them the same things they learn at school. Every moment I spend learning the language is a moment I invest out of love, so that I can be a better and more supportive parent.
Simply making higher-than-median income should not make you eligible for permanent residency. Cultural immersion and assimilation is important to maintain social stability and language is just the first step. From what I found (and as another commenter pointed out) the bar is not even that high.
Edit: For context I am not a right winger and am an immigrant myself. But I am seeing the social fabric of my host country (Canada) degrade because of immigrants' refusal to assimilate.
If you live somewhere long enough, know the country, work and handle daily life without issues, have social connections with other people in this society, understand at least some language - in my opinion you are as integrated in that country as needed.
> abandon your own language, culture
Thank god nobody is asking this. They're being asked to learn enough French to participate in France. B1 is hard, but it ain't B2, and you'll still barely understand what's going on around you.
The discussion is about permanent residence, not citizenship.
Permanent residence allows eg an employee be able to continue staying in a country without being dependent on a particular employer and having to reapply everytime they change jobs. It is gives a person who works in a country for a certain amount of time already, paying taxes etc, having the same rights as an employee.
To allow otherwise leads to its destruction, just people with no long term skin in the game extracting before moving on.
It is a huge conflict of interest among the population. Its like having a corporation where half the owners want a quick return and exist and half want to run it like a lifestyle company.
Getting citizenship is a different thing, and in some places much harder, easier to get denied if you have the wrong ethnicity etc. I think that when settling long term in a place, having equality wrt work, health, social rights as native citizens is important, and thus getting permanent residence in a country should not depend on irrelevant factors. The important thing is to not have people who live long term but their residence rights are tied to their current employer. In these situations, the system produces a workforce that is pressured to be much more compliant and accept stuff that citizens and permanent residents typically don't. This is the kind of difference that creates people with different interests within a country. Stuff like cultural assimilation and similar mentioned here in comments should be irrelevant imo for solving issues like this, and frankly, it presupposes already a certain dynamic and as if the local culture is on homogeneous thing, which is often not. A country don't accept economic migrants (at scale) as some kind of philanthropy, but to fulfill needs/jobs within the country. If they need people to work, they should expect those who stay long term to be given rights equivalent to citizens wrt work etc.
It's actually the perfect opposite, a skilled worker who plans to leave is a burden on their home country as they presumably will use services there they never paid for. Hopefully, in developed nations this balances out more or less. In undeveloped nations there's not much of a system to take advantage of.
I live in a country I was not born in, I pay taxes as much as anyone else and pay into social security programs I'll likely never get to use. The state did not have to spend a penny to educate me. If I return to my home country without having worked there another day in my life, I'm probably quite the net loss to them.
The extraction phase of your life is overwhelmingly being a child or elderly.
There is plenty of evidence that immigrant enclaves depress wages because these immigrants are trapped in their local community instead of being part of the broader national economy.
Everything you're talking about just proves the point of the person you're responding to.
Either you argue that the job requires you to stay in another country and the stay is always temporary and there you would not focus on any given language since you're going to leave before you reach any level of proficiency
or you want to stay in the country because you like it and therefore learn the language.
You cannot cherry pick the option where you have your cake and eat it too.
It is illogical to demand permanent residency for a temporary stay that is short enough to not bother learning the language.
In other words, yes it's illogical to argue that a stay is short and long at the same time but who declared that learning the language is an inherent part of long stays?
It’s a healthy, human process that forces weighing what works and what doesn’t across cultures and, hopefully, walking away with something better than either individually. The idea that immigrants shouldn’t have to assimilate is arrogance redressed.
But if you want “permanent” residency then yes you have to be a bit of a “pretend-Frenchman” or however you want to put it. I just pointed out that tradeoff in the GP comment.
The biggest hypocrisy is that you will never be considered a real Chinese/Japanese/Indian/Vietnamese even if you learn their languages and adopt all their cultural traits. Western countries are very generous about this but you do have to meet them half way. B1 level proficiency is not even that high of a bar - compare that to living in China.