I can eat sushi, pizza, samosas, kebab (kabobs, döner or shawarmas depending on your frame of reference), gyoza/pot stickers/tortellone/pasteczki (or whatever), noodles/ramen/spaghetti, knödeln/kroppkakor and so on and so on. Leaving lots of cultures unsaid.
I can enjoy music, cringy cultural movies (animated and not), fun cirque sessions (even without animals being endangered), go to festivals for various cultures, enjoin then in our cultures of scouting, mountaineering, hiking and share my love of enjoying nature.
I can drive electric cars, communicate on Internet forums, keep in touch with new friends as well as loved ones across the world.
I would be in a much poorer world without you all.
Agreed 100%. Unfortunately the people who need to read this are not on Lemmy.
I’ve seen a few anti-immigrant comments pop up around here that have been upvoted and they’ve made me pretty sad.
This thread makes my immigrant ass happy though so thank y’all.
No, I’m pretty racist and needed to read this. /s
Reminds me of this for some reason
I dunno, the left path looks far easier because it’s far less uphill
Completely agree! The concept of Culinary Diplomacy is actually practiced by a few countries around the world and is often implemented in partnership with emigrants from those nations. South Korea did this with their “Kimchi Diplomacy” back in 2009 and it was considered very successful. It is one of the reasons Korean food became so popular here in the U.S. around then. Culinary Diplomacy
I think the Chinese government also supported the Chinese restraunt industry similarly in the US
Never read about SK or China (just not familiar, not to say it doesn’t exist) doing this but Thailand went all in.
https://www.foodrepublic.com/1318428/how-gastrodiplomacy-brought-thai-food-world-stage/
Hollywood and the anime industry have done much the same - helping people around the world normalize the feeling of living in their home societies.
Looking back at the history of England. We have had wave after wave of immigrants/invaders. Each wave brought a period of tension. That period was followed by a period of innovation.
The new people, with new views means old ideas are re-evaluated. New skill, flavours and modes of thought became part of our culture.
Even our language improved. Part of English’s power is the level of nuance with word choice. A loft of that comes from melding multiple root languages in.
Obligatory Stewart Lee routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y38pbfJ4i_U
The world would be a lot poorer without the music genres that spawned from the USA and UK, too. And most of those were only possible because people from Africa were (forcefully) brought to the USA.
I don’t think that logically follows.
Music genres that came out of poor black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta could have just as easily come from middle class black manufacturing workers in Congo or Nigeria, if the continent had been integrated with the industrial west back in the 19th century rather than raided and plundered for 400 years.
Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah’s dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren’t cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.
The Peace Dividend reaped across the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West that gave us modern western music could have been collected anywhere.
There’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s). But true, maybe we could have gotten blues and jazz from a thriving, industrialized Congo, Nigeria etc.
Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah’s dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren’t cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.
They might have invented interesting musical genres that merge mainstream european music with their own more rhythm-focused music styles, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles early black music. Maybe one of them could have invented techno, but blues, jazz, soul, and blues-derived rock music as we know it? Very improbable. Music genres don’t spawn out of thin air.
there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)
Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.
They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.
Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.
If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.
Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.
But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.
Cool, I never made that claim. They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it and popularize it, that they went there as slaves is a different matter.
Cool, I never made that claim.
How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?
They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it
Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.
I did write that they came as slaves, but that’s not the necessary part. I’m starting to think that you just really want me to be racist, facts be damned.
Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.
Yeah, because american rock music already existed, and USA and UK have a long shared history. Inventing rock music without close personal proximity is much less likely, and inventing a style is one thing but popularizing it is quite another. It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.
you just really want me to be racist
I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.
It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.
Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.
The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.
Southern blues really were the catalyst that brought about rock and country music. There are some good clips of people playing rock solos in a jazz form. The chord progressions and phrases are the same, they’re just played with a different feel. There’s one guy on YT who’s short I’ve seen a lot of that does it fairly frequently. A bit clickbaity title like, “rock guitarist plays a jazz gig” and then he’ll solo something like slipknots psychosocial over a jazz backing. It’s pretty awesome.
