Nationality and ethnicity

[Lea101]

People have always been migrating from one place to another, even native tribes. What matters is one’s values, not their race.

 

[Salibi]

The difference is that Jordan is already an Arab Muslim country, so naturalized refugees won’t cause the same demographic and cultural shifts as they would in majority non-Arab, non-Muslim countries.

 

[Annie]

It’s what has shaped my opinion, that mass migration between country’s is not good, and can only lead to strife and trouble.

I think your emphasis should be on the word mass, which I bolded.

I think a large influx of outsiders into any fairly stable place will cause problems. That includes lots of retirees moving to former vacation areas, as we find all along the East coast, and probably in the mountains.

There is a lot of disruption.

I remember being in a certain West Coast city and being told to avoid a certain area. Well, naturally I got lost and found myself in it. It was just like where I had spent part of my childhood, in a Spanish-speaking country. I loved it! But I could see that people who had always been in the US, where you can’t smell the food til you start to cook it, would feel out of place, especially when everyone is speaking another language.

I am all for enforcing our border laws. People we know nothing about should not be entering. We need to fix our immigration laws so it is easier for the people we truly need to enter, but at the same time, is it right for us to benefit from the low wages we pay to them simply because they are from a nation that is very poor? And when they return home, they rely on their own nation’s health service (at least in Mexico) into which they have not paid.

OTOH, maybe the remittances make up for it. But maybe also that means that people are not fighting for a better life for all their own compatriots.

So it is a mess.

But what has generally happened is that the third generation is very American, and some of the 3rd and 4th generation Americans are now complaining about current immigrants.

But I do not agree with you on all the skin color stuff. It has nothing to do with skin color. It’s a culture issue, not skin color.

 

[AlbertDerGrosse]

European nationalities stemmed out of the various ethnic groups, the Franks, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish, etc. with all the great confusion of a few thousand years of conflict and migration.

As far as Africa, and the Americas, they hadn’t gotten past a tribal society which reinforces my point. An Iroquois couldn’t be a Blackhawk or an Apache.

You can’t be serious! Do you really believe European ethnic tensions are so neatly packed into nationalistic little bundles and those of other (not White) continents are not?

A Bantu can’t be a Tutsi.

And a Catalán cannot be a Castilian, and a Swabian cannot be a Bavarian.

 

[AlbertDerGrosse]

Better yet, what happens when these nice little 19th/20th century nationalistic labels cease to hold any political sway for those who are bound to see themselves as part of that group? @CCHcolonel, do you consider “Yugoslavian” as an authentic “European nationality”? Why or why not?

 

[AlbertDerGrosse]

Americans don’t have one nationality. Anyone who meets the governments immigration requirements can come here and be a citizen and that’s been the case since it’s inception.

Your ignorance of American history knows no bounds. Never minding the obvious exception to your statement, that over a third of the American populace were denied citizenship for almost 100 years due to nothing more than the hue of their skin, until Congress saw fit to ratify the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, we’ve indeed had multiple cases of citizenship restricted based on race and skin color: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Korean Exclusion Act of 1894, the Seneca Exclusion Act of 1897, the Puerto Rican Exclusion Act of 1916 (yes, we excluded citizenship to a territory of the US because the people were too brown), it wasn’t until 1924 that we extended citizenship to all Native Americans on or off the reservations, and it wasn’t until 1954 that the Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated, once and for all, every impediment to citizenship based on race/ethnicity/skin color/etc.

 

[Rhubarb]

Historically? How historic?

There were Romans of all sorts of ethnicities - that is to say, citizens of Rome. The various Italian tribes became Romans first. Greeks became Romans. Africans became Romans. Gauls became Romans. Depending on circumstances, potentially any ethnicity could become a Roman. After the Western Empire fell, there were more Greco-Romans than Latin Romans. We can go back even further. Because Spartans were not Athenians. Were not Thebens. Were not Thesbians. Were not Thessalonians. But they were all GREEKS. So we’ve a historic example of many ethnicities who can all share a nationality. And we have another historic example of one ethnicity making up many different nationalities.

The fallacy in this all is that one type of people, or another, isn’t bound down to any one bit of land. We’ve seen patterns of human migration throughout history and evidence of into pre-history. What even IS an Englishman? Is it the pre-Roman Celts that were in Britain as far as we can tell first? Is it the Latinized Celts after Caesar? Is it the Anglo-Saxon British before the Conquest? The Norman British afterwards? How about the German-British that the current monarchy’s family comes from? And what if the Kentish and the Essexians and the Wessexians and the East Anglians and the Sussexians and the Northumbrians and the Mercians all want to express their nationality? They’re all historic kingdoms that now make up England. How does that fit this schema of what can be an Englishman? Why stop at England and not go back further? And don’t get me even started about Cornwall or Wales.

Ethnicity has to do with our culture. Nationality has to do with which constructed entity we currently live in. My grandfather was of Japanese ancestry, born in Hawaii. He fought in the infantry in Korea. I’ll be damned if anyone tells me he wasn’t American. And anyone would be hard-pressed to say he was Japanese. Let’s say there was a homeland for every ethno-nationality. Where would I go? One side of my family traces to Japan. The other side traces to Denmark. Surely we wouldn’t stay in the USA. That’s obviously the Native Americans’ homeland. Where would I, personally, have to go?

