And what did you expect? 2.45 generations is what is required to stop being a colonial?
It varies based on the people involved.
So, if you were the son of a British noble who was born and raised in Africa or India in the 1900’s, you wouldn’t be a colonial?
To me, a colonial is anyone who looks at the country that they are in, and thinks that other people who are also here in their homeland do not belong here, or should not have the same rights and privileges.
We got a bunch of colonials left in this country. They seek to delegitimize the very presence of their fellow citizens.
I don’t understand what this means. You are saying that we can refuse without prejudice, so what reason are we refusing based on, if it not prejudging them and their merits based on their nation of origin?
In the case that you mean that we can refuse them entry with prejudice, then you are correct, we can. The question is whether or not we should.
But, strangely enough, the USA is much more liberal with regard to immigration and citizenship than almost any other country in the world. In many places you can have several generations born, live, and die in a country without becoming citizens.
Are Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Norway colonialist countries?
I hate this immigration argument. Both sides are just so full of shit. Conservatives hate brown people and liberals have no idea of how hard it is for non-brown people to
immigrate. If you are an Eastern European it is tough to get a tourist visa for Christ’s sake, never mind a green card.
I wish there were some adults in the room to figure out what a reasonable number of immigrants allow in each year and how to allocate that number among the various countries.
I am not sure that pointing out that there are nativists and racists in other countries really justifies the eugenics model of immigration that we have in any way.
Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Norway are not colonialist countries because they didn’t successfully wage genocidal land grabs when other groups in Western Europe did, but as you pointed out their “cultural” claims are just a currently more acceptable revision of the same bigotry.
Although some of those groups also don’t claim to believe in innate human rights which makes the US brand of policies, based on pure bigotry specifically racist. Had Japan or China been less inward focused historically thing may have been different, but really they probably weren’t colonialist purely due to their regional focus on expansion.
The quotas us in the US have are based in the same racial ideas that drove Eugenics and which were adopted by the Nazi party from US authors like you mentioned. I doubt that rational discussions about immigration will be possible while both the Right and the Left fear the mythical “white genocide” myth.
Hopefully we do reach a point where we can admit that we are where we are now because of extremely immoral genocidal, racist policies in the past and start moving forward. But I fear we will just continue to repeat our errors of the past because we want to paint them as a noble effort to protect our own myths.
Yes, and the USA is pretty cool in that regard. And if it were not for factions that wish to change that, then I would agree. However, you are aware that Trump and his supporters want to get rid of birthright citizenship, correct? If you are saying that birthright citizenship is one of the things that makes us more liberal than most other countries, then you would have to agree that those that want to get rid of that are of a colonial mindset.
Throw in racism and bigotry of telling minorities that they don’t belong here, even if they were born here, even if they can trace their family roots to before the founding of our nation, and you are looking at some pretty colonial thinking.
No, they are largely of a native population, though some of them were colonized by western powers.
Can you see any difference between a country where the population has pretty much been there, and been about the same, for thousands of years, and a country that was colonized recently by white people?
Do you deny that the USA was a colony? Were any of the countries on your little list there ever colonies (of the now “native” and majority population)?
You are correct about conservatives hating brown people, (because they are of colonial mindset), but you are incorrect on what liberals know. I know how hard it is to get a tourist visa, I even know exactly how hard it is to get a work visa if you are in eastern europe, as I have a rather large Lithuanian population in my area.
Now, it is certainly harder to get a visa from Lithuania than it is for say a US citizen to get a visa to Lithuania, but it is really not all that hard, not anything compared to someone from Central America.
I will agree that it is harder than it should be, for pretty much anyone who is not wealthy or a celebrity to immigrate here. That should not be a reason to excuse racism, though.
Do you have a specific number in mind? If so, lets hear it.
If not, then I take it that you feel that we should be taking a larger number of immigrants. One side wants to decrease the number of immigrants, and the other wants to increase it. Do you not have a preference as to a side there?
I am sure that there is some limit to how many immigrants we can or should take a year, but we are nowhere near that. The adult thing would be to allow an increase in immigration until we start reaching that point. Do you have a better way of figuring it out?
No, people continuing to “protect” a mythical white people at the cost of other humans is bad.
“White” is a manufactured term post Bacon’s Rebellion to enforce this artificial in-balance in power.
Pretending “race” is real outside of the social construct, and/or fighting to still protect this concept and power balance is what is bad. If it wasn’t for the intentional use of the concept of “white people” to discriminate it wouldn’t matter at all.