I was gonna say this, but not specific to USA and UK. Other countries have thriving music cultures born of immigration we just don’t hear about. Nigeria, for example, had a progressive rock scene in the 70’s and it was kinda baller. Check out the Lijadu Sisters.
I’ve been listening to Creole music all morning as “research” for my next writing project.
Made me think about the volume of information we take in about other cultures through stories, art, music and food without ever opening a history book.
Edited for context and to clarify I don’t think slavery was a necessary evil. Because I have to do that now.
I included foreigners such as the US and UK too.
dont let the fascist whoresons read this, they will frame you mentally deranged and a danger to their homogeneous society
Fuck their homogenous society, its total lack of art, its dog shit food, and its boring everything. Plus its queerphobia and intellectual stasis. Stillness is death. They have guns; they can get that for themselves any time they like.
Plus I’m kind of autistic. People already look too much the same. If they stopped being different colors and sizes with different types of hair i would not be able to go outside.
Theirs is not a homogeneous society. They are demented and fragmented.
Some of those who burn crosses
Are the same that love kebab bossesI immigrated to the US when I was too young to make that decision myself. Now I’m immigrating to another country. I literally don’t know what it’s like to not be an immigrant, and I’m tired of receiving nothing but hate for it. At least my new city is more welcoming.
The problem is when immigrants from countries with lower labour standards and poorer conditions are effectively used as “scabs”, to suppress wage growth and unionization. And I fear the capitalists who benefit from this are pushing the “you just hate immigrants” narrative to protect it.
And how do you propose the solution?
I would stop normalizing the theory that immigrants are here only to do badly paid jobs.
I’ve hear too many times “without immigrants who would work in insert miserable badly paid job?”.
Immigrants are not here to do the most miserable jobs without getting properly paid for it.
I think progressive forces should stop with that discourse. I find it a little dehumanizing. If you don’t want to do that shitty job I don’t know why anyone would think that a person, only because they are an immigrant, want to do it for you.
You make a good point.
Lobby the government to stop doing that. In the meantime, teach them their rights, how to unionize, help them with food security and finding a place to live, so that they aren’t in such a precarious position that makes exploitation so profitable.
I would say make sure people have a clear way of becoming legal immigrants. If they are legal, make sure the labor laws are enforced. So no paying under minimum wage, make sure the workplace is a safe place, etc.
America would be a boring ass country if it was just white America. I have been saying this
It wouldn’t even be white America. Europeans are all immigrants
Fascism always promotes blandness and boredom. When the dust of chaos settles, that’s all that is left.
Never forget, the rest of the world is on the internet too. As I am. Not American. ❤️
My apologies 😘
Thank you… uh… please leave those sharks alone…
Besides all of that valid stuff, immigration is the only reason the US doesn’t have slowing/declining population numbers like many developed countries now have.
The irony is most Americans are descendants of immigrants.
“You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
What a godless country.
Immigrants make a country great. One of the reasons why I’m happy about the increased immigration in the USA, and why I’m sad about the decreased immigration in Canada.
100% agree. The biggest overlooked benefit of immigrant culture is the mirror it offers us on our own practices and beliefs. When seeing what others do it gives us the chance to reaffirm that our actions are correct, or even more important, modify our actions for the better by adopting their view on something. We get to cherry pick the best parts of cultures around the world and discard bad practices that are perhaps “traditional” because we see our immigrants have a better approach. In the end of either we get the chance to be the best versions of ourselves with constant exposure to new ideas and ways of doing things.
You can have culinary trends without migrants. Like sushi, the best sushi IMO is still the authentic sushi. Its neat I can get it in my vicinity though.
Street food fusion is a whole other level though. With that you couldn’t be more right. Craving late night street snacks now
The only reason there is to love American culture is the blending of different immigrant cultures.
