There is an anecdote that is often used in India about how the Parsis (Zoroastrians who escaped the Islamic conquest of Persia) came to India and assimilated into the society.
When a group of Parsis landed in Gujarat (Western India), the local chieftain posed a question to the leader of the group in the form of a glass of milk. The leader responded by adding a spoon of sugar to the glass and stirring the contents. The answer was found to be acceptable and the Parsis, the tiniest of the minorities, continue to live and prosper in India to this day.
Would they have managed this if the leader had smashed the glass, danced on the fragments, and then taken a hammer to the face of the principal deity at the local temple?
Immigration wiped out Native American tribes, and many other peoples, because the people who immigrated were different and were in no mood to assimilate. Europe is facing this kind of immigration, not the Parsis.
A father who wonders if his daughter will be stabbed in school today may not vocalize such sentiment, but when the time to cast a vote comes, that vote will go to Geert Wilders.
30,000 years worth of missing genetic immunity to essentially every disease imaginable wiped out native populations in the Americas and precipitated the collapse of civilizations there, actually.
That's irrelevant. The point of the story, if you missed it, is that Europeans were not interested in adopting the Native American way of life and assimilating.
Cortez didn't arrive in Mexico and swear loyalty to the local king, and adopt their religion
Cortes’s expedition of literal conquerors arrived by fighting for their lives the moment they met a state, let alone an empire.
Europe and its institutions failing to incorporate wildly conservative religious citizens has a lot more historicity than attributing “immigration” to the implication of native tribes in a post-apocalyptic pre-USA (it’s never Mexico or Peru) being culturally, physically, and biologically colonized.
Because wildly conservative religious people tend to abuse their religion to push their personal agenda. Hell you could say some candidates are pondering to them BECAUSE they know they are easily manipulated without upholding the core of their religion.
Another point of the story is that new populations are either going to assimilate (which could be great for the pre-existing population) or they aren’t going to assimilate (which could be pretty bad for the pre-existing population).
I grew up hearing this story (it's famous in India), but it's not applicable to the current immigration crisis in Europe / US.
For one thing, the Parsis were lobbying to be allowed in. Europe and US are in need of immigrants due to shrinking, aging populations as their populations stop having kids. Their economies require a working class that they need to import. So immigration bans aren't really an option. And because the immigrants have some leverage in this situation they don't have to lobby like the Parsis did.
In the other case: refugees. This is a policy Europe and the US (and by extension the rest of the world adopted due to their negligence in WWII and the need to resolve that conflict post-war. It's another situation where the immigrants / refugees have the leverage and do not need to lobby. The US and Europe could revoke this policy, but they will suffer in the world if they do.
In contrast, the Parsis and the king in whose kingdom they moved to did not have this backdrop, and there was no need to take them in nor any pre-accepted agreement to amend. Additionally imagine if the Parsis had, 3 or 4 centuries later become a "problem" population in India in spite of the story. It's not as if that story alone kept the entire community from ever committing crimes or otherwise changing the fabric of society. In that scenario, it would not be possible to then remove them once they have moved there for generations. The same thing is true in Europe and North America.
I don’t think non-assimilation is limited to people of just one specific religious background. To state the problem is X when factors such as education, household income and circumstances of migration likely have a much higher correlation seem to indicate a sweeping generalization.
Calling the European conquest of the Americas 'immigration' is kind of like calling operation Barbarossa 'tourism'.
I also think the anecdote is kind of ridiculous. There was no India when the Parsis arrived. There was no India for a millennia after the Parsis arrived. The whole concept of assimilation to 'Indian culture' is even more ridiculous than it is to vastly more uniform (and vastly smaller) european cultures, because India, to its credit, is composed of hundreds of distinct cultures. Especially if you are going to backproject India (a country founded in 1947) to 700 ad.
>Especially if you are going to backproject India (a country founded in 1947) to 700 ad.
Ah, the idea that a nation couldn't possibly exist until it got modern statehood (as opposed to being "a country founded in 1947") or is just a perfectly homogeneous blob (as opposed to "composed of hundreds of distinct cultures".)
Sorry, but neither are requirements for there to have been an India - or China, or any other such examples, for millenia. They first is just the modern form of statehood that emerged after the era of nationalist.
