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posted by
LaminatorX
on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:30AM
from the Xenophobia:-the-Universal-Language dept.
from the Xenophobia:-the-Universal-Language dept.
fx_68 writes:
"A sharp rise in the foreign population has ratcheted up racial tensions. Does Singapore have a problem with xenophobia? It seems that barely a month goes by these days without news reports highlighting friction between Singaporeans and foreign workers in the tiny multi-ethnic city-state."
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-- Oliver Goldsmith
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 27 2014, @02:54PM
It's pretty simple really. People usually favor their own culture and way of life, for fairly obvious reasons. They like their lifestyle, and don't want it to change any more than it has to. Large-scale immigration threatens that, and for what? Why does any group of people NEED a lot of immigration? Sure, a little immigration is fine, it's nice to mix things up a little, meet new people, not get too stagnant, etc. But very large-scale immigration, with the newcomers quickly rivaling the existing people as a percentage of the overall population? What is the incentive? Generally, it's just money: business owners want to take advantage of cheap labor, and then they (through their stooges in government) try to convince everyone else they need to bring in all these new people for various feel-good reasons. But large-scale immigration has serious consequences for any culture, and will change it greatly. Why should the existing people welcome this? Maybe their like their culture, and maybe they don't particularly care for the culture of the newcomers. If the newcomers had such a great culture, why are they fleeing their homelands, which tend to have a lot of problems like violence? Why would the existing population want to bring in people and then have to deal with these problems? Moving a giant group of people having serious cultural problems from their homeland to a new place isn't going to magically make their problems disappear, and will also create new problems in integration.
Immigration seems to be OK as long as it's done at a slow, controlled rate, so that the natives don't see their culture changing very quickly (and even without any immigrants, it would change on its own, don't forget). They might even welcome the newcomers, as long as it's not impacting them very much. Introduce very large number of them, and the changes become very apparent very quickly, and may not be very positive either (in the view of the natives), so of course there's a backlash.