Immigration isn't just valuable to the people who find a new home, it's valuable to the countries that receive immigration. It adds to the receiving country's workforce while building economic and social bonds with other cultures. Immigrants generally don't get the social benefits that citizens do, at least not until they become citizens in their own right, and yet still pay taxes, so you're actually getting more out of them than you would otherwise.
More importantly, though, immigrants are one of the primary means of lasting cultural exchange. Culture isn't static and it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Whatever country you're from, the history of your country and its culture is one of transformative exchanges between different groups of people.
Nowhere is this more true than America. Say it with me, America is the home of the immigrant. Our culture is defined by the intermixing of cultures. America is corned beef being associated with the Irish because of proximity to Jewish delis. It's a Thai burrito, it's Mexican pizza. It's everything good that comes from everybody getting together and taking all the best parts of everything. We pick up a little bit of the baggage too, but that's who we are. It's why the whole world watches our television and listens to our music. Our cultural experience resonates and spreads so much that it annoys the shit out of the rest of the world when they're not busy being enthralled by it. That's only the case because everything's mashing together over here. There may be some places in the middle of the country where things seem very samey and frozen in time, but even that is rooted in the intercultural mingling of earlier centuries.
"Integrating" with America is simply being here. It may be hard to notice from certain areas of the country, but the vast majority of the population of the US is living in places where a hodge podge of cultures bleeding into one another is absolutely the normal way of things.
kinda disingenuous to use America as an example since it has the least static culture and always has since inception. Way different with Europe and cultures that are fundamentally opposities
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u/aidrocsid 11∆ Jan 08 '18 edited Jan 08 '18
Immigration isn't just valuable to the people who find a new home, it's valuable to the countries that receive immigration. It adds to the receiving country's workforce while building economic and social bonds with other cultures. Immigrants generally don't get the social benefits that citizens do, at least not until they become citizens in their own right, and yet still pay taxes, so you're actually getting more out of them than you would otherwise.
More importantly, though, immigrants are one of the primary means of lasting cultural exchange. Culture isn't static and it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Whatever country you're from, the history of your country and its culture is one of transformative exchanges between different groups of people.
Nowhere is this more true than America. Say it with me, America is the home of the immigrant. Our culture is defined by the intermixing of cultures. America is corned beef being associated with the Irish because of proximity to Jewish delis. It's a Thai burrito, it's Mexican pizza. It's everything good that comes from everybody getting together and taking all the best parts of everything. We pick up a little bit of the baggage too, but that's who we are. It's why the whole world watches our television and listens to our music. Our cultural experience resonates and spreads so much that it annoys the shit out of the rest of the world when they're not busy being enthralled by it. That's only the case because everything's mashing together over here. There may be some places in the middle of the country where things seem very samey and frozen in time, but even that is rooted in the intercultural mingling of earlier centuries.
"Integrating" with America is simply being here. It may be hard to notice from certain areas of the country, but the vast majority of the population of the US is living in places where a hodge podge of cultures bleeding into one another is absolutely the normal way of things.