It is justifying racism by using racism is bad, people who happen to be “white” are not bad, their fight to keep others under their jack boot heal is bad. Heck dropping the claim that one believes in freedom and human rights would be more respectful of a position, justifying racism to protect ones racist beliefs is the issue.
“Race” is a social construct, with no biological basis, but people want to claim the believe in human rights and don’t believe in the myth of biological race without actually stepping up to the plate.
It’s hard to say wha the number should be, but I expect that economists and other academics could take a crack at it. It is useless to put a number to legal immigration if we just allow a steady stream of illegal immigrants from Latin America. I don’t think an underclass of undocumented workers is good for anyone.
I’m not sure what the answer is to immigration. Maybe we should wage war on the cartels close to home rather than worrying about the middle east. I imagine that many asylum seekers would rather live where they were born rather than emigrate here.
I may be coming across as racist and anti-immigrant. I’m against open-borders, if for no other reason that it is a political non-starter. But I’d like to see a much greater number of legal immigration opportunities.
But unfettered immigration is the exception in the world, and most people who live in those countries are not “white”. I know that America is, was, and will be racist but not every policy decision is based on racism. In this case, the immigration policies of the United States are not (currently) racially biased. If they were, they are doing a shit job of it since most immigrants are not “white”.
It is a perfectly reasonable position to believe that immigration should be regulated in some fashion.
That’s unfortunate, because it isn’t going to happen. I am not going to stop defining “American” as “citizen of the USA”. If that excludes illegal aliens and others who don’t belong here, that’s kind of the idea of immigration laws.
Why not? Because it is an abuse of language. “Colonialist” doesn’t mean “support for the rule of law” even when referring to immigration law.
You’re free to use the term that way, certainly. Just so long as you don’t mind being laughed at.
The stupid in this thread burns so bad that even my biggest goggles do nothing. Current immigration policy is not eugenic by even the wildest definition. It is also not racist by the most typically used meaning of the word as in favoring whites. Most current legal immigrants are not white, unless (perhaps and maybe) you assume all Central Americans are white, and this thread implodes then anyway.
US immigration is restrictive. It is, however, the least restrictive of all countries sane people might want to emigrate too.
Getting a visa from Lithuania (as in -work-visa) is not in fact easy. It is demonstrably harder than getting one from Central America as evidenced by actual numbers of visa awarded by country.
If you want to argue all white people - bad! Then this is not the horse to ride. If you want to argue America -Bad! by using its immigration policy, which is objectively more open and allowing for diversity than any other country, then there must be easier venues available to you.
US immigration policies have flaws for sure - currently immigration almost requires you to have family already here. And some plans for immigration “reform” are repugnant and vile. There’s enough to argue right there.
There is a very big difference between “unfettered immigration” and the shift to “cultural protectionism” which really is a shift from the dis-taste with explicit racism of the first half if the 20th century.
In the early 1900’s the Dillingham Commission wanted to stop immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe because they believed it posed a serious threat to American society and culture, and threatened a danger of “degeneration” to “lesser” races.
This Nordicism which was really Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was based on pseudoscientific racism believing that these Catholics, Finns and other groups would never assimilate and is still based on the same ignorance of the Know-Nothing Party from the 1840s.
Opposition the Catholic faith and lived in fear of immigrants from Eastern Europe is the same Nativism that is happening today and it is fully based on race.
Hart-Celler Act of 1965 claimed to avoid using national origin, race, and ancestry as basis for immigration but really didn’t change those quotas much.
Even today, the claim is that muslims or hispanics are “lesser humans” and unable to integrate and thus are a threat to “culture”. Basically as science matured enough to prove that there is no biological basis for race the same segments and fears of society just dropped the race part and kept the culture part.
But note how that culture that apparently needs to be protected directly maps to the earlier discredited race claims.
While some people will miss-apply Godwin’s law and dismiss the direct connection and the export of American ideas as documented in books like The Passing of the Great Race this is not hyperbole but fact.
Oddly enough this nativism which lead to the current biased quotas and restrictions is quite similar to the reasons Japan and China weren’t large colonial powers, and actually directly relates to the Muslim words decline in the sciences and Europes rise subsequent rise to the scientific revolution.
While it may be uncomfortable to talk about the reason nativists fear muslims and hispanics is that they think of them as inferior and unable to assimilate and they actually fear that “white culture” will be destroyed by these degenerate populations.