India was a nation way before 1947 and before the brits got the fuck out. And I'd argue was also a country, just one under occupation, as opposed to a sovereign one with externally recognized statehood status.
So there's that.
And if "the European conquest of the Americas" isn't exactly immigration, the European settlements in the country we now call US were called and described as exactly that, of innocent "pilgrims" and "persecuted minorities" too. Still they didn't do the native "indian" populations any favor.
>Europe is facing this kind of immigration, not the Parsis.
The US faced this about 200 years ago.
A bunch of dirty, disease-ridden, rapey, religious extremists started invading the US, fleeing from the hellhole country they came from and running amok in the US.
They threatened the very fabric of US society with their criminality and the insular nature of their culture which saw them clustering in tenements that were overrun by disease and crime.
Many, if not most, Americans considered the recently-freed slaves to be a nobler and harder working part of the human species and held their coin purses and daughters closely whenever an Irishman was spotted.
Interesting. The researcher correctly states that economic concerns are only an excuse. But he never asks why people object to reducing their homelands to mere economic zones. This is typical of such research - their goal (openly stated in this interview) is to undermine national identity and promote immigration. He does not ask or propose what we should do instead of mass immigration - he is only concerned how to continue immigration despite the people's objections, and how to silence those objections.
All running on the implicit assumption that "xenophobia" is simply incorrect (not just morally wrong) - that humans are unique in the animal kingdom in that they benefit from more competitors in the same territorial and ecological niche.
I'm interested to hear alternatives. The only one I've ever heard is that countries should promote fertility amongst the existing citizenry, and that has a lot of opposition from feminists for obvious reasons.
> a lot of opposition from feminists for obvious reasons
They oppose financial aid to young families, flexible working hours, and the promotion of living in multigenerational/extended family homes, where relatives help care for children, and free schooling/kindergartens? There are many countries, past and present, with above-replacement fertility, so this is nothing but pretend-helplessness. Israel, for example, is a modern economy, yet has a 2.9 fertility rate [1]. France and Ireland are at 1.8 - just a small push away from the 2.1 replacement level.
From the point of view of the native population (and not "the economy"), immigration is the worst option - not only does it introduce a competing group, it allows the system that resulted in their sub-replacement fertility to persist, where otherwise some change would be forced to come about.
[1] And better gender equality than the US, as well as China. The latter has a 1.2 fertility rate, which, together with the high fertility of Islamic countries, shows there is no simple linear link between gender equality and fertility. Sources:
When you look at any [N]GO memo on planned population reduction, Jaffe memo, Kissinger report, The World Bank's 'Population Planning', they are completely aligned with what feminism (and the general left) has been bringing for the past century
>shows there is no simple linear link between gender equality and fertility
Everyone "knows" what is coming with Global Warming. The Syrian refugee crisis was a very minor dry run, and the world failed.
In a similar fashion to Covid being a "minor" pandemic by historical / black death standards, being a dry run to see the mass discipline of modern society (it UTTERLY failed).
The world does not have the current capacity to handle mass population migrations of possibly a billion people that global warming will likely bring. The next century will bring continued technological development, but ultimately the spiraling environmental problems and reduction of natural resources/reserves will squeeze the population.
Perhaps lower fecundity of the world population in general is explained by mass economic development and leisure economy distractions. Or maybe it is the economic and technological squeeze being placed on everyone that is doing it.
Anyway, a wise man once taught me that wars over resource scarcity (e.g. the Sudan civil war was mostly about water) break down on ethnic lines, or barring that, religious lines (kind of the same thing historically).
Really this xenophobia is that expression in a "modern" democracy. Four decades of war on the middle class by the elites in America have seen steady ratcheting of less and less thinly veiled racism.
Fair enough; I just (perhaps because I live in a country that has had several waves of immigration over the last half century, all of whom largely assimilate within half a generation?) don't believe the antecedent, so my consequent would be "incorrectly cautious". Feel free to call me a xenophile if you wish.
> The key check on rising xenophobia is to limit the options for the xenophobe to enjoy the cover of anonymity. This could both blunt the current trends in xenophobia and limit many opportunities to socialize a new generation to be intolerant. Xenophobia deserves the same categorization as other widely reviled forms of bigotry.
