Abridged and paraphrased conversation I had recently:
“Where are you from?”
“New Zealand”
“What are you doing here?”
“Working”
“You’re lucky to find work these days, with all the immigrants coming in.”
“…”
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Was the person being sarcastic, or clueless? Not sure which is worse, just curious.
Those toe-headed youngsters eventually become productive members of society.
(I have no idea why he has toothpaste and mouthwash.)
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The asininity of that being the sole method of certification is breathtakingly wasteful. There’s absolutely no reason why any university couldn’t have tested either gentleman on their training. Certainly a substantial fee for a comprehensive exam process would be understandable, but as long as higher ed operates as a profit maximizing business with no room for alternative certification tracks, it will work at odds to both its clientele (students) and the societies that subsidize those institutions with loans, land and other institutional privileges.
Mind you I think the university system has been a boon too education the world over. And I assume that, as with physics, engineering needs gatekeepers to filter the crackpots. But the hidebound inflexibility of the one-size-fits-all educational track is sheer waste and a betrayal of the societies that made the system possible. Even just in economic terms, never mind the human cost, it throws away colossal amounts of skilled productivity and erodes the competitive edge of the society it purports to serve.
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For my country more than half of immigrants are low-skilled (no secondary education), roughly 25% are medium-educated (a high school education) and only 20% are high-educated.
No, that’s not what I argue. What I said is that most of them are low skilled and unwanted. Most countries are trying to attract highly-educated people, so those who come won’t be perceived as economic migrants even when they technically fit the description.
Many kids are starving and out on the streets. Why don’t you let them live in your house? After all the fact that your kids live in your house is only an accident of birth. In fact why are you still living there taking up valuable space that could be used to house starving children you heartless piece of filth ?
I think everybody would agree that if we lived in some kind of utopia of course we would want everyone taken care of. The fact remains that in the real world the social security systems as set up in western Europe couldn’t handle having to take care of everyone who “by accident of birth” wasn’t actually from there, seeing as they outnumber us by a very large number.
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The toothpaste and mouthwash belong to his partner.
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Clueless. Or more like… he had a speech mentally prepared, and he wasn’t going to let the present reality get in the way of it. When I realised he was about to have a go at immigrants I helpfully supplied that a lot of families will save for years to send a child here, where the wages are good and he can send most of what he earns back home. Trying to be a bit insightful or compassionate maybe. Him? Oh yeah exactly, and they have two kids just so they can claim government benefits etc. etc…
The guy was an independent contractor who’d been paid by the city council to install a fire alarm. Exactly the sort of trade that a lot of immigrants will get into, because self-employment can be the only decent option when your language skills aren’t up to scratch yet. So yeah, there’s a class of immigrant that fuck directly with the guy’s livelihood, and I didn’t fit into that class, and so in his mind I didn’t count. It didn’t seem right for me to press the point.
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I wonder if he was being clueless; or being imprecise in speaking? It’s certainly not news that good, old-fashioned, xenophobia is an important part of the decision-making process on immigration matters; but it’s also not news that having your economic interests threatened(or enhanced by) a given flavor of immigrant is a very, very, solid way to change someone’s opinion about whether or not to let them in(quite possibly not whether or not they want to live next to them, or send their children to the same school; but at very least on the level of whether or not to turn them away at the border and/or deport them as necessary).
It doesn’t fit the word’s accepted definition; but informally there does seem to be a tendency to use ‘immigrant’ when talking about people perceived to be either a threat to one’s own livelihood or a drain on state resources, and people deemed unlikely to return to their place of origin or move elsehwere; while ‘expat’ covers the ones not deemed to be an economic nuisance and/or much more likely to be staying for a modest amount of time and then moving on.
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A friend of mine gets to have uncomfortable conversations all the time because she is as pale as milk, speaks perfect unaccented English, and yet is originally from Ecuador. So so so many white people let their racist masks slip when they think they’re among fellow whiteys.