If one truly believed in European liberalism (not the right vs left but the belief that all people are created equal) it would be completely incompatible with regional and racial restrictions.
While not intellectually compatible with what many people even on the “conservative” side think that they believe in the reality is that “white identity” is so important to people that most of us cannot have honest discussions about race as people become very defensive.
The reality is that the Americas were colonized through genocide and the concept of “white”, which never even willingly self applied to the Europeans who were part of the colonization of the “New World” until after that settlement happened, is so important to current residents that we will never have an honest conversation until we can be honest about our past.
An example, We can watch movies like “Mars Attacks” and recoil in horror when the Martians say they are coming in peace, only to slaughter humans. Yet this is exactly what Cortez did. As the anti-catholic sentiment decreased during the cold war, exactly why are “White Americans” so afraid of latinos or (actual) Indians? It is because of perceived “race” and the belief it is a biological trait.
How can one justify any regional proxy for skin color if one truly believes in the equality of humans? Why is a person from Central America less “human” than a European? How do these people justify their “culture” protections when Even the economies of Asia are quintessentially European capitalists and people from the South of us are Christians?
We pretend like it isn’t about race, but the restrictions and concerns are about “white identity” and race. And as the OP pointed out it is hypocritical considering how even politicians who are “liberal” in our current political labeling lump all Native populations into a cohesive group while ignoring their cultures and languages were far more diverse than Europe and yet we are still actively attempting to destroy those “cultures” in order to protect this manufactured “white identity”
I get the concerns, and being a white dude I am subject to the exact same implicit bias, but the fragile response to any of these discussions blocks forward movement.
If I was Inca, Aztec, Maya, Salish, Crow, Navajo, or Cherokee and saw “White Americans” being fearful of “White Genocide” it would seem very hypocritical and ignorant.
The “classical liberal” approach to human rights only seems to apply if you are white.
Note how your post was defensive and insulted others but didn’t address the actual policies at all?
How about explaining how the preference system and per-country limits aren’t “racist” or “culturalist” if you want to hide behind that thinly vailed claim.
“White people” aren’t bad for being placed in a container called “white”, what is bad is maintaining that artificial, racist power imbalance. Why are some humans more human than others?
Note how this thread also drifted from the historical fact that we are living on stolen land.
It doesn’t matter what color or arbitrary race resulted in that fact, the fact that people are so defensive about their “race” and can’t admit that kind of proves the OPs point.
Why is it so hard to admit that? It isn’t like you have to leave to admit the truth. Had Hitler been successful and exterminated the “undesirables”, would you have a problem saying that Poland was “stolen”?
To illustrate how racist this this, an immigrant from India with an Advanced Degree would have to wait for 150 years with the current backlog.
Yet attempts to remove country caps for these types of merit based immigration always fail.
Note that this applies to even Canadian Citizens who were born in India, even if they were a perfect “cultural fit”. If you don’t think that our current policy is intended to protect “white identity” I would highly suggest you do some reading. Our country doesn’t benefit by keeping people with advanced degrees out, yet it is still a problem because of “white genocide” fears.
It is conquered land, not stolen for the most part. Every country on the planet contains conquered land and the only thing that makes US/Canada/Australia different is that they came of age in an era where that became uncool to do.
Note how you misinterpret my post entirely or not adddress it at all? The notion that the current immigration policies are somehow designed to maintain a certain mythical racial profile is patently ridiculous because of the verifiable information on which immigrants the current policies allow in. Since you don’t want to be bothered by facts in mid-rant, don’t read this part:
Immigration to us by region, 2016
Americas 43, Asia 39, Africa 9.5 Europe 8
About 10 of those 43 Americas percentage points are Canadian, so at most 20% of immigration is possibly European or European descended whites.
I don’t either, which is why I advocate for pretty much the only policy that will make a dent in illegal immigration, and that is to increase legal immigration.
Maybe, but we should be careful about that. It is the consequences of our actions in Central America that are causing quite a bit of displacement. It’s our mess, in both that we have a large part of the cuase of it on our hands, and because we declared with the Monroe Doctrine that this hemisphere is our responsibility. We kinda revoked the part of that doctrine that said we would stay on this hemisphere, but we still don’t want foreign powers meddling in our back yard.
The other practical way to make a dent in illegal immigration is, as you infer, to improve the conditions where people are immigrating from. Waging wars on the cartels may not be the best way of doing that, but at least you are seeing that we have some work to do to clean up our mess, rather than just complain about the humanitarian crisis that we have created.
