Allowing hundreds of thousands unskilled immigrants who require housing, medical care, education, and other financial support while providing nothing to the economy or society, is incomprehensible. Unless, of course, the current administration has another agenda that has nothing to do with the welfare of its own citizens.
I couldn't agree more, I suspect there is a plan to import as many immigrants who will be grateful and vote for the party that granted them leave to remain. However, if so, it is a very dangerous strategy, as we have seen now with the Muslim vote, they will use Labour as long as it suits, but will then, as they are already starting to do with 6 independents MP's, go alone and formulate their own party.
I'm not sure I can totally agree. My reaction is based on working and living in the greater Tokyo area 1990-1993 as a conversational English teacher (at the time at least one of the more common occupations for foreigners or at least those with a native English-speaking background). Thus my impressions are over 30 years old, and perhaps things have changed.
With that grain of salt aside, here's what I experienced:
* Concur, I have never felt safer in another urban center than what I experienced in Japan. I clearly remember commuting home around midnight and seeing moms taking their babies in stroller rides to get them to sleep. They were alone and had no fear. Along with raw safety, yes, the Japanese were nearly universally neat, clean, polite and helpful.
* There were various groups that were "out." I remember seeing homeless WW2 veterans, shunned for the embarrassment of losing the war. Considering how I am treated with general honor as a US veteran myself, I feel for them. Also consider the descendants of the Korean laborers imported to Japan in the first several decades of the 20th century. Their only path to citizenship is to totally renounce their Korean names, language, ancestry, etc. I know this because a certain percentage of them were my students. (Meanwhile, S. Korea doesn't want them back; they feel a certain shame towards them, too. Truly, these are essentially stateless, status-less, and pitiful. The shame is that they are shamed.) I also encountered various groups of illegal immigrants, always workers in various low-skill trades. They were typically Pakistani, Thai and various South and Southeast Asian nationalities, though at least one of them I met was a US citizen and native of Hawaii, crammed into shoddy apartments. Like illegals in the US, they are there because someone is willing to pay them for jobs that need done that native Japanese are unwilling to do--but these same too-good-for-me Japanese still benefit from this illegal trade. Finally, consider that many Japanese men, famously farmers, are unable to find wives willing to work with them out in the countryside: they import Filipina , Thai and other women to marry, join them in the work, and raise a family.
In particular, I dispute the author's account of a lack of xenophobia. Yes, Japanese are almost universally polite, but at least for a certain percentage, this is merely a facade that is culturally enforced.
* I married a Japanese lady that I met in the US in college. As we would ride the trains together, clearly a couple but never engaging in PDA, I would get glares from middle-aged men (the same men who would flip through pornographic magazines while wedged between Japanese schoolgirls). Their glares were very pointed and their message very clear: "How dare you filthy foreign scum come in and steal our virginal Japanese princesses." They never did anything about it, but this was a very common experience. I'm still enraged by their hypocrisy--I know I treated my wife better than they treated theirs.
* At one point, my wife and I were apartment hunting, looking to get a place 1/2 way between my work and hers. The realtor we were working with (they actually use realtors as middlemen to find apartments; potential renters do not approach landlords or properties directly) told us bluntly that our preferred section of Tokyo was exclusively for Japanese and that "gaijin" like me were not welcome. This was the most explicit and clear form of racism I encountered.
* At our wedding in Japan, my wife's very large extended family all showed up. (Her parents came from the large families that were common in WW2, as the Japanese government was seeking a huge birthrate to replace battlefield losses as well as colonize Manchuria and other places in Asia.) All, and I mean all 15+ of her cackly aunts placed bets on how long it would take for their cute niece to come to her senses, dump the cute American playboy (me), and marry a proper Japanese fellow and raise proper Japanese children. (This was in contrast to my parents-in-law who have always treated me kindly and appreciatively.) Well, 30 years later our marriage is strong, our kids aren't on drugs or having babies as teenagers, etc.--and all those cackly aunts have now gone back to my mother-in-law and apologized, wondering what our secret is.
* Many Japanese mistook me for a US serviceman (in spite of my beard!). (I wasn't one then but did join up on my return to the States.) This was not a favorable impression. If you don't think that the Japanese are xenophobic (at least a certain significant percentage), then witness the riotous responses, especially in Okinawa, when a US serviceman allegedly rapes a local or is suspected of some other crime. Sadly, all too often these allegations are in fact borne out. But my point is, all foreigners tend to suffer suspicion as a result of the crimes of a few. That is the definition of xenophobia. One of the particular times I indisputably suffered from this was during a late night subway ride. On the other end of the car from me was a clearly drunk American serviceman making rude noises and gestures. The poor Japanese in the car with us were justifiably offended. And, they kept on looking in horror and disgust at him, and then to me. Like, "Are you like that, too?" I was never more embarrassed of being an American in my life. I wanted to drag that idiot out and throttle him, but of course that wasn't the answer.
* Japanese are xenophobic of their own people. What does this mean? Talk to the kids of e.g. Toyota executives who are posted abroad, e.g. at US factories, and bring their families. These kids are exposed to freedom from the very tight cultural expectations to do certain things at certain times, etc. It's intoxicating. And they do NOT integrate well back home in Japan when their dads return. In fact, the situation is so bad--literally suicidal--that in Tokyo at least they had a shadow school system exclusively for these returnee kids, complete with something approaching Western-style freedoms. See, the point is, the Japanese have this idea that the only real way to be Japanese is to be born in Japan, of Japanese parents, and raised exclusively in Japan. Returnee kids do not fit. My wife is a returnee and she sure didn't fit back into Japan; the reason we moved back to the US was that she was physically and mentally deteriorating under the atmosphere of expectations she could no longer meet.
I could tell more anecdotes, but this is already a long post. Again, my experiences are more than 30 years in the past. Perhaps things have changed--but I wouldn't be posting this if I were skeptical.
However, I will add that many Japanese I encountered were not xenophobes: I am sure their kindness was genuine, and they were embarrassed by both the xenophobic past and present of Japan. In fact, I would say, despite all the above recollections, that I loved my time in Japan and could have spent the rest of my life there. My point is, I was also realistic about the attitudes of many and the attendant constraints it put on my opportunities.
To reinforce the point that Biden's words can't be trusted, the Russian economy is not stalling either. On the contrary, during the war in Ukraine, it has been growing for one simple reason: The sanctions were successful in restricting imports to Russia but quite open with exports, which allowed Russia's oil and gas to flow to China, India, and other countries interested in buying them, thus funding the Russian war machine.
It would be nice to have diversity of thought, and opportunities to discuss these different ideas and outlooks, rather than only thinking of diversity in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity.
Differences in religion are by definition differences in ideas and outlook at the most fundamental level possible. (I'm thinking of religion here not in terms of, say, mindless rituals done only to comply with, say, tradition or similar expectations, but rather in terms of a conscious search for ultimates--ultimate truth, beauty; what is worth living, and dying, for; what, ultimately, life is and its meaning and our place in the cosmos.)
Allowing hundreds of thousands unskilled immigrants who require housing, medical care, education, and other financial support while providing nothing to the economy or society, is incomprehensible. Unless, of course, the current administration has another agenda that has nothing to do with the welfare of its own citizens.
Which, of course, they do.
I couldn't agree more, I suspect there is a plan to import as many immigrants who will be grateful and vote for the party that granted them leave to remain. However, if so, it is a very dangerous strategy, as we have seen now with the Muslim vote, they will use Labour as long as it suits, but will then, as they are already starting to do with 6 independents MP's, go alone and formulate their own party.
It’s Houllebecq’s ‘Submission’, playing out in real life.
I'm not sure I can totally agree. My reaction is based on working and living in the greater Tokyo area 1990-1993 as a conversational English teacher (at the time at least one of the more common occupations for foreigners or at least those with a native English-speaking background). Thus my impressions are over 30 years old, and perhaps things have changed.
With that grain of salt aside, here's what I experienced:
* Concur, I have never felt safer in another urban center than what I experienced in Japan. I clearly remember commuting home around midnight and seeing moms taking their babies in stroller rides to get them to sleep. They were alone and had no fear. Along with raw safety, yes, the Japanese were nearly universally neat, clean, polite and helpful.
* There were various groups that were "out." I remember seeing homeless WW2 veterans, shunned for the embarrassment of losing the war. Considering how I am treated with general honor as a US veteran myself, I feel for them. Also consider the descendants of the Korean laborers imported to Japan in the first several decades of the 20th century. Their only path to citizenship is to totally renounce their Korean names, language, ancestry, etc. I know this because a certain percentage of them were my students. (Meanwhile, S. Korea doesn't want them back; they feel a certain shame towards them, too. Truly, these are essentially stateless, status-less, and pitiful. The shame is that they are shamed.) I also encountered various groups of illegal immigrants, always workers in various low-skill trades. They were typically Pakistani, Thai and various South and Southeast Asian nationalities, though at least one of them I met was a US citizen and native of Hawaii, crammed into shoddy apartments. Like illegals in the US, they are there because someone is willing to pay them for jobs that need done that native Japanese are unwilling to do--but these same too-good-for-me Japanese still benefit from this illegal trade. Finally, consider that many Japanese men, famously farmers, are unable to find wives willing to work with them out in the countryside: they import Filipina , Thai and other women to marry, join them in the work, and raise a family.
In particular, I dispute the author's account of a lack of xenophobia. Yes, Japanese are almost universally polite, but at least for a certain percentage, this is merely a facade that is culturally enforced.
* I married a Japanese lady that I met in the US in college. As we would ride the trains together, clearly a couple but never engaging in PDA, I would get glares from middle-aged men (the same men who would flip through pornographic magazines while wedged between Japanese schoolgirls). Their glares were very pointed and their message very clear: "How dare you filthy foreign scum come in and steal our virginal Japanese princesses." They never did anything about it, but this was a very common experience. I'm still enraged by their hypocrisy--I know I treated my wife better than they treated theirs.
* At one point, my wife and I were apartment hunting, looking to get a place 1/2 way between my work and hers. The realtor we were working with (they actually use realtors as middlemen to find apartments; potential renters do not approach landlords or properties directly) told us bluntly that our preferred section of Tokyo was exclusively for Japanese and that "gaijin" like me were not welcome. This was the most explicit and clear form of racism I encountered.
* At our wedding in Japan, my wife's very large extended family all showed up. (Her parents came from the large families that were common in WW2, as the Japanese government was seeking a huge birthrate to replace battlefield losses as well as colonize Manchuria and other places in Asia.) All, and I mean all 15+ of her cackly aunts placed bets on how long it would take for their cute niece to come to her senses, dump the cute American playboy (me), and marry a proper Japanese fellow and raise proper Japanese children. (This was in contrast to my parents-in-law who have always treated me kindly and appreciatively.) Well, 30 years later our marriage is strong, our kids aren't on drugs or having babies as teenagers, etc.--and all those cackly aunts have now gone back to my mother-in-law and apologized, wondering what our secret is.
* Many Japanese mistook me for a US serviceman (in spite of my beard!). (I wasn't one then but did join up on my return to the States.) This was not a favorable impression. If you don't think that the Japanese are xenophobic (at least a certain significant percentage), then witness the riotous responses, especially in Okinawa, when a US serviceman allegedly rapes a local or is suspected of some other crime. Sadly, all too often these allegations are in fact borne out. But my point is, all foreigners tend to suffer suspicion as a result of the crimes of a few. That is the definition of xenophobia. One of the particular times I indisputably suffered from this was during a late night subway ride. On the other end of the car from me was a clearly drunk American serviceman making rude noises and gestures. The poor Japanese in the car with us were justifiably offended. And, they kept on looking in horror and disgust at him, and then to me. Like, "Are you like that, too?" I was never more embarrassed of being an American in my life. I wanted to drag that idiot out and throttle him, but of course that wasn't the answer.
* Japanese are xenophobic of their own people. What does this mean? Talk to the kids of e.g. Toyota executives who are posted abroad, e.g. at US factories, and bring their families. These kids are exposed to freedom from the very tight cultural expectations to do certain things at certain times, etc. It's intoxicating. And they do NOT integrate well back home in Japan when their dads return. In fact, the situation is so bad--literally suicidal--that in Tokyo at least they had a shadow school system exclusively for these returnee kids, complete with something approaching Western-style freedoms. See, the point is, the Japanese have this idea that the only real way to be Japanese is to be born in Japan, of Japanese parents, and raised exclusively in Japan. Returnee kids do not fit. My wife is a returnee and she sure didn't fit back into Japan; the reason we moved back to the US was that she was physically and mentally deteriorating under the atmosphere of expectations she could no longer meet.
I could tell more anecdotes, but this is already a long post. Again, my experiences are more than 30 years in the past. Perhaps things have changed--but I wouldn't be posting this if I were skeptical.
However, I will add that many Japanese I encountered were not xenophobes: I am sure their kindness was genuine, and they were embarrassed by both the xenophobic past and present of Japan. In fact, I would say, despite all the above recollections, that I loved my time in Japan and could have spent the rest of my life there. My point is, I was also realistic about the attitudes of many and the attendant constraints it put on my opportunities.
To reinforce the point that Biden's words can't be trusted, the Russian economy is not stalling either. On the contrary, during the war in Ukraine, it has been growing for one simple reason: The sanctions were successful in restricting imports to Russia but quite open with exports, which allowed Russia's oil and gas to flow to China, India, and other countries interested in buying them, thus funding the Russian war machine.
Sounds wonderful. It is so ridiculous and expensive to take all these unskilled migrants.
Diversity is our Weakness.
https://freevoices.substack.com/p/diversity-is-our-weakness
It would be nice to have diversity of thought, and opportunities to discuss these different ideas and outlooks, rather than only thinking of diversity in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity.
Differences in religion are by definition differences in ideas and outlook at the most fundamental level possible. (I'm thinking of religion here not in terms of, say, mindless rituals done only to comply with, say, tradition or similar expectations, but rather in terms of a conscious search for ultimates--ultimate truth, beauty; what is worth living, and dying, for; what, ultimately, life is and its meaning and our place in the cosmos.)
Our family spent 5 years in Japan and this was our experience. It was a wonderful 5 years.