 

[Rhubarb]

Everything you’ve said has been twisted and misconstrued because these people just want to be able to call you a racist. Just quit feeding them.

I haven’t called anyone a racist. I’m more than willing to examine the metaphysical and epistemological puzzles CCHcolonel brought up. Asking for an explanation isn’t an attack.

 

[Sarcelle]

So is Saudi Arabia.

But then why isn’t Saudi Arabia taking in a large part of these migrants?

Saudi Arabia said the reason why they weren’t taking in a lot of migrants was because of cultural differences.

 

[Sarcelle]

Good question.

 

[Salibi]

Don’t get me started on Saudi Arabia. All they’re good for is polemics. Zero action. They extoll the virtues of Arab brotherhood and fraternity, yet when it comes to actually helping Arab refugees they bail out. Did they really say it was due to cultural differences? Funny how they emphasize Arab unity on one hand and then claim cultural difference on the other. How typical of them, in fact.

 

[Sarcelle]

Yes they did say it was due to cultural differences.

 

[Londoner]

European nationalities stemmed out of the various ethnic groups, the Franks, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish, etc.

We need to be careful about terminology. When you say “nationalities” I assume from the context that you mean “nationality” in the sense of belonging to a state. I think the point you are making is that, for example, Italy emerged as a nation state offering Italian nationality (here synonymous with citizenship) to people of Italian ethnicity. Italy is, however, an interesting case. For example, the Italian language was in fact not originally indigenous to the whole of the Italian peninsula. It is actually the modern form of the Florentine dialect of the Tuscan language. There are more than thirty other languages that are indigenous to Italy, including languages that are not Romance languages. That is not to say, of course, that there is no such thing as an Italian national identity, but it is debatable whether that identity is ethnic or whether it is only national in the modern sense. Mussolini rejected the notion of an Italian race. In particular, he regarded Italian Jews as Italians. For Mussolini, Italian nationalism was an expression of identification with the idea of an Italian nation rather identification with an Italian ethnic group.

As far as Africa, and the Americas, they hadn’t gotten past a tribal society which reinforces my point.

In the case of Africa it isn’t true to say that pre-colonial Africa consisted entirely of tribal societies. There were also states. Those states were not as developed as European states, but they did exist. For example, there were pre-colonial Kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi with populations of Hutus, Tutsis, and Twas. I think that European colonisation rapidly accelerated the political development of most African countries in a way that was not sustainable, especially after the European powers withdrew from Africa in the later 20th century.

Poland for Poles

Poland is very interesting. Before it was erased from the map of Europe by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, Poland had been for a time the largest country in Europe. Poland was a multi-ethnic, polyglot, and multi-confessional state whose population included ethnic Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, Livonians, Cossacks, Tatars, and of course a very large population of Jews, as well as immigrants from as far as Scotland. Poland rarely experienced the kind of religious conflict seen in western Europe, and its people practised Latin and Eastern Rite Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam. Poland elected monarchs drawn from French, Hungarian, Swedish, and German dynasties. When Poland was reconstituted as an independent state after the World War I it was again ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse, albeit constrained within narrower borders—borders which after the World War II would again undergo revision as Poland lost large territories in the east while gaining a much smaller amount of territory to the west.

 

[TULIPed]

It’s amazing that people can’t see the danger in adding such large numbers of new people into an existing country and not expect there to be friction.

I’m sure the Native Americans would heartily agree with you.

 

[on_the_hill]

Reminds me of my friend who is of Japanese ancestry.

He went to Japan and the people made it known to him that he was American not Japanese.

Same thing happened to another friend who was of Italian descent when he went to Italy.

I had a friend in college whose parents were born in Japan. She was born in Fort Lee, NJ. Yet she scoffed at a classmate from Hawaii who claimed Japanese heritage, “She’s not really Japanese. She’s Hawaiian.”

 

[Annie]

Yes, you said that white people would find themselves a minority in their own countries.

 

[on_the_hill]

There’s an Irish stand-up comedian who jokes about Americans traveling to Ireland to find their roots. He set it up as if he’s talking to an American tourist, “Oh, the McGintys? Of course I know the McGintys! Sure! Tell ya what, buy me a drink and I’ll tell ya all about the McGintys!”

 

[Annie]

Yeah, there’s a lot of differentiation among various groups which we consider unitary: first, people of color, then Asians, etc. But among Asians (by which I mean people from Asia, not Pakistan), even among those from one nation in Asia will have different groups which are looked down on within the one nation, and between nations… lots of “tension.”

 

[Sarcelle]

Asians in the US almost always means Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

Of course Asia is a huge continent and is made up of countries other than the aforementioned three. There is no such thing as an Asian race.

However there is a lot of animosity between nations in Asia.

 

[JoeShlabotnik]

Is white a nationality?
I think the National Socialists in Germany preached that back during the 1930s.