I’m against open borders too, I want to be able to know who is coming into our country, and what they are bringing; I want to know if they are healthy, and if they have had all their vaccines (though most Central American countries actually have a higher rate of vaccination than many US communities). I also would like to see many more opportunities for legal immigration, and I really do think that we can bump up our intake by orders of magnitude, and it will only make our country stronger, not weaker. Maybe a bit less white, but I personally consider that a feature, not a bug.
I’m also not a big fan of deporting criminals back to their home countries, as that is one of the things that we are doing that is causing these countries to have problems. We can produce far “better” criminals than most places, and then we send them back to where they have no way of dealing with them. I like the idea that we just keep them locked up here, while actually implementing real rehabilitation, and then maybe send their home country a bill for the services, pro-rated, of course, based on the country’s ability to pay.
If we decriminalize a few non-violent crimes, we may find our prisons woefully empty, and taking on the prisoners of the world may make the investors in private prisons happy again.
Fettered immigration is the exception in history, and most people immigrated and settled in new countries with very little permission. It was emigration that was often more regulated, where feudal lords and such didn’t want their population leaving them for a better lord.
The main reasons that immigration now is not very white is because of chain immigration. A US citizen can sponsor an immediate family member to get a visa, and maybe eventually become a citizen.
Chain immigration was originally created for racist reasons, with the idea that white people would be sponsoring other white people. That has changed, but that doesn’t change that it was created for racist reasons.
What is one of the big things that Trump and his supporters want to shut down, chain immigration, because it is a policy that is no longer effectively racist enough for them.
Agreed, not sure why you think that this would be something that is not agreed upon by pretty much everyone. It is just the nature and manner of those regulations that we disagree.
Did anyone say it was easy? No, we make our immigration process much more complicated and bureaucratic than necessary.
However, you have now made an interesting claim that it is easier to get one from Central America than from Lithuania. This is true if you have a US citizen as immediate family, and if you are from Central America, there is a higher chance that you have a US citizen as family as someone from Lithuania does, but that has nothing to do with it.
If you are not related to anyone in the US, then you simply cannot get a work visa if you are from most Central American countries. If you are from Lithuania, you can.
It is a good thing that those are not in any way, shape or form, reflective of the arguments made.
That is what we are arguing, and you are ignoring that, and accusing us of arguing that “all white people - bad!” or “America -Bad!”. I did not say either of these things, but due to simply having the gall to criticize our immigration policies, and point out that they are in fact, based on trying to keep non-white people out, you immediately leap to making those inaccurate and almost disingenuous accusations as to the nature and reasoning for the argument.
Depends, are we the Nazis in this hypothetical? If we are Nazis that have taken over Poland, and we are Nazis that oppress the Polish people (who are left), then we would probably say that we have the right to the land, it was not stolen, it was “liberated” or some such.
Anyone that is not a Nazi would probably quibble with that, though.
Does it make a difference to you at all that there is much higher demand to come from other countries?
Many people in Europe are pretty happy with what they have going on. They don’t want to immigrate here, we don’t even have healthcare.
There are two types of people that primarily immigrate to the US. People from poorer countries who are looking for a better life, and wealthy people from wealthy countries that are looking to expand their wealth. Middle class people in Germany or Norway have absolutely no impetus to come here.
So you admit you would have been fine had Nazi Germany won, or ? Or you are just uncomfortable with the term “stolen” which is accurate despite you above post trying to make it seem justified.
Plus how certain are you? Note the same issue as in other threads where all “Indians” are the same to you?
There are hundreds of treaties and Nations and situations, and while it may make you feel better to not admit the truth, in many cases it was theft too, and even our countries courts agree in some cases.
I can find 100s more examples but I also bet if I broke into your home and forced you out with violence you would call it theft, why is it so painful to admit that it is what it is? Luckily I hope to learn from our past and not repeat that type of action so don’t worry.
The US/Canada/South Africa are very different. As an example Velázquez had revoked Cortés’s charter before he went to take over the Aztec Empire. He was rogue and not much different than modern ISL leaders. Would you be so accepting if ISL invaded England, killing the Queen under a false premise of coming in peace? Or is it just because you are on the victors side, gain benefit and dont’ want to acknowledge the past misdeeds by your predecessors?
Especially when those misdeeds are still going on today.