Secrets of the Aegean Apocalypse

[Minimalist]

I live in Phoenix, R/S. There is a Mexican area in the next town over. It's no big deal. I've even learned to read the signs.


I don't think your analogy holds at all. I grew up in NY where immigrants are a fact of life. My grandparents came over in 1912 from Italy. My dad's generation was fully assimilated. To this day, no one gets excited about immigrants....as long as they are white.

These people come here to work....not pillage. There are American employers who are only too glad to have them. I read a letter to the editor the other day in which the writer opined that the problem with llegals was that they depressed the wage scale. Something like, "there are no jobs that Americans won't do....they just won't do them for coolie wages." He's right in a sense. But he fails to look at the long term result of such thinking. If American farmers have to pay three times the wage for lettuce pickers then American-produced lettuce will cost 3 times that of Mexican produced lettuce. If you think that America's Soccer Moms are going to pay $3 for a head of lettuce instead of $1 on the next rack you are sadly mistaken. All this will achieve is to drive American farmers out of business and shift one more industry over the border where they will gladly export food to us.

[Digit]

Some years ago I took a holiday from engineering and spent 18 mths selling insurance in and around Luton in Bedfordshire and I report this as factual without bias, just factual.
Many of the houses in Luton were Victorian terraced houses, which for those unfamiliar means 2/3 levels 3/4 bedrooms.
On occasion I knocked on the front door, asked for a Mister --- and the person who answered didn't know of them and proceeded to knock on each room entrance to enquire if the person I wished to see lived there.
7/8 families per room!
The area is now a hot bed of Moslem fundementalism because Britain failed to live up to what they expected and the last census failed to discover exactly how many people did in fact live in the area.
These are the facts, make of them what you will.

[Rokcet Scientist]

[...] All this will achieve is to drive American farmers out of business and shift one more industry over the border where they will gladly export food to us.

That's only half of the picture, Min:
when economic activity has been shifted over the border you are left with an exhausted, dilapidated economy, picked clean by the locusts. Destroyed. A sad end to the "rich west".

But if it were 'merely' the shifting of economic activity I wouldn't have too much of a problem with it. However, in order to 'take our place' in the world, they also need to develop a societal and political (democratic) fabric that is somewhat akin to our present ones. And they have sofar abundantly demonstrated that they can't do that. So that is bound to fail. The net result would be destroyed and exhausted erstwhile affluent civilisations (economies) in the northern hemisphere and failed civilisations (economies) in the southern hemisphere = ZILCH. Destruction!

[Minimalist]

Again I can't speak for Europe. The US has a long tradition of welcoming immigrants. Funny how Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Scandinavians, Chinese, and Koreans have all migrated in waves, all faced various forms of discrimination and all somehow managed to assimilate, with no real problem. Even various Muslim groups have grown recently, and even though they are the new Yellow Peril after 9-11, there seems to be no great embracing of Fundamentalist thinking among them.

Perhaps Europe needs to look in a mirror and figure out why it has such problems. I suspect it is a legacy of colonialism but that's just me thinking out loud.

As for over here, the anti-immigrant movement....masked behind "border security" rhetoric....is nothing but code word racism which is a main plank of the Know-Nothing Wing of the Republican Party. It is interesting watching the money players of the GOP and the Redneck element fight among themselves......but let's not pretend that it has anything to do with "security." These people are no threat.

[Minimalist]

Here, R/S... just for you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/washi ... /ZGwvDpI+A

MIDLAND, Tex. — Late last spring, Republicans in this West Texas oil town called for a boycott of Doña Anita’s Mexican restaurant, a retaliatory step against its owner, Luz Reyes, for closing shop and showing up at a rally against proposed new penalties for illegal immigrants.

But President Bush’s three best friends here defied the boycott and went to the restaurant, Mr. Bush’s favorite when he lived here, regardless. One of them, the president’s close confidant and former commerce secretary, Donald L. Evans, told Ms. Reyes: “Luz, you didn’t do anything wrong. We love you.”

The hometown divide helps to shed light on a broader rift, as Mr. Bush and like-minded Republicans engage in an unusually contentious fight with the rest of their party in the national debate over immigration.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Again I can't speak for Europe.

You may assume there's not much difference where migration is concerned.

The US has a long tradition of welcoming immigrants.

It's exactly the same on this side of the pond: I, for instance, am a descendant of Scots, French, Germans, and Indonesians.

Perhaps Europe needs to look in a mirror and figure out why it has such problems. I suspect it is a legacy of colonialism but that's just me thinking out loud.

I hope you're not offended that I find that ... well ... 'funny' coming from a citizen of a superpower with that country's recent history...

These people are no threat.

I wish you were/are right. But I highly doubt it. Past immigrant 'waves' were much, much smaller. And could – apparently – be assimilated. The numbers are very different now! Lemme paint you a picture:



And here's some background for you. For 'Cape Verde' and 'The Netherlands' you may substitute 'Colombia' and the 'United States'. Or any other combination of northern and southern countries!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/world ... verde.html

Short summary:
the island of Santa Luzia, Cape Verde, is the source of 90% of Cape Verde's emigrants. Santa Luzia has 25,000 inhabitants (left). The others have migrated to Boston, USA, (200,000), Rotterdam, Netherlands, (80,000), and Zürich, Switzerland, (60,000).

Another example:
The Netherlands' former colony (until 1975) Surinam (in south America) had 400,000 inhabitants in 1974. They wanted independence. And money. They got it. A dowry of 3 billion dollars as a lump sum. That translates to 7,500 bucks per person, for every man, woman, and child. Or 52,500 greenbacks per average family. Every family in the country. Today, and a couple of coup's later, the dowry has vanished into thin air. And Surinam is a dirt-poor banana republic – well, really more of a coke republic – with a population between 150,000 and 200.000. While almost 350,000 Surinam people now live in The Netherlands. Almost half on welfare, and 5 times as much criminal records as indigenous Dutch.

Decolonization has been a bad development for both countries!

[Minimalist]

I hope you're not offended that I find that ... well ... 'funny' coming from a citizen of a superpower with that country's recent history...

Hell, no. We don't conquer them to rule them. We conquer them to kill them and make them love us.

Frankly, it hasn't worked so well. But, in the long run, the British model didn't work out so much better and I happen to think that the Brits gave most of their empire the best government they ever had. But still....the ungrateful blokes seem to resent it.

(I doubt that English-Dutch residents of NYC in the 1850's thought that the Irish were a "small" wave.) Perception is everything.