Integrating foreigners

Into the local dot matrix. Yes, we just watched Tron, the old movie with Tom Cruise and the young Dudowski for the very first time.

It was a blast, especially the dot matrix printer. The one totally forgotten item in the stylish, laser transmattering world of the film.

They can beam you into and out of microchip assemblies, but the printer goes dotdot and hits some of the highest sound frequencies your ear can process.

We decided that makes a great image for the integration of migrants into any one of our beloved Western societies - all the glitz but a few things sticking out like a sore thumb.

The other option would have been a shrill "fucking double standards everywhere". The Tron imagery was only used to ease you into the post, and now we will we hit you with the double standards. Deal?

We have posted some immigration barbs in posts like "Too many blacks" and one of the all time audience favorites, "You are not welcome" sign. 

These posts did not dwell on the expectations toward the foreigners, on their role in society. The posts basically dealt with "keep them out" and "get rid of them" centuries ago and today.

Let's say they are here to stay, what do we want before we make them take a citizen's exam?

They need to obey the law like everybody else
Behaving like the natives would involve that a certain number of them do bad things, violate the law. Some do, and are kicked out of the country for it. So, like everybody else, not true. Immigrants have to be better than the natives at obeying the law.
Turns out, as a US study showed, they actually do better. 

They have the same freedoms as the natives
Legal residents in the U.S. have to tell the immigration folks when they move homes - citizens are free to pack up and split without telling Uncle Sam. For a few years now, U.S. legal residents get fingerprinted like tourists every time they enter the country. Or in Germany, a couple of months ago, a Russian citizen studying in the country was kicked off a train by police because she could not show an ID with a German address. None of the officers seemed to be aware that a German address is not typically found in a foreign passport. In France, if you are a Roma (aka. gypsy) you may find your camp surrounded by barbed wire one balmy French morning.

They need to learn the language
Germany's highest court held that learning German as an immigrant is important to society as a whole. Kind of nice that I am all of a sudden really important. I don't want to be important. And the old lady of 60 ordered by the court to learn German after 30 years in the country, is she not the perfect example that you can live a decent, law abiding, German-speaking-child raising life here without speaking the language?
Imagine for a moment the outcry in K-land if they had to translate voting documents and ballots like some jurisdictions stateside.

If you have watched enough movies, the next paragraph will be familiar.
Doesn't anybody realize at least one distinct advantage of not speaking the language? If you get stopped by a puffy pasty peace officer and can quietly tell him in a foreign language he is a cocksucking motherfucking son of a bitch without him understanding it -- doesn't that save you from prison and deportation? And, having let off steam, you can then forget their profiling and go about being a law-abiding foreigner again. Plus, not speaking the language as well as the locals can get you lots of great sex (as we mentioned in a more generic post). Which may well be a sub-conscious Freudian reason for the locals to keep your numbers down.
We will personally check the train platforms around Southall, UK, for signs of bilingual activity in the near future.

They need to learn about the culture
TheEditor of the K-Landnews took a grand total of five online citizenship tests as described in an earlier post. If you remove some of the little factoids, these tests are really almost identical. So, the nature of the test questions - once again - tells us more about the people who devised them than about those who sit the exams.
Sorry, guys, as much as I enjoy Beethoven, around 99% of native Germans function very well without any reference to Beethoven in their lives. Oh, don't get me started about composer Richard Wagner. His sole redeeming quality is that he wrote the music for the intro scene of Apocalypse Now a few decades before the movie was made. If you asked me (which ain't gonna happen), I can name you some aspects of culture in any of these five countