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Frank Lee's avatar

I'm good with accepting at some point nationalism, patriotism and cultural homogeneity are all necessary and positive with respect to the ongoing safety, stability and success of a nation. It is just way too easy to note that heart and mind of immigrants today remain stuck in their home country culture, and their lack of love for their new home collectively degrades ongoing safety, stability and success of a nation.

To claim that this gets us to genocide is intellectually bankrupt and disgusting.

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Liberal, not Leftist's avatar

Totally.

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Kenneth Crook's avatar

How do you feel about the mass immigration into North America during the 17th and 18th centuries, or into Palestine/Israel following WW2? Why is it only the mass immigrations in this century that so upset you?

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Frank Lee's avatar

You mean before the US had 340 million people? How I feel about migration is that a young country needs people to settle its land, and once the land is settled, it does not need nearly as much migration, and it would be self-destructive to keep flooding people in. Liberals are hypocrites that clutch the resources of family and friends and neighborhood while claiming that culture does not matter... that national unity and patriotism does not matter. They envision a world that is like a boiling sea of people without any binding values or beliefs, where the liberals set in elite power on their own hill in their own castle surrounded by walls and armed guards to make sure the plebes don't get in.

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Kenneth Crook's avatar

"a young country needs people to settle its land"? What makes you think it was young and did the settlement need to be massacres of the people already living there? You seem to be willing to skate over that rather too easily.

If however we accept you don't care about that fact, but that you now consider the US to be "full" and unable to accept any more immigrants (I also take exception to your use of the term "flooding" - the numbers coming in relative to the numbers already here do not constitute a flood by any definition of the work, but I guess your goal is to use deliberately exaggerated language to try to create the impression of a catastrophe), by what objective terms do you determine that the country is full? And in what way would the current rate of immigration be "self-destructive"? Do you evidence from other comparable countries where this has been the case?

I have no idea what you were trying to say in the second part of the reply, with your creation of a straw man liberal that appears only to be the product of a paranoid imagination. It's certainly nothing I recognize.

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Al Brown's avatar

Under international law, any right to asylum appropriately applies to those having a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion".

The frequently successful effort of migration activists to distort that definition to include economic migrants is the real source of the problem; with that opening, illiberal regimes like that of Belarus have been handed the opportunity to exacerbate the situation, and they have taken full advantage of it.

Simply being poor in one's own country does not create a right to migrate to someone else's country. Voters understand that, and they're right.

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Justin Mindgun's avatar

It seems like the era of mass migration is coming to an end. Back in 2018 I read an article that stuck in mind about the differences between the Western and Eastern European understanding of immigration (https://p.dw.com/p/34VYL). The Eastern Europeans had learned a lesson under Communist rule to be skeptical of the government and media, so they didn't trust the popular narratives which justified mass migration. They were right.

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Isabelle Williams's avatar

The major incentive to accept massive immigration in the USA- and many other countries- is that left wing politicans believe that immigrants are future left wing voters. The Democratic establishment in the USA has admitted this ever since someone ( I forget who) wrote a book in the early 2000's about the idea that demographic change would create a permanent democrat majority.

So mass immigration has never been mainly about humanitarianism. Its obvious that a more econonmical and more humane solution would be to get serious about helping countires that are in terrible shape ( as in AFrica), to stop exploiting them, and to end the wars that also cause refugees.

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Kenneth Crook's avatar

The facts would dispute this belief (about left-voting immigrants), so I guess you're left with a conspiracy theory.

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Todd McCune's avatar

Perhaps Aristotle was onto something when he emphasized the importance of one’s culture “the polis” over individualism or one’s tribal “family” relationships.

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alexsyd's avatar

This article is a good example of what Roger Scruton called oikophobia:

''oikos'' - from the Greek meaning a “house,” “family,” “people,” or “nation”

– Encyclopaedia Britannica

and

''-phobia'' - extreme or irrational fear or dislike of a specified thing or group - Webster's Dictionary

An extreme and immoderate aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West appears to be the underlying motif of oikophobia; and not the substitution of the culture by another coherent system of belief. The paradox of the oikophobe seems to be that any opposition directed at the theological and cultural tradition of the West is to be encouraged even if it is "significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric". (Mark Dooley, Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach (Continuum 2009), p. 78.)

The only way out is to move from a rights-based culture to one more inclined to accept privilege, obligation, honor and divine order.

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Irwin Singer's avatar

Good reporting and analysis by Leo. Liberals (and others?) too often excuse over broad regulations on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. They then ignore the unintended consequences of following the letter of the law. So it’s easy to see how such conflicts polarize us: “The current political moment in the West is one in which the memories of war and genocide still ring loudly for many, especially for liberals. It is also one where political momentum is with ideas of stability and nationhood, and where most people do not want 75-year-old international legal schemes forcing their government to accept migrants.”

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