I suppose we could erect pillories and publicly shame secret xenophobes, and take away their children to "limit their opportunity to socialize a new generation to be intolerant."
I found a little strange too, the author complains that it is a slipping-of-the-mask and suggests that to stamp out xenophobia we pillory those openly exhibiting it...surely that just takes us back to square one.
You absolutely can be phobic (read: afraid) towards certain cultures and religious values. It is not a secret that people from abrahamic countries more often get their - conservative - values from religion than people in the west nowadays do.
As a bisexual man who has a lot of connections / friends in the gay community, we are afraid and for good reason. People like me suffer from violence every day in the middle east and europe is actively importing massive numbers of immigrants into our place of living who more often than not hold opinions completely different than what I would call „western values“ - and they are much closer to actively showing violence against gay people than the natives who hold „moral conflictions“.
Attacks on gay people are on the rise and whereas gay people had no problem holding hands or showing affection out in the open even in Germany 15 years ago, they are much more cautious now.
Nice infographic, but it‘s no secret that we‘re counting radical attacks by people who also - by complete chance I wonder? - happen to be muslim as „rechte angriffe“ as well.
For another perspective on this, as a Eurpoean (well, British) gay man who lives in a neighborhood with lots of Muslim immigrants in it, I am much more concerned with threats to LGBT rights coming from domestic right-wing political sources.
As the sibling comment points out, the idea that immigrants or refugees are to blame for recent rises in hate crime is more reflective of how skillfully the right plays minority groups off against each other than it is of any facts on the ground. They love it when gays are more worried about 'foreign' Muslim immigrants than they are about the domestic politicians who are actually gearing up to pass anti-LGBT legislation.
> As the sister post points out, the idea that immigrants or refugees are to blame for recent rises in hate crime is more reflective of how skillfully the right plays minority groups off against each other than it is of any facts on the ground.
This is a strange argument to make. There are nearly 2 billion Muslims worldwide, they are not a minority.
Muslims are a minority in Germany, the UK, and most European countries. Surely it's obvious from the context that this is what I'm referring to.
Getting the dafter elements of the Muslim community worked up about trans people is approximately as easy as getting the dafter elements of the gay community worked up about Muslims. The right is very good at stirring this particular pot. I personally have no doubt where the real threat to my rights comes from.
> Muslims are a minority in Germany, the UK, and most European countries. Surely it's obvious from the context that this is what I'm referring to
Regardless, it is misleading to cast them as a minority group in the same way as the LGBT population. They have global solidarity and power.
> I personally have no doubt where the real threat to my rights comes from.
It's not mutually exclusive. Radical elements from the Muslim community have long since propagated such beliefs, it's bizarre to act as if "the right stirring the pot" is the only reason such beliefs exist.
Of course, there are many peaceful and tolerant Muslims. I personally know several people who moved to western countries to escape the radical elements of their home country. Those same radical elements are now (~10-15 years) immigrating and bringing their beliefs with them.
I think you understand perfectly how Muslims are a minority group in the context of a conversation about European xenophobia. But you could delete the word ‘minority’ from my original post and it would still make the same point, so I am not sure why you keep picking at this detail.
>it's bizarre to act as if "the right stirring the pot" is the only reason such beliefs exist.
It would be bizarre, but I didn’t say this. There are individual people who are bigoted, which is bad, and then there are people who are making strategic use of bigotry to achieve political ends. At least in the UK, where I have the most knowledge, the current threat to LGBT rights (currently centered on various pieces of anti-trans legislation) has nothing to do with Muslims.
What if we look more broadly at the European countries that have actually seen major regressions in LGBT rights? Poland and Hungary are the obvious examples. Are Muslims to blame here? On the contrary, we see that the very countries that are most hostile to immigration and religious diversity are also (surprise surprise!) hostile to gay people.
On the one hand, then, we have a largely imaginary threat to LGBT rights coming from a supposed invasion of Muslim extremists, and on the other, a real threat stemming from a long and thoroughly ‘indigenous’ European far-right tradition.
> At least in the UK, where I have the most knowledge, the current threat to LGBT rights (currently cantered on various pieces of anti-trans legislation)
It's pro-women legislation that is being proposed. Specifically, legislation to keep men who pretend to be women out of female-only spaces. This actually is of benefit to the LGB, lesbians in particular.
