Nice. My opinion as an immigrant is the opposite: I'm clinging to this rock like a tenacious fucking barnacle. And as far as I know, I probably have a better right to it than you. At least I earned it. You were just born into it. I made it here.
You can pretend like you gifted me this but in reality you didn't. I took it through my hard work. And you can try to stop me but I'll beat you, even though you have the advantage of having been born here. Because I'm better.
Man, surely there's some kind of middle path without all the forced adversarial stance, isn't there?
People "born into it" had a whole lot to say about policy, and provided you the opportunities to be here. You seized them. It should be a good deal for both sides, but to the extent that each tries to make it adversarial and zero-sum, the benefits of the deal evaporate for everyone.
Sure. I see it as Tit-for-Tat with default cooperate. We can both play for the win together and I'll start there. Or someone else can start a fight that I will finish.
People saying this BS have no idea of what it means to leave everything you know behind and how many home-cultures are simply better than the ones immigrants find themselves living in, but they had to leave because (put the name of some super power) decided that it was the right spot to start a war and destroy everything to seize control of some resource or out of spite to some competing super power
People think they are gifting you, because they don't realize how irrelevant they are and how little control have in their lives, let alone the lives of others.
P.s. if we wanna talk about integration, Americans, for example, should watch themselves abroad.
They are absolutely the less capable of understanding what "this is not the way we do things" means.
> P.s. if we wanna talk about integration, Americans, for example, should watch themselves abroad.
I think expats anywhere should integrate. That doesn't mean to give up everything from your home culture, but it doesn't mean to form a walled enclave with little cultural interaction, either.
Travelers/tourists/etc, is different. I don't expect any integration-- just a basic effort at courtesy.
I will talk about Americans simply because I know what they do when they live abroad in my country, for many reasons, one being they hang out in the same neighborhood I was born and raised.
Probably there are similar problems with people from my country somewhere, but let me tell you what I know first.
Here in Italy American tourists are less of a problem, they do silly things sometimes, but who doesn't in an mostly unknown country on the other side of the World?
As you said, the real problem come from expats, students for example, but also military personnel who usually form walled enclaves.
If you hang out in certain neighborhoods in Rome, it's very easy to spot the "Americans only" places. There are quite of few of them.
The reasoning is simple: they come here in Europe for the culture and the relaxed way of living (Barcelona is ranked very high among expats from US exactly for that reason) but they don't have the cultural tools to handle the lack of restrictions they have to face home.
Drinking at the age of 16 is quite normal in Europe, it is not in USA and more often than not Americans are the ones sh*tfaced outside bars and clubs or engaged in alcohol fueled scuffles.
One can argue that's what youngsters do, we are not used to that, but at young age (almost) everyone is forgivable.
Except when they kill police officers in the streets of course
But there's also another cultural issue with them: they are used to be a ruling country, they don't accept to be questioned or put in their place or be simply asked to act as a reasoning person.
Consider that for a US citizen until not long ago Canada, Mexico and many cruises were passport free (but not the contrary), consider the fact that in Europe there are many US military bases, consider that police officers in Europe are not heavily armed and you end up with situations like this one
When I was in LA my friends told me to avoid certain parts of the city because they were dangerous, "how much dangerous?" I asked, I come from Rome after all, I know how to handle myself, "you can get shot" they told me.
Turns out LA this year will top the 2009 for number of homicides and reach the staggering number of 300 homicides in a year.
I don't know but I suppose that it is something that it is considered I won't say normal, but not far from something in USA they expect from a city like LA.
Maybe not 300 homicides in a year, but 200? Maybe yes.
In Rome, a bit smaller than LA, more or less the same size of Chicago, there were 12 homicides in the whole 2019.
In the entire Italy (60 million people) in 2019 homicides were "only" 276.
I couldn't believe it when I was staying there that dangerous really meant "Escape from New York" dangerous.
My point is it's easy to say to expat to "integrate" when you are living in a violent society and where police on the street is armed to the teeth enforcing God only knows what law.
It's much less easy to adapt to foreigners when they are the ones not integrating and bringing their violent culture at your doorstep.
You can pretend like you gifted me this but in reality you didn't. I took it through my hard work. And you can try to stop me but I'll beat you, even though you have the advantage of having been born here. Because I'm better.