atavistic hatred. insults and degradations...

Peter Burnett writes:

...Perhaps it is best not to get too hung up on words like multiculturalism and assimilation and focus instead on the hard daily realities of the immigrant experience. The world's three most successful immigrant societies–The United States, Australia and Canada-- preach different ideals but arrive pretty much at the same place in the end. Americans hold fast to the ideal of the melting pot and unquestioned fidelity to the constitution, yet are extremely tolerant and even encouraging of cultural and religious retention. For decades, Canada and Australia have pursued official multiculturalist policies that read right from the tranzi playbook, yet there is little separation of cultures and communities beyond the first generation. Both invest huge resources in what is really assimilation by another name and, when tempted by a wacky or even dangerous political correctness, are often set right by their immigrants themselves.

In Europe, not even the rigorous enforcement of a sterile and uncompromising anti-cultural secularism based upon abstract notions of universal brotherhood and equality has tempered their atavistic hatred and distancing of the other. Behind all the officialese lie thousands of daily insults and degradations that would make even the most nativist North American squirm. Recently in Greece, Albanian immigrants were (officially) denied tickets to a Greece-Albania soccer match for “security reasons”. In France and Belgium, African immigrants are often spoken to publically like wayward servants and nobody protests. A fourth generation Turkish-German is still a Turk and who can imagine a modern American presidential election being fought over the menace to the nation posed by Polish plumbers?....

The United States, Australia and Canada...the Anglosphere again. And contrast French problems with this story:

workpermit.com:...Despite fears across Europe that low-cost workers would steal jobs, multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers with hardly a ripple. Unemployment is still low at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace. Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the European Union last year.

Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected. Still, the government says it has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.

"They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future."

Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new European Union members.

With nearly full employment, Ireland's booming economy still needs workers, and immigration is encouraged. More than 128,000 East Europeans from the new European Union member states registered to work in Ireland from May 2004 to August 2005....