Be surprised, then. While the exact form of “it doesn’t apply to ME/MY ancestors” varies from person to person, I’ve encountered it in multiple countries. From my aunt claiming that “people should just stay wherever they were born!” (in which case neither her nor I would have), to someone with a definitely-foreign lastname complaining about “immigrants coming here to take advantage of our medical system” or “of our educational system”. While the %s will vary by location, one thing doesn’t: jerks are always real loud. So long as they don’t get the voting numbers it’s ok.
And forgetting what your exact ancestry is does not equal rejecting current migrants - the two are completely different. Many of the people I know who have no problem with inmigrants (in multiple countries) can’t tell you their grandmothers’ lastnames; many of the ones I know who do reject it, can (or directly have a “foreign” lastname), but consider their own ancestors to have been exceptionally, uh, exceptional.
It’s not that difficult to understand. We are hard-wired to make decisions based on our biological best interests. If you have something and a bunch of other people want it, it’s probably better to keep it for yourself. It’s also in the interests of those other people to get it for themselves. Let’s say that I own a private lake where there are lots of big fish and just me to fish for them. It makes sense that my buddy Joe wants to talk to me and fish at my lake. He’s on the outside and wants in. Let’s say I’m a nice guy and we’ve been friends for awhile and I let him. Does it then stand to reason that since Joe was on the outside looking in that now he should just want to open the lake to the public? Of course not. He likely wants it to just be him and me. That makes the fishing easy and keeps the fish big. The more people that we let in, the harder the fishing is and the smaller the fish.
Of course, this analogy doesn’t quite hold water since the problem with immigration isn’t really economics and is cultural. The real fear in this analogy isn’t that the fish will be gone, but that the new people on the lake will start bringing their jet skis, but the analogy is close. Once you have something, you don’t want it to change and you want it to be for yourself. You don’t necessarily want other people to get it just because you didn’t have it at one point either.
I know about all this. I was born in New York; I have great-grandparents who were immigrants. My ancestry includes Greek, Jewish, and Italian (Northern Italian, though - most Italian-Americans are from the South.) And my grandparents always had plenty of Irish friends. The last thing I’m trying to do is imply that Italians and Irish are mortal enemies or something. They’ve had regional rivalries on the East Coast, sure, but they share many of the same attitudes. I think people here are taking my comment about the name Kennedy way too seriously. I know Irish and Italians have a lot of similarities, I just meant that their surnames sound totally different.
Don’t forget, too, that a lot of descendants of immigrants do, in fact, feel a sense of camaraderie with current immigrants. There are a lot of proud Irish-American and Polish-American and Italian-American and <insert ethnicity here>-American organizations that are speaking out in favor of immigrants and immigration, and a lot of folks who don’t belong to such organizations who feel likewise.
Definitely. The further back someone’s roots go in America, if they’re of European ancestry, anyway, the further removed they are from the suffering and hardship that arrivals to this country have to go through. People forget that the English migrants to America had to suffer through horrific conditions and long sea voyages where many people died in agony. They forget that their ancestors had to fight in brutal wars, cope with poverty and disease, etc. Most Americans live lives of relative comfort and have never had to personally deal with life-and-death situations. They often can’t empathize with the idea of people trapped at the border, confused, scared, separated from their families, in an unfamiliar place hearing an unfamiliar language, and with total uncertainty about what comes next. Uncertainty is one of the scariest things on earth. And they just can’t empathize.
A lot of them would have more empathy if they smoked weed and read about this stuff, because weed increases a sense of empathy and personalizes situations that you read about so you can picture them in your mind’s eye.
Hypocrisy in general is a common human phenomenon. But this particular issue is probably mostly American due to circumstances.
Most countries don’t have the history of settlement by recent immigration that America has. Anti-immigrants in France, for example, can at least tell themselves that their ancestors are true Frenchmen who have been living in France from time immemorial. So they can draw a clear line between “us” and “them”.
But unless you’re a Native American, everyone in America acknowledges that they are the product of recent immigration. So there’s a special hypocrisy in people calling for laws that their own families couldn’t have met. Donald Trump himself is the child of an immigrant and four of his children are the children of an immigrant. But he’s locking up children because their parents are immigrants.
There’s been people moving all around Europe and out of Europe and into Europe… since before the US were founded. The wars of the last century… uh, two centuries… uh, well, lots of centuries alone led to both waves of refugees and to soldiers hooking up or raping women all over the place. Sometimes I think we agreed to create the EU so the waves of migration would look less like arson and more like moving house. IME there is no correlation between the amount of “local” blood someone has and how xenophobic they are; a lot of xenophobes wouldn’t allow themselves or their parents or grandparents in. It’s a matter of “I’m in, fuck those of you who are out”.
