h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

privalege or privilege...
the £700.00 costs seems a bit high on the one hand and low on the other.
A cynical part of me thinks the surge in immigrants, allowed in might be one way the GOV has been raisng cash... must check on the amount raised over (x) years, would one get a rebate if they decided they didn't want it after a short period....

Wonders how the birth rate would be affected if the cost of a birth certificate went up from £7.50.... to same

'Södertälje (Swedish city not far from Stockholm) recieves more Iraqi refugees than the US and Canada put together' - why, for crying out loud?

'Today, ethnic Swedes move away from Södertälje. Of the 3,500 people that moved away last year a minority had immigrant background. The reason is said to be too many immigrants and a too large share of foreign children in the preschools and schools.'

Well, I'm not surprised. As my Polish colleague said today, Swedes are becoming a minority in their own country.

She also confessed never to have had racist thoughts until she moved to Sweden. See, you don't need to learn Swedish to live here, you don't need to work, you don't need to adjust to the Swedish way of living and it's just fine if you continue to oppress women in the name of Islam (teenage girls being murdered by fathers or brothers for wanting a life like their Swedish friends at school).

'Integration'. Bah! All the thousands of Italians, Greeks, Finns and Yugoslavs that came to Sweden in the early 60ies (Swedish factories had a serious lack of manpower at the time and sent out recruiters to countries with high unemployment due to having been involved in WW2) never had any trouble getting 'integrated'. They worked their a**es off and learnt Swedish from fellow countrymen.

My own mother (Finn) is a raving racist these days because of all the 'freeloaders'.

Demands is what I'd like to see more of. And if the Swedish way of life doesn't appeal to you, move somewhere else - nobody asked you to come here!

Sounds just like what I used to hear from Brits back in the day, when I lived in England, particularly about the Sikhs. As resources shrink in the face of climate change and population growth, expect it to get worse.

Sorry. I'm usually cheerful, this time of day.

Looking over that last post, I think I should be more specific. The complaints I heard were about "fitting in." The furor du jour was motorcycle helmets and turbans.

To be anti-immigrant in New Mexico is a big, un-funny joke. Anglos are the immigrants here, second-layer immigrants after the Hispanics, who originally took the land from the Native Americans.

I think Titania has some good points. Learn the language, adopt the culture, leave behind the baggage. However, there's a certain quality to the immigration debate here in America that's ironic, for the reason Lil gave: all of us are immigrants. The only people that can claim to be "natives" are the Native Americans, and they didn't have any say in the rest of us coming over.

I have a hard time with the idea that, simply because it is a better choice for someone to move to another country, they should be made to "fit in" once they have arrived. Especially when the cause of the move in the first place was displacement due to by war, poverty, or something similar.

On the other hand, like other European descendants in the US, I've never lived in a place where "my people" were native. We all like to act like this has always been our land, though. Encouraging (sometimes violently) the Native Americans to assimilate...

You make "fitting in" sound like something akin to torture, Irv. I don't think it's too much to ask our new fellow citizens to respect our style of democracy, learn the language (I don't believe in passing "English only" laws), and be a part of the larger small-l liberal culture (no honor killings, no female circumcision on these shores, please). I would do the same if I moved to another country. I don't necessary think of it as "conforming", in the tedious high school sense of having to fit in with the popular crowd or be made fun of behind the cafeteria. I think of it as being able to function and succeed on one's own in a new environment.

[]

I tend to agree with FG. If *I* were to move an 'alien' culture I would expect that I would have to 'fit in' with their culture and laws. I wouldn't be able to call a teddy bear Mohammed/Jesus/Buddha or whatever and should abide by the laws of the land. If that meant me covering my legs, then I should have to - I chose to move to that country afterall.

Refugees are slightly different - they have been forced away from their own land, possibly never to return. However, they have now entered another setting and *should* learn the lingo (even if they only have basic knowledge and only use it outside of their own homes, to buy goods and services for instance).

I also see no problem with immigrants using their own language and culture, however, they should not then try and change the rules of the country they have moved to so that certain (abhorrant to the place they moved to) aspects can be accommodated.


In other news, I noticed HicDig had posted on the last convo and I am sad to report that Charlie (my cat) is still missing - it's been a week now I'm not hopeful for a homecoming (unless he's decided to a summer holiday in late-winter) The only upside is that George seems to be coming into his own and sitting on our laps more. I still have Charlie's bowl out, though, hoping for his safe return...

(I've spent ages on this. I'm just going to hit post - hope no-one is offended)

The debate has changed a little i Denmark - we've for long had the far right trying to make everyone fit from a point of view that All Things Danish are the very best of everything available. Which is silly and gets towards what I'd call racist. Recently, they'd downright called for assimilation - and I don't believe that is the way to go in these days.

On the other hand, the left side of the political spectrum has probably been guilty of being far too complacent, not wanting to put any demands to immigrants (or refugees) out of a fear, probably, of being called racists.

So it's all hot debate now because the leader of the Socialist People's Party (sounds a good deal more old-East Europe than it is) has publicly declared ideological war on the non-democratic, non-equal rights (etc) parts of the islamists in Denmark - in actual words saying, that if all they're here to do is work for creating the caliphate, then a) there are countries in the world where they'll have a much easier time, b) to go to hell.

The thing I like - but which the right hand party and good part of the press ignores or skips over - is that he has targeted the heat not on immigrants as such but specifically at the non-democratic ones.

Which I think is a fight that needs fighting. I couldn't care less about religion, eating habits or. largely, dress code. But do not come here and try to install Sharia law, or any of the backwards, in our sense, rules and laws of these groups! Actually, at a demonstration, one guy was publicly denouncing our constitution, claiming that the Quoran and Allach was far superior .

