Yeah, in the famously failed case of Ceausescu’s Romania, the government thought they could forcibly counter the falling birthrate by mandate instead of maybe not having life in communist Romania be so shitty that no one wanted to have to raise children.
Further down the line here the OP has become ‘Authoritarian Regimes should not force birth on women’. Which is certainly true, but anyone in an Authoritarian Regime is already well versed in the wide array of dehumanizing effects of State control no matter their age, gender, or religion.
So women in messed up political States got it bad. Yup. They have company.
All cultures are blended cultures. Hunter-gatherers borrowed liberally from one another. Nation-sized cultures are awash with borrowed items, from language to religions.
The only distinction between blended cultures is that some blended earlier than others and then tried to lock in those changes by accepting few new ones. While perhaps not even realizing from generation to generation the way that the new changed them. Their towns are already completely different, like it or not.
Change is often scary and something basic in human nature dislikes confronting scary things. Also basic is that everything changes over time. Some humans love to embrace change; some do not. But refuse change and die is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Something I’m saying to disembodied anonymous words over the internet, theoretically readable by every literate person in the world through the spread of literacy, automatic translators, text to voice apps, and connectivity. Already omnipresent in all those “resist change” cultures.
Exactly, and moreover, even without immigration cultures change, a country’s culture is going to be different in 20 years, immigration or no immigration.
7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Llamadrama posts (Trock)
Is the fear that some cultures in fact reject the whole liberal idea of tolerance of other cultures a legitimate one?
When thinking about immigration to counter birthrate, you’d need to consider the situation where the immigrant culture overcomes the native culture. For instance, ethnic neighborhoods in cities like San Francisco and New York. There are parts of those cities which are essentially foreign cultures. The people speak their native language, the signs are in their native language, the stores cater to their own culture, etc. Essentially, it’s an island version of their home culture. If they have enough political influence, they can change the city laws to conform to their culture. This happens when religious groups move into a city in large numbers. They may change the laws to be more consistent with their religious views on things like alcohol. In most cases, the existing population won’t be accommodating to this kind of large-scale change. A country considering immigration to fix their falling birth rate would do so only if they felt they could preserve their existing culture to a large degree. Some mixing is to be expected, but they would want it to be 95% the same as before rather than 5%.
I think it’s presumptuous as hell to label human rights as “western values” and act like you own them. It’s too self-absorbed patting oneself on the back to be able to communicate with the world at large.
Especially since Republicans use “western values” as a racist code word for white supremacy, a dog whistle.
Slow change is inevitable and often leads to improvements. Rapid change, whether it’s climate change, cultural change, or other types of change, often lead to dislocations and pain.
Both rising and falling birth rates can generally be accommodated, and there’s an excellent argument that the human population would be more sustainable if it were lower. But both skyrocketing and plummetting populations lead to serious problems.
I don’t think it’s wrong to try to manage the birthrate and immigration in ways that favor slow change over rapid change. I just think we should be cognizant of what tools we use, and avoid coercive and brutal tools.
Been like that for a couple hundred years now. During which time those cities have grown, thrived, and become essential parts of USA culture.
How did you think we got places like NYCity in the first place? Or, for that matter, the rest of the country. There never was a time when we had one consistent mostly-unchanging culture over the whole country. It’s a myth.
Which has been the case since like, ever (Chinatowns, Little Italys, Polish/Jewish neighborhoods)
Those are isolated areas which were founded when the cities/country was being founded. If the San Fransciso of today started taking in so many Chinese immigrants that the whole city became Chinatown, lots of the people living outside of Chinatown would object to that. I doubt if the residents of San Fransciso would support such a policy of immigration. They would likely support an immigration policy which kept San Fransciso mostly as is rather than one which converted it into a Chinatown. That’s my point about why countries are resistant to consider immigration to replace birthrate. South Korea doesn’t want to have a lot of Americans immigrate and convert South Korea to Americantown. Even if it meant economic stability for the country, it doesn’t seem like a solution they would consider because they value their own culture so strongly.
New York’s Chinatown was established over 250 years after the city was founded.
The influx of immigrants to San Francisco if the laws encouraged it would be mostly Latin Americans from the same cultural strain as the people who founded the city in the first place.
Celebrating culture is distinct from vicious racist suppression, which was the history of the Chinese in California. Today Asians are considered, condescendingly, a “model majority.” They and Hispanics are a majority of the population of California, whose major flaw these days is that it is so desired that it is unaffordable. Objective observers might also notice that Hispanic and Asian popular culture is immensely, well, popular across all segments of Americans as well as in many other countries.
Immigration, pace what the American bigot right insist, does not consist of alien hordes overtaking “white” culture, but the gradual infusion of the new that has driven American growth since colonial days.
Cultural bigotry, to give it its proper name, can be defeated, even if pockets of hatred will never be eradicated. Sensible immigration policies can be devised. Alleviating horrendously unlivable conditions in other countries that drive mass emigrations of desperate refugees is a sensible way to be proactive in these policies. (And will undoubtedly help birthrates and free choice as well.) Saying that your people are too bigoted to allow this is a blot on their character that requires immediate removal if true.
That’s simply not true. Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves were built well after major cities were founded in all the cases I’m aware of. That’s why they are localized areas in the cities, and not the whole cities.
However, there are cases where massive immigration have caused huge changes to local culture - consider Boston, founded by radical Protestants who thought that Christmas was too Catholic-y for them and outlawed any public celebrations of the day. Now Boston is a center of American Catholicism, and Christmas is celebrated openly. Things change, and today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is simply recycled with the words Irish, German and Italian crossed off, and new words substituted in (see this cartoon of an ape-like Irishman threatening to bring his foreign animosities into our great nation)
Fine, use whatever term is acceptable to you. But my question remains, are some cultures profoundly illiberal by the standard of human rights that we value? And is the fear that immigrants from such cultures will perpetuate the oppressive values of their home societies rather than uphold human rights as we define them a legitimate one?
Yes.
and No.
Second half of the 1800’s. So maybe more like a hundred and fifty years ago than a couple hundred. I sit semicorrected.
Yup. This same damned argument goes around and around again, often in the mouths of the descendants of people it was used against on a previous round.
You misread. The second half of the 1800s is indeed 250 years after the city was founded.
Speaking of which, more than half of Catholics now live in Africa and Latin America. And the American Pope must take heed of that change. (Hence, his first foreign visit is to Africa.)