Angela,
I agree Europeans are more racist than white Americans, I allready told you that.
But immigration into Europe is a mess because there is no realistic European immigration policy.
I told you before how hard it is for someone with the proper education and skills to immigrate into Europe and how easy it is to get into Europe as 'refugee' without papers and with a phony story. I think in America this is impossible.
We need some European politicians with some spine.
Some spine to go against the Unions who overprotect the European employees with all kind of complicated rules which makes it very dificult to hire someone from outside the EU, and as you say yourself they even try to obstruct people from other countries within the EU. It is the overprotection of employees and even of jobless people which makes Europeans much less mobile than Americans. There are still a lot of political parties in the EU with ties to certain Unions. Work regulations in Europe have to become much simpler.
Some spine to go against the political correct groups who want to believe all those so-called 'refugees' and to accept them all without any selection or condition.
Sometimes I think it is more the ambition of Angela Merkel to win the peace Noble price instead of governing Germany and Europe in the appropriate way.
As long as that don't change, immigration into Europe is bound to fail.
And I also told you, the more immigration fails, the more racist Europeans will become.
By the way, I object your critics that not enough is done in Europe to invest in immigrants.
It doesn't lack them opportunities to get extra schooling.
But the first thing is to learn the language.
And there are a lot of low educated and even illiterates. You can't make doctors of them. They need the right attitude to make themselves usefull. But many come with to high expectations, partly because of the stories told by human trafickers.
We agree as to the relative degrees of racism.
America also has no realistic immigration policy, and that includes its policies toward refugees. The major difference is the source of the immigration. We're not right next door to the Middle East; we're right next door to Latin America. Our floods of immigrants come from there. High percentages of them do indeed come with no skills other than in farm work even if many are marginally literate. Since they enter illegally, they are not screened for disease; we have had upticks in tuberculosis and other communicable diseases as a result. There is no screening for past criminal activity, so they import their criminal gangs, Mexican, a lot of them, or the Central American gangs like MS-13. So, along with women and children we get cartel members who import drugs and guns.
Unlike immigrants from Europe, Italians, Poles, etc., they do resist learning English, and whole bilingual education programs have been set up for them. You know what my bilingual education program was? The nun told a neighbor of ours to tell my mother not to worry about the fact that instruction was in English and not a single person there spoke Italian, and in under a year I'd be speaking English. It was sort of the drop the kid in the lake and eventually he'll learn to swim method. I'm pretty good at languages so it took a lot less than a year, but it was scary at first and alienating. Do I recommend that approach? No, I don't, but these bilingual education programs aren't set up to wean the kids into English classes as soon as possible. They're not helping them. If you want to get a good job, you have to learn English
fast.
A lot of them do indeed go on welfare and cost the U.S. incredible amounts of money spent on social services. I could post study after study here but nobody really seems to read them. Trust me, despite what Democrats try to sell, when you count everything, even if they were all legalized and therefore paid taxes, the net net is that they cost more than they contribute. That may not be the case for their grandchildren, but it's the case now, largely because they're not able to command high paying jobs. The result is that even if they're working, many of them can't make it on their take home pay, and so they qualify for food stamps, and housing assistance, and on and on. Don't get me wrong, a lot of them are really hardworking people. Many if not most of them are not sitting in their public housing smoking dope all day like some "native" Americans, white and black. The women walking into my neighborhood from the bus stop to do housework or childcare or eldercare, the gardeners etc. are often illegal immigrants from Latin America. So are day laborers who do a lot of the less skilled construction work.
Even this is a complicated issue, however. White Americans have a very low birthrate, although not as low as that of Europe. Italians are a freaking endangered species, something that drives me bonkers. Who is going to take these jobs? It's work that needs to be done, after all, although I supposed you could say people should just take care of their own old people, and children, and mow their own lawns, as they used to do when I was growing up. There are other areas, though where that kind of do it yourself won't work. All agricultural labor can't be mechanized. Who is going to do that work?
Also, money has to go into the system not just in terms of income taxes, but also in social security taxes, to pay for the huge bulk of baby boomers who are going to flood the system and drain social security coffers, and through free health care through Medicare.
There's the whole issue of skilled blue collar and lower middle class white collar work to address. I've read all the papers, and it's incontrovertible to me that this flood of immigration is depressing the wages of "white" Americans in these fields. There aren't enough of those jobs to go around anymore. It used to be that a high school graduate or even someone who didn't finish high school could support his family decently by working in the car industry in Detroit, or the coal mines of Tennessee, or as a bricklayer or a carpenter. Now many of the factories have shut, not only because they were mismanaged, but because in a global economy our factories can't compete with factories in Asia that pay their people slave wages. The Democrats have declared war on the coal industry, so there goes that. They closed down the oil pipeline, and on and on. For the few jobs that remain, why pay a union worker a decent wage when some illegal immigrant from Mexico will work for half that. These people are not taking jobs from the children of people like Michael Bloomberg. They're taking jobs from working class Americans, and they're justifiably angry. I'm sick to death of this, well, we feel your pain, but you're just going to have to retrain for something else. As with your example from Europe, a lot of these people, the salt of the earth in many ways, don't have the intellectual capacity to become computer programmers, and it's dishonest and shows a lack of real compassion to pretend that this is any kind of solution.
Less academically capable "native" Americans are being hit by a double whammy of mechanization and immigration. That's part of what's fueling Trump's rise.
As to how refugees are handled, it's a mess here too. I've said that I've volunteered with Catholic Charities to help Christian refugees from the Middle East. I used to do a bit with Central American refugees as well, but no more. In the beginning there were actual refugees among them, but soon it was crystal clear to me that many of them were actually economic refugees, and we can't take in all of Latin America. I feel for them, believe me, very nice people a lot of them, and I have no "racial" problem with them immigrating here; it's just that we can't absorb them all.
The only difference that I can see between the situation in Europe and that in the U.S. is that luckily this uncontrolled stream of immigrants in the U.S. is not composed of people who come from a part of the world that hates our way of life, hates Christianity, or wants to bring down our government. I may not like the Mexican flags that get waved around, or the ones that say give back Texas, but it's a very different situation.
As to unions and work rules in Europe, don't even get me started. The fact that teachers are unionized in the U.S. is one of the reasons that our education system is going down hill. There is no accountability. A lousy teacher stays as well as the good teachers. That's one of the reasons that inner city black and Hispanic kids flood the Catholic schools. There's none of that ****there; plus, they maintain discipline. No teachers getting beaten up in the halls, no sex in the school bathrooms, none of it. Unions were meant to make sure that people got a living wage, that health and safety standards were maintained, it shouldn't be about ensuring that incompetent people keep their jobs, but that's what it's become. At one point I had the romantic notion that I would start a company in my ancestral area, which is still rural and not as prosperous as the more urban areas around it. As soon as my husband read the employment regulations (who was going to capitalize it), he was like, forget it. I'm out of here. Well, the language was more colorful than that.
I've been part of a family owned business. We've paid more than competitive wages, provided health care etc., but if you're late or just barely on time in the morning, and the first out at night, you talk on the phone for personal matters, you don't take customer service seriously, and that includes letting the phone ring more than three times before picking it up, or you work sloppily and inefficiently, you're out so fast that your leaving creates a windstorm. (I do have to admit that the "You're fired" atmosphere was not created by me. I'm too soft for it, but I acknowledge that's what's needed to create a successful business.)
