18 ways to hate your neighbor

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Oct 29 13:23:34 PST 2002


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>Europe isn't ethnically pure. If you look at the proportions of the
>foreign-born, immigrants, and/or non-nationals out of the total
>populations, many European nations are as diverse as, and some of
>them are more diverse than, the United States. USA is way behind
>Canada and Australia in the proportions of the foreign-born in the
>total population and the labor force.

Of course Europe isn't ethnically pure. If it were, they wouldn't have spent so much time and blood trying to be. But Hayden is right that a good bit of modern European history has been devoted to creating ethnically pure states, a process that involved lots of murder and population transfers. And much of Europe today isn't too friendly to foreigners. It's still the case that people born in Germany of Turkish parents aren't German citizens, right? Anti-immigrant movements have sprung up all over the continent, and have a lot more traction than they do in the U.S.

Doug



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