*drops in an 'n'; switches a . with a , and stubbornly stops looking for more typos*

[Makes alphabet soup with all the left-over letters... yum!]

Thanks, Marv - I'll drink Maker's Mark any time. Just not right now... they tend to frown on that at work.

As for immigration and assimilation... As long as I can understand them and they can understand me, I'm cool. We seem to have waves of immigration every ten years or so here in the US, which always brings in new cuisines. I love it - the latest invasion was Thai and Vietnamese. Now you can find pho restaurants everywhere, and a new Thai restaurant just opened up near my house. (I'm a little nervous about trying it - it's in an old Pizza Hut!)

Unfortunately many of the foods that are part of the culture in other countries are banned here. The USDA is constantly shutting down meat markets for selling the wrong part of the animal, or the wrong kind of animal. All well and good if you can make the same kind of dish with chicken instead of dog, but I'm sure it's not the same.

FG, I was refering to things like English Only laws, wich are very popular on the border. Certainly there is nothing wrong with expecting that an immigrant will not engage in an activity that our laws define as "murder." What I have problems with are those who attempt to pass laws aimed directly at immigrants, wich is something I see on the ballot in Arizona every single election.

There are downsides to not learning the language of the country you are in, and they are eventually going to create a problem for the immigrant. But becoming fluent in a new language is difficult, and too many people where I live hear Spanish being spoken and immediately assume that the person speaking is here illegally.

As Lil said, it's a very un-funny joke.

And yes, it's probably that my views of being asked to fit in are heavily influenced by excessive teasing during elementary school. And middle school. And high school. And college...

Probable. The word is proable, not probably. Sorry.

One of the problems with Britain is that we actively encourage our perception of our country as a haven, an outpost of free speech etc etc.

Now this mean we end up harbouring some rather dubious characters. My particular gribe is the Russian billionaire Beresovsky who systematically stripped Russia of its assests in the 90s and then feel out with the new president Putin. He's a political asylum seeker. Ha.

But you could also cite people like Marx.

Now it's one thing to harbour other people's troublemakers - people who are actively trying to not fit in _somewhere else_, but it also means we have painted ourselves into a corner in terms of the whole integration issue.

Inasmuchas we are technically _entirely_ down with the whole do what you want, multiculturalism rah rah rah, but actually now discovering what this means in practice, which is that you can't please all of the people all of the time and damn but it costs a lot of money.

Take the strain on the state education system.

The school I'm at has a 50% non native speaking intake. They get kids who, at 14, have never been to school, don't read and write in their own language, and don't speak English. And teach them along with kids whose own education is fab, but only speak a bit of English, and the kids from the estates who are native speakers but frankly have barely managed to reach the level of constructing a sentence in coherent English by age 16.

The sheer impracticality of the school's job is mindboggling. And that's before you get to the problem that the Polish kids are virtually at war with the kids of imiigrants from places like Somalia.

Admittedly, it doesn't help that about 45% of immigrants all live in Nodnol and the state school stystem admissions system means you get all the middle class kids in one school and everybody else in another. Concentrated impracticality, that.

Anyway, a goodly majority of the kids are going to come away with so little education, or even a grasp of English that their chances of integration, even if they wanted to, are virtually zero. I find the Poles particularly irritating. Why would you take your 15 year old child to the UK when they don't speak English and so will end up with no qualifications from either the UK or Poland? And the Polish education system, even in the provinces, is quite good. Surely there's someone you could leave them with? It's not like you are fleeing a warzone or in a situation where they won't get any schooling anyway.

Well, that was a rant.

The 700 pounds must be a backdoor tax. They only give you 80 pounds back if you don't make it and so don't have to do the citizenship ceremony and there was a lot more paperwork for people to wade through on our previous visa forays, where I felt that probably the time it would take to check everything would cost a fair bit. This time, B is so well documented by the homeoffice that they barely need anything. And he has to apply seperately for a passport too. Really, they should just come out and admit it they are asking you to pay for the privlage and ask for a few thousand more.

[Bagpuss]

It often appears that immigrants are welcomed or at least tolerated all the time the economy is doing ok . If the indiginous population has work , a car and enough spare cash for an annual holiday and other luxuries things seem to more or less bumble along fine . However as soon as the economy takes a down turn , the populous who feel hard done by look for somebody to blame . Racists and racist organisations are quick to exploit this and underlying tensions boil over .
Though given the choice between my perfectly amiable turkish nieghbours and the selfish , noisy toe rag who's recently moved into the flat above me . I will take my muslim neighbours every time . My fantasy of a rich lonely widow moving in has fallen well short of the mark . Reality can be such a disapointment at times .

best fishes...tod

I think integration happens with the 2nd or 3rd generation, and you can't really expect it from true immigrants - the most you can get from them is a willingness to abide by their new countries laws and customs. And integration goes both ways, people partly become "integrated" because the society itself has come to accept some of their differences as normal.

On another issue: I unfortunately cannot reveal any more of my knowledge of the future, including who will scribe this thread, because it is inherently dangerous and could have catastrophic results. This is particularly problematic because now I cannot volunteer to scribe since that would reveal who scribes, so instead I'll just keep silent and let you all try to guess who the scribe will be, and maybe when it's safe, about the time we reach post 2000, I'll reveal the answer privately to Lil in a rather long e-mail missive.

Thanks for the good wishes. Am off to hospital tomorrow, but will be back soon.

Take care, all. Help yourselves to while I'm away.

LP

best fishes..tod