Here’s a 1919 NY Times article (PDF warning) about a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote in the 18th century about German immigrants (presumably among your “Northwestern European” immigrants). His complaints ought to sound familiar to you. He complains that they don’t know English and aren’t well assimilated (though presumably by 1890, they were). His solution was an enforced assimilation of Germans into English speaking society before they posed a significant threat.
Beyond that, Franklin described Swedes, Germans, and French as being of a “Swarthy” complexion and lumps them together with Italians, Spaniards, and Russians. So, we’ll just have to narrow your definition of “Northern” Europeans even more, if we want to use the even older narrative of the English and Saxons.
So, there was no rush to assimilate, even for the Germans or Swedes. It looks like your arguments are simply an oversimplification of history in hindsight.
I think you were from Holland. Let us look at Amsterdam as an example. Publicly, you Dutch will say “How nice to have non-Westerners in majority in our Capital”. But at heart you feel sorry about it. The teachings in your schools and the brainwashing by Dutch-media and Hollywood have made you so politically correct that you rather become a minority than complain about it in public.
Most of Ben Franklin’s objections were directed at Germans: he seemed to think them the worst kind of immigrants, who stuck obstinately to their own language and customs.
I am from the Netherlands. There really isn’t a shortage of people who will complain about the Moroccans and Turks around here - especially not in the part of Utrecht where I live. However, the Netherlands - the major cities especially - are traditionally/culturally welcoming of immigrants with different cultural practices. We’ve never been a closed country.
But I suppose you’re right; we are taught in school that it’s not nice or civilized to discriminate against people just because they have a funny accent or a different color skin.
As for your “you’re becoming a minority” point; even if whatever you’d call ‘the Dutch’ would make up less than 50% in some major cities would not make them a minority even in those cities unless there would be at least one other ‘ethnicity’ that was larger than ‘the Dutch’. There are shitloads of immigrants from all over the world (even Sweden and the US) in Amsterdam.
Apparently, for RaleighRally, it’s very easy: you draw a line on a map of Europe, with the Westerners who are “good” immigrants on the northern side of the line, and the non-Westerners who are the “bad” immigrants on the southern side of the line.
This is from my OP: “For simplicity, Northern Europeans in this thread are people who mainly origin from Britain, Ireland, Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia”
So if your surname is Neville you are probably English and therefore Northwestern European.
I don’t think this is just a nitpick, but the language spoken in France and half of Belgium is French, which is not usually thought of as a Germanic language.
In addition, German is spoken in about 3/4 of Switzerland, so why isn’t it on the list?
ETA: Our friend RaleighRally has just edited out the second part of the quotation above, but I’ll keep it there for posterity’s edification.
You have provided YOUR word that this was probably a “slip” with NO corroborating evidence. Nice try citing yourself as a correction.
Beyond that, his later sentence claiming only English and Saxons were truly “white” indicates he meant to include the Scandinavians AND the Swiss among the Swarthy Peoples.
It still doesn’t address the point that there were among even the Founding Fathers those hold the same opinion of “Northern” or “Northwestern” Europeans that you do about other Europeans or that they considered themselves primarily English. Or that some considered the assimilation of many of these outsiders to be proceeding too slowly.