If that is "anti-trans" then it just illustrates how so-called "trans rights" are an encroachment on women's rights.
That is a separate debate. The point is that it's the kind of legislation that would also be supported by conservative Muslims and conservative religious people in general. If you think that trans women are 'men who pretend to be women' then you probably have relatively little to fear from a social agenda driven by recently-immigrated Muslim extremists, were such a thing to pass. Indeed, they would probably be useful allies.
I really do not like to do this on HN, but you‘re either outright lying or living in a privileged living situation near educated muslims who are already beginning to assimilate. I figure you are living in the US, where stringent immigration laws protect you.
Europe is suffering from mass immigration of people with - in our opinion - close to extremist values. A conservative German who dislikes gay people is much less threatening.
Gay and trans people are even more of a minority than muslims, and only one party is actively threatening the other.
My institution offers protection of ex-muslim women and gay people. Their stories are harrowing. And these people have lived in Germany for generations.
>I figure you are living in the US, where stringent immigration laws protect you.
I'm living in the UK. (I thought this was obvious from my post; I'm not sure why you would jump to the conclusion that I'm living in the US.)
Homophobia within Muslim communities is certainly a serious problem for gay muslims. However, as I said elsewhere in this thread, you only have to look at the European countries where LGBT rights are actually under serious threat to see that Muslim immigrants are not the primary problem. Orbán agrees with you about Muslims – but how's he doing on gay rights?
You are willing to accuse me of lying and to jump to jump to bizarre conclusions about my living circumstances. I won't do you the same discourtesy, but it is always disappointing to see LGBT people using LGBT rights as a smokescreen for xenophobia and other prejudices. This only aids and abets people on the far right who couldn't give two hoots about our rights, but who are only too happy to opportunistically capture the votes of useful idiots within the gay community.
Only in the West is valuing (and wanting to protect) your own culture now seen as extremist and hateful. For everyone else and pretty much all of human history it is and was the norm.
It is possible, even easy, to value your own culture without being afraid of strangers. It's the latter, not the former, that constitutes at best xenophobia, and at worst bigotry.
What would make doing one without the other difficult?
46 comments
[ 112 ms ] story [ 1442 ms ] threadWhen a group of Parsis landed in Gujarat (Western India), the local chieftain posed a question to the leader of the group in the form of a glass of milk. The leader responded by adding a spoon of sugar to the glass and stirring the contents. The answer was found to be acceptable and the Parsis, the tiniest of the minorities, continue to live and prosper in India to this day.
Would they have managed this if the leader had smashed the glass, danced on the fragments, and then taken a hammer to the face of the principal deity at the local temple?
Immigration wiped out Native American tribes, and many other peoples, because the people who immigrated were different and were in no mood to assimilate. Europe is facing this kind of immigration, not the Parsis.
A father who wonders if his daughter will be stabbed in school today may not vocalize such sentiment, but when the time to cast a vote comes, that vote will go to Geert Wilders.
Cortez didn't arrive in Mexico and swear loyalty to the local king, and adopt their religion
Europe and its institutions failing to incorporate wildly conservative religious citizens has a lot more historicity than attributing “immigration” to the implication of native tribes in a post-apocalyptic pre-USA (it’s never Mexico or Peru) being culturally, physically, and biologically colonized.
For one thing, the Parsis were lobbying to be allowed in. Europe and US are in need of immigrants due to shrinking, aging populations as their populations stop having kids. Their economies require a working class that they need to import. So immigration bans aren't really an option. And because the immigrants have some leverage in this situation they don't have to lobby like the Parsis did.
In the other case: refugees. This is a policy Europe and the US (and by extension the rest of the world adopted due to their negligence in WWII and the need to resolve that conflict post-war. It's another situation where the immigrants / refugees have the leverage and do not need to lobby. The US and Europe could revoke this policy, but they will suffer in the world if they do.
In contrast, the Parsis and the king in whose kingdom they moved to did not have this backdrop, and there was no need to take them in nor any pre-accepted agreement to amend. Additionally imagine if the Parsis had, 3 or 4 centuries later become a "problem" population in India in spite of the story. It's not as if that story alone kept the entire community from ever committing crimes or otherwise changing the fabric of society. In that scenario, it would not be possible to then remove them once they have moved there for generations. The same thing is true in Europe and North America.