It didn’t happen in my family. Or maybe they immigrated too recently. In any case my parents immigrated as refugees from Europe in the 1950s. They are now in their 80s and if anything they are getting more and more liberal. They are on the side of the recent immigrants totally.
Playing arm-chair psychologist, ISTM that there is a sense in someone with ethnic roots that they are acutely aware that the more recent immigrants are seen as an underclass. They feel a desire to draw a firm hard line between themselves and the recent immigrants in order to confirm their own bona fides as an assimilated member of the predominant social culture. If they were to sympathize more with the recent immigrants, they would run the risk of being more associated with them and there is a perceived social cost to that.
Or in simple ugly terms - Don’t hang out with losers, or you will look like a loser too.
Good points, Little Nemo, about the New World situation (in which the first-comers were displaced by waves of immigration that came much later) containing some real differences from the situations in Europe and other parts of the world.
But tribalism–and resulting suspicion and hatred of ‘outsiders’–is certainly a feature of human interaction everywhere.
Of course it’s not exclusive to America. But it is disturbing to those who hold that America, a land of recent immigrants, held to be a “melting pot” in a good way, does not always live up to the liberal promise and high expectations of the ideal.
The usual take is that “they will change our way of life”. And they’re not wrong either. Imagine an America without pizza, without bagels, without Chinese food, etc. Imagine if you are a native American who could go back to 1492 and keep all those nasty foreigners out. Wouldn’t you want to?
It seems like basic human nature. Until some time in the 20th c., Chinese were not allowed to be naturalized. And even native-born Americans of Japanese descent were not really citizens, whatever the constitution said.
That’s not the message I get from the majority of anti-immigration sentiment. Usually it’s more along the lines of “they’re dangerous people and they will commit crimes/drain our resources.” Which is bullshit, but it’s what they seem to seriously believe.
First of all, leftists try to make conservatives look mean by deliberately muddling the difference between legal immigrants and illegal aliens by just calling them all “immigrants”. There’s a lot more opposition to illegal aliens as opposed to legal immigrants, and most of our ancestors were legal immigrants. I welcome legal immigrants 0f any race but I hope ICE gets every single illegal alien out of the country. I don’t want people in the country that have shown unwillingness to respect our laws and rules, including those pertaining to immigration, and are in excess of what we’ve determined our society can absorb without affecting wages and draining social resources.
Second, if you’re talking about white America, the last big wave of European immigration ended 100 years ago. That’s not what I’d call “quick”; that’s a lot of time to both forget. I don’t think there’s many people alive today that encountered the kind of hostility say Iaccoca encountered.
How many families are “pure” enough to really feel an identity these days? By that I mean, say, Irish immigrants married other Irish immigrants, and their children married descendants of other Irish immigrants who married other Irish immigrants, and so on and so forth to the current generation. Or even just where the culture was strongly conserved despite the specifics of who married who. The whole thing seems to me to be particularly confined to the picture of immigrants in large Northeastern and Midwestern cities–New York, Boston, Chicago, for example–and lives on in popular culture while becoming less and less relevant.
Take me, for example. My last name is English. On my father’s side, my grandmother’s family is also an English surname and a great uncle of mine doing some genealogy research has documented to somewhere before the Civil War in South Carolina and maybe a little bit of Georgia. I don’t really remember the specifics, but I can tell you that I have both slave owners and sharecroppers in my family history. On my mother’s side, I still have some family in central Pennsylvania from my grandmother’s family and her maiden name was Italian (maybe Sicilian). There’s also more family in Georgia and South Carolina. My grandfather’s last name could be from a pretty big swath of Europe and my great-grandmother’s was English as well. I think there’s some German in there as well at some point.
The thing is, for better or worse, basically none of this was brought up in my family. I couldn’t give you the names of basically any of my extended family (great aunts/uncles, second cousins, etc.) except for a few exceptions. Heck, I can’t even remember what the name of my first cousin once removed is because I’ve never even met her.
If someone asks, I generally say I’m probably some mixture of English/Italian/possibly German/possibly Scottish or Irish. But I feel that I have no ethnic roots for such an argument to work on for me, and I doubt I’m in that much of a minority for the white population of the US.
The xenophobia and distrust is more human than just American. It’s a position that wasn’t reached by logic and can’t be argued against using the logic in the OP.
Yes, but there’s a subtlety that conservatives almost always ignore: In years past, most of our ancestors were legal immigrants because there was essentially no such thing as an illegal immigrant. As long as you didn’t have a contagious disease you were legally allowed to immigrate.
Also, there was a fairly large wave of European refugee immigrants in the late 50s. My family immigrated then.
My ethnic heritage has absolutely no bearing on my day to day life in any way. Tell me why i should care? About my ethnicity or anyone else’s? People are people are people. Everyone starts at the same baseline of deserving respect and equality. From that shared point, only they themselves as individuals can cause a justified removal of those rights.