Zosoforum

There are many reasons to dislike MENA immigrants in Europe. They're a strain on the fiscal budgets, they commit more crime, they're rude, they're more violent, they seem slower up there, they're uglier and fatter, they take up social housing and make areas shittier. Their marriage practices can seem bizarre. And the children they result in are unimpressive and often sick. Despite holding these beliefs I have to admit that I am one of them.

I don't really like most immigrants here either. When my local acquaintances bemoan immigration and its consequences I can't help but agree. My own father is pretty slow up there and engages in welfare fraud. I don't like that either. His friends are all similar. And his friends' children are criminals or rude, incompetent and arrogant. Going from job to job while crying about racism. When it's easy to see why employers don't like them. They're lazy and annoying.

It scares me that I belong to this group of people. If deportations were to happen by popular demand I would be deported. I would have to move to a terrible place, which might not even want me and give up my comfortable lifestyle.

I think the best solution for me would be a halt to immigration from MENA and India to prevent the strengthening of enclaves and increasing tensions between communities. But the damage is done.

The answer to what do I do is quite obvious and easy. Assimilate. Take a local wife, have mixed kids, give them local surnames, pray they take local partners and hopefully the MENA ancestor will be a curiosity in a line of locals.

While I have to agree with a lot of this (I have to live in MENA everyday, terrible) I don't think this is the correct analysis. A lot of it is dependent on the systems of the country receiving them. America, for example, takes MENA immigration much better than Europe does; MENA immigration there is much older and the people who end up in the US are of far higher selection

I also just don't think it's good to hate your race or ethnicity or wtv. Again, ironic both because I bitch about Arabs every single day and because I am a rootless cosmopolitan type.
But, ultimately, I am Arab, you are MENA. These are our people.
Nor do I subscribe to anything hereditary about why we act the way we do. Iraqis used to act far better then than they do now; wealth was and is a great civilising equaliser.

I appreciate your spirit (which unfortunately, most of your compatriots lack), but self-hatred or other forms of degrading yourself are pointless. You ultimately didn't choose what ethnicity or nation you were born in, so it's a more reasonable choice to accept being Iraqi, in spite of your country's many flaws.

Speaking of your plan to completely assimilate into European society - from my experience, Europeans will actually ruthlessly mock non-Europeans who adopted European names, since they believe they appropriated European culture and it doesn't fit them. Therefore, in Germany for example, only the Vietnamese adopt German names. Turkish immigrants, even if they marry with Germans, will still give Turkish names to their children for this reason.

Unlike the United States, which is a country built on immigration and thus where locals accept you as their own if you sufficiently integrate into American society, European countries are fixed national/identitarian states. Germans will never accept you as German no matter how much you assimilate, because their definition of German-ness is inherently ancestry-based. The very fact that Iraqis and other third worlders are inundating Europe is an abomination of our modern age.

If I were you, I'd consider moving to the United States. Nativism is becoming increasingly accepted in Europe, so even if you were "one of the good ones", you'd still be subject to discrimination. In spite of the current political milieu in the US, no one would actually care that you're originally from Iraq if you become sufficiently American in character and behavior. If that's not an option, then integrate without losing your Iraqi identity - i.e. don't try too hard to become German/Danish/French/etc. They will notice and they usually do NOT like it.

>>4
>Speaking of your plan to completely assimilate into European society - from my experience, Europeans will actually ruthlessly mock non-Europeans who adopted European names, since they believe they appropriated European culture and it doesn't fit them.

I am from North-Eastern Europe and have not observed "ruthless mockery" here. Culturally assimilated racially alien foreigners are rather viewed in a pet-having-learnt-a-trick-like manner, a neat curiosity, but I have not seen any explicit mocking-rejection, rather an implicit one unconsciously expressed in the way people (especially liberals) talk about it: hostility, though, yes, as is rising through all of Europe.

>>5

What I've described is true for Germany. Maybe it's different for the Baltics and Finland. Germans will ruthlessly mock Arabs or Turks who adopt German names for either themselves or their children as essentially LARPing. I think anti-immigration hostility will eventually result in most European countries adopting the current Danish immigration model (only temporary residence permits, immigrant children forcibly assimilated by the state, family reunions forbidden for the first 5 years) - already the UK's Labor government openly said they wanted to adopt the Danish model. We will probably see large-scale deportations of asylums seekers either back to countries of their origin (Syria) or to third countries for processing (Libya, Rwanda). As for immigrants with a citizenship, there will probably be significant governmental and societal pressure to leave. Something akin to Japan paying Dekasegis to go back to Brazil. In the end I feel the current period of mass migration to Europe will be more of an oddity of a rapidly changing time, like how Idaho used to be 30% Chinese in the late 19th century.

Both of my parents were former immigrants/expatriates in Europe, in Germany and in Wales. They returned to the ME after staying for around a decade there in the 90s. Given they're both highly educated (my dad worked in Wales as a biomedical researcher in addiction medicine, mother specialized in dermatology in Germany), they did find a good bit of culture shock seeing other Arabs and Turks there that did often come from worse-off backgrounds. But in the end every one of them was an individual, and they differed in virtue.

In truth, neither self-hatred nor wanton violence are our ways; the real question isn't if you're a refugee or diaspora, it's not about assimilation, it's if you have virtue. Some of the folks among you lack it. Some of the folks among you have it. If you really want the cure, the first step is to stop thinking of yourself in terms of the fact you're diaspora, to stop de-individualizing yourself. My parents remained religiously dedicated but also maintained a sense of duty in living in others' land and doing as the Romans do. It's not about pure assimilation nor about being violently and vehemently stereotypical, it's about the fact that your own culture is you, and whatever it is you do is your culture.

In Britain there is an interesting dichotomy that suggests that there is a "correct" way to handle 3rd world immigration. Those Muslim-origin immigrants who came in the middle twentieth century during the collapse of the empire are overall very industrious and generous, often running humble businesses like general shops and are also highly involved in charity work. This stands in contrast to the "Boriswave" of immigration that brought over a much younger generation from the same country, who are generally as OP has described, in addition the famous grooming gangs case involving police negligence with which I'm sure all posters will be aware. I don't know enough about the countries of origin to say precisely why, but it is interesting to note that this appears to be an issue of the younger generation; ironically it is quite the opposite of the situation with native Britain wherein the boomer generation are generally lazy and cruel and the younger generation far more (although of course I'm biased by being a member of which) productive and moral.