I also think the anecdote is kind of ridiculous. There was no India when the Parsis arrived. There was no India for a millennia after the Parsis arrived. The whole concept of assimilation to 'Indian culture' is even more ridiculous than it is to vastly more uniform (and vastly smaller) european cultures, because India, to its credit, is composed of hundreds of distinct cultures. Especially if you are going to backproject India (a country founded in 1947) to 700 ad.
Ah, the idea that a nation couldn't possibly exist until it got modern statehood (as opposed to being "a country founded in 1947") or is just a perfectly homogeneous blob (as opposed to "composed of hundreds of distinct cultures".)
Sorry, but neither are requirements for there to have been an India - or China, or any other such examples, for millenia. They first is just the modern form of statehood that emerged after the era of nationalist.
India was a nation way before 1947 and before the brits got the fuck out. And I'd argue was also a country, just one under occupation, as opposed to a sovereign one with externally recognized statehood status.
So there's that.
And if "the European conquest of the Americas" isn't exactly immigration, the European settlements in the country we now call US were called and described as exactly that, of innocent "pilgrims" and "persecuted minorities" too. Still they didn't do the native "indian" populations any favor.
The US faced this about 200 years ago.
A bunch of dirty, disease-ridden, rapey, religious extremists started invading the US, fleeing from the hellhole country they came from and running amok in the US.
They threatened the very fabric of US society with their criminality and the insular nature of their culture which saw them clustering in tenements that were overrun by disease and crime.
Many, if not most, Americans considered the recently-freed slaves to be a nobler and harder working part of the human species and held their coin purses and daughters closely whenever an Irishman was spotted.
Is the same thing happening in Europe?
All running on the implicit assumption that "xenophobia" is simply incorrect (not just morally wrong) - that humans are unique in the animal kingdom in that they benefit from more competitors in the same territorial and ecological niche.
They oppose financial aid to young families, flexible working hours, and the promotion of living in multigenerational/extended family homes, where relatives help care for children, and free schooling/kindergartens? There are many countries, past and present, with above-replacement fertility, so this is nothing but pretend-helplessness. Israel, for example, is a modern economy, yet has a 2.9 fertility rate [1]. France and Ireland are at 1.8 - just a small push away from the 2.1 replacement level.
From the point of view of the native population (and not "the economy"), immigration is the worst option - not only does it introduce a competing group, it allows the system that resulted in their sub-replacement fertility to persist, where otherwise some change would be forced to come about.
[1] And better gender equality than the US, as well as China. The latter has a 1.2 fertility rate, which, together with the high fertility of Islamic countries, shows there is no simple linear link between gender equality and fertility. Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index
>shows there is no simple linear link between gender equality and fertility
There is: https://i.imgur.com/SkLQBlv.jpg
(Consider the post black-death boom: I personally see very little problem with becoming fewer but richer; Unus sed Leo)
If you’re a refugee though this doesn’t apply obviously.
The example of uk losing a lot of European “immigrants” suggest immigration is valuable to society.
In a similar fashion to Covid being a "minor" pandemic by historical / black death standards, being a dry run to see the mass discipline of modern society (it UTTERLY failed).
The world does not have the current capacity to handle mass population migrations of possibly a billion people that global warming will likely bring. The next century will bring continued technological development, but ultimately the spiraling environmental problems and reduction of natural resources/reserves will squeeze the population.
Perhaps lower fecundity of the world population in general is explained by mass economic development and leisure economy distractions. Or maybe it is the economic and technological squeeze being placed on everyone that is doing it.
Anyway, a wise man once taught me that wars over resource scarcity (e.g. the Sudan civil war was mostly about water) break down on ethnic lines, or barring that, religious lines (kind of the same thing historically).
Really this xenophobia is that expression in a "modern" democracy. Four decades of war on the middle class by the elites in America have seen steady ratcheting of less and less thinly veiled racism.
> Four decades of war on the middle class by the elites in America have seen steady ratcheting of less and less thinly veiled racism.
If the former "middle class" feels wronged by rich people, why should they be taking out these frustrations on poor people?
