I'm a little bit under the weather right now, but Double A is bugging me to post. If I somehow manage to some reasonable and coherent, please rest assured that it is an accident. ^_^;
I think immigration attitudes have a lot to do with perspectives on two things: Race and economic opportunity (I'm deliberately ignoring "law" for the moment, which will be explained later). I'm somewhat familiar with the immigration situation in the U.S., Central Europe, and East Asia, so let's see what I can do here. ^_^;
A comparison between prevalent attitudes regarding immigration between Europe and the U.S. is marked by how they are perceived. The U.S., for example, has very noticeable xenophobia behind a mask of tolerance and multiculturalism, but if we are to chalk up racism to simple distrust towards anyone that isn't
them, I would not necessarily say that the American treatment of foreign persons is particularly different or worse from how other countries treat non-nationals (not that it justifies this behavior). The American complaint, or so it is said, is largely the fact that illegal immigrants are a source of cheap labor, and Americans feel that they're taking all the jobs. (Most economists I have heard from says that trying to stop illegal immigration on an economic basis is equivalent to the U.S. shooting itself in the foot, but that will be a point reserved for another topic.) Combine this with racism, and you have a bit of a winning combination. However, Americans largely feel that job opportunities are being stolen from them, and not that their way of life is being threatened. (Of course, there's also the stereotype that Mexicans are "the dirty man" and African-Americans are "♥♥♥♥♥♥s", but let's not go there right now.)
In Central Europe, meanwhile, the primary issue regarding attitudes on immigration targets Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. The immediate issue here, however, is that not only do Muslim immigrants seem entirely unwilling to compromise on their values, lifestyle, and cultural outlook, they are also hostile towards European culture (a startlingly percentage of Muslims believe that European culture is decadent and morally repugnant); Central European culture and Islamic beliefs seem almost completely incompatible. Historical divides and long-standing attitudes in regards to race and religion have also caused Europeans to colonially discriminate against Muslims over the past three centuries, and unfriendly attitudes exist even today. It's a chicken-egg argument, and I'm not going to get into "who started it", but you have is a deteriorating cycle: Europeans get angry with Muslim immigrants and treat them poorly, which causes Muslim immigrants band together and embrace more radical forms of Islam, which causes Europeans to get angry with Muslim immigrants and treat them poorly. The result is
an increasingly obvious and hostile divide between Europeans and Muslim immigrants, part of which splashes onto immigration in general.
East Asian attitudes are racially and historically-inspired. On one hand, as Chocolate Tampon above has mentioned, the Japanese can be very xenophobic, and while they are the extreme example, it's difficult to say that other East Asians fare a whole lot better. A lot of this is historical; much of East Asia consider themselves to be victims to Western colonialism and "arrogance". For example, most Sino-Asian children subject to Sino-Asian culture will unfailingly learn about the "Eight-Nation Alliance" (a military invasion force of the U.S., U.K., Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, and Japan) and the humiliations foreign powers have repeatedly inflicted upon China; many Sino-Asian parents I know use such stories as cautionary tales to warn their children getting too "chummy" with "Westerners", saying that history has proved that Western people are arrogant, hypocritical, cruel, and two-faced, and even the "good" Westerners are entitled and naive people who just don't "get it". Similarly, Japanese students learn without fail the
kurofune, the Black Ships, in which
U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to do trade with the rest of the world by sailing up to their ports and demonstrating the power of their cannons in the most classic case of gunpoint diplomacy. Such incidents, in the eyes of East Asians, have proven to them that people from the West are "enemies" who are actively preventing them from self-rule and gaining power, so there is a strong cultural, historical, racially-motivated discrimination against non-East Asians. There's also the fact that many East Asians believe in stereotypes; the vast majority of East Asians see Southeast Asia - with the exception of Singapore, which has strong Sino-Asian ties - as an underdeveloped, poor, and inferior part of Asia. They're also racially disinclined towards black people; when I explain to my colleagues in East Asia as to why parts of the U.S. have crime problems, the most common question I get is, "It's because there's so many black people, right?" It most certainly doesn't help that there's a significant black population in Japan, which seems to fill the role in Japan that the Roma fill in Europe.
06-23-2012, 01:49 PM
