this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they're not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in "their own country."
The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they'll find themselves strangers in their own country.
It's usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don't want to become second-class.
Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn't be so afraid. They wouldn't be afraid that they'd be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they'd themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.
I think it's not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it's happening.
What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they're advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they're pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they've been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It's been said and it's true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.
Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country's native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it's the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we're afraid of someone else doing the same to us.
I agree with everything up until you said “dilutes”. I would argue that immigrant cultures don’t dilute the host country’s culture, they add to it. In other words, the culture that was there still exists in the same amount and in the same “concentration”, and immigrants bring their culture to newly developing areas of the country/state.
Its very hard to add more of something else and not have dilution.
Take 1 litre of vodka and add 1 decilitre of water - there will be more fluid but the vodka will be?
framing is important though. Nobody considers a cocktail 'diluted' even if that's technically applicable, the resultant mixture usually improves the beverage.
But the fear isn't so rational. It's like a fear that the cocktail in your example will replace the original vodka whether they want the cocktail or not, or that the vodka will be so diluted by seltzer that it will functionally cease to exist.
It's like a fear of gentrification of the country as a whole.
It's also important to remember that the US is a huge exception in this regard as well. Most other countries are like 90%+ native population, and immigrant populations tend to be sort of isolated from the wider national culture due to things like language barriers, and they often set up little "bastions" of their native culture locally wherever they live. We even see plenty of that in the US as well. While there are many distinctly US cultures across the country that are derived from a variety of backgrounds, there are tons of "enclaves" of European culture that make it blatantly clear where immigrants from certain countries settled. In Boston, the culture of Chinatown is distinctly unique and separate from the wider culture of the city, which largely has ties back to Ireland (and is very proud of it). And both of those are distinctly different from where the Italian immigrants settled, who effectively have their own districts of cultures descended from Italy regardless of where they immigrated to.
Good - i wish your culture good luck