I suppose we could erect pillories and publicly shame secret xenophobes, and take away their children to "limit their opportunity to socialize a new generation to be intolerant."
I'm speechless.
As a bisexual man who has a lot of connections / friends in the gay community, we are afraid and for good reason. People like me suffer from violence every day in the middle east and europe is actively importing massive numbers of immigrants into our place of living who more often than not hold opinions completely different than what I would call „western values“ - and they are much closer to actively showing violence against gay people than the natives who hold „moral conflictions“.
Attacks on gay people are on the rise and whereas gay people had no problem holding hands or showing affection out in the open even in Germany 15 years ago, they are much more cautious now.
By Ausländer or by AfD-or-further types?
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/30252.jpeg
As the sibling comment points out, the idea that immigrants or refugees are to blame for recent rises in hate crime is more reflective of how skillfully the right plays minority groups off against each other than it is of any facts on the ground. They love it when gays are more worried about 'foreign' Muslim immigrants than they are about the domestic politicians who are actually gearing up to pass anti-LGBT legislation.
This is a strange argument to make. There are nearly 2 billion Muslims worldwide, they are not a minority.
In Canada, Muslims are some of the loudest voices against LGBT rights and representation. Another example in the states: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/202...
Getting the dafter elements of the Muslim community worked up about trans people is approximately as easy as getting the dafter elements of the gay community worked up about Muslims. The right is very good at stirring this particular pot. I personally have no doubt where the real threat to my rights comes from.
Regardless, it is misleading to cast them as a minority group in the same way as the LGBT population. They have global solidarity and power.
> I personally have no doubt where the real threat to my rights comes from.
It's not mutually exclusive. Radical elements from the Muslim community have long since propagated such beliefs, it's bizarre to act as if "the right stirring the pot" is the only reason such beliefs exist.
Of course, there are many peaceful and tolerant Muslims. I personally know several people who moved to western countries to escape the radical elements of their home country. Those same radical elements are now (~10-15 years) immigrating and bringing their beliefs with them.
>it's bizarre to act as if "the right stirring the pot" is the only reason such beliefs exist.
It would be bizarre, but I didn’t say this. There are individual people who are bigoted, which is bad, and then there are people who are making strategic use of bigotry to achieve political ends. At least in the UK, where I have the most knowledge, the current threat to LGBT rights (currently centered on various pieces of anti-trans legislation) has nothing to do with Muslims.
What if we look more broadly at the European countries that have actually seen major regressions in LGBT rights? Poland and Hungary are the obvious examples. Are Muslims to blame here? On the contrary, we see that the very countries that are most hostile to immigration and religious diversity are also (surprise surprise!) hostile to gay people.
On the one hand, then, we have a largely imaginary threat to LGBT rights coming from a supposed invasion of Muslim extremists, and on the other, a real threat stemming from a long and thoroughly ‘indigenous’ European far-right tradition.
It's pro-women legislation that is being proposed. Specifically, legislation to keep men who pretend to be women out of female-only spaces. This actually is of benefit to the LGB, lesbians in particular.
If that is "anti-trans" then it just illustrates how so-called "trans rights" are an encroachment on women's rights.
Europe is suffering from mass immigration of people with - in our opinion - close to extremist values. A conservative German who dislikes gay people is much less threatening.
Gay and trans people are even more of a minority than muslims, and only one party is actively threatening the other.
My institution offers protection of ex-muslim women and gay people. Their stories are harrowing. And these people have lived in Germany for generations.
I'm living in the UK. (I thought this was obvious from my post; I'm not sure why you would jump to the conclusion that I'm living in the US.)
Homophobia within Muslim communities is certainly a serious problem for gay muslims. However, as I said elsewhere in this thread, you only have to look at the European countries where LGBT rights are actually under serious threat to see that Muslim immigrants are not the primary problem. Orbán agrees with you about Muslims – but how's he doing on gay rights?
You are willing to accuse me of lying and to jump to jump to bizarre conclusions about my living circumstances. I won't do you the same discourtesy, but it is always disappointing to see LGBT people using LGBT rights as a smokescreen for xenophobia and other prejudices. This only aids and abets people on the far right who couldn't give two hoots about our rights, but who are only too happy to opportunistically capture the votes of useful idiots within the gay community.
What would make doing one without the other difficult?