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@fuzzyfungus Yeah, that all sounds about right. “Clueless” only in the sense that I think he missed the irony of saying these things to me. That’s why I say it didn’t feel right to press him, I can offer arguments about the broad economic benefits of immigrants but I think deep down his grievances were personal and specific and not something I’ve had to deal with myself.
@Missy_Pants Totally, all the time. I’m still not really sure how to respond. Once had a Chinese friend of mine ask me pretty much out of nowhere, do you like black people? Well, I said, not all of them.
I still think about that a lot.
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… thats just… what?
I would also think about that all the time too. O_o
Did your friend ever explain?
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You realize skill and education aren’t the same thing, right? My plumber never went to college but he’s pretty skilled. The same goes with my mechanic.
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The proper response there is to go all W.C. Fields and reply “when properly cooked”.
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Not sure what European country it is where all these “unwanted” unskilled economic migrants are flooding in, but I am puzzled by your use of the word unwanted.
In my experience travelling in Europe the norm seems to be that pretty much every retail job, every hospitality job is manned / womanned by an migrant whose country of origin has a lower standard of living than the country they are working in. These are tough jobs, which make huge demands on your private life, and someone has got to do it and I can assure you that in most instances the locals don’t want to.
Let me illustrated. You can pretty much guarantee that any hotel / restaurant in Switzerland has a largely Italian workforce (admittedly this is the top of the food chain) in turn pretty much every hotel / restaurant in Italy that has anyone working in it besides Nonna will likely have Romanian / Albanian staff. Every shop (and these were nice shops) I entered in Germany / Austria this October had Spanish / Italian more seldom Easter European staff and it goes on and on. In Munich and Berlin the majority of shop assistant and cafe staff are not German (going by the way they speak).
This is what freedom of movement means. And it is a bloody good thing. What is less cool is implying that these people, doing jobs the locals don’t want to do, especially not for the conditions offered, are somehow unwanted.
Or are you referring to unskilled, unwanted migrants from outside the EU working in your ominous country? Because they are really doing the dirty work. And it is pretty safe to assume that unless there is a significant, revolutionary shift in how resources are allocated in Europe, taking away from the 1% and spreading it all more widely, your, my, everyone’s living standard in Europe would drop significantly because somehow we would have to pay for all those highly skilled rubbish collectors…
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The difference being that Ned did so at a time without quotas and a claim of some different sense of urgency - at present, whole towns worth of people “must” be moved in a matter of weeks. These people may be refugees, but many of them are also out of immediate danger. The distinction of economic migrant vs “real migrant” very much matters today. The presumption of a “new urgency” is simply false, and based on an unspoken lie: that there is some imminent danger to these people who are already living in improvised conditions. Improvised conditions here won’t be significantly better.
I don’t have any problem with the people under discussion at a high level, based on absurd stereotypes. I have a problem with the false sense of urgency coming from the government and press when, in fact, it’s the same problem as always (even if it’s bad), and I have a problem with the failure to prioritize our own problems effectively first. As long as we have food banks in Canada - which we didn’t have or need in the first part of the 20th century - we should not be promoting immigration, let alone rushing it. Context very much matters here.
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Seriously, if you were not mistaken, then that is not typical at all.
I spent two weeks in Germany and every shop / cafe I entered in Munich or Berlin (unless solely manned by the proprietor) was staffed by non native speakers. The change really struck me, because it is so different from how it was 15 years ago, when I lived in Berlin. The change is remarkable, and not necessarily a bad thing. Not so sure about Austria as I only spent few hours there.
I can’t speak for those two cities and they have a relatively high proportion of foreigners, but that is definitely not a general German thing.
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The OECD itself uses the terms interchangeably and acknowledges the confusion.
“The definition of “low-skilled” can be based either on the skills required for the job performed, or according to the educational level of the worker. In other words, “low- skilled” can be either a characteristic of the job or a characteristic of the worker.
[…]the low-skilled are considered to be those whose educational level is less than upper secondary. By definition, trades people and artisans with upper secondary education or with higher vocational training are excluded from the low-educated group.”
You’ll forgive if I don’t believe those 50% low-educated immigrants are all amazing craftsmen. Not without some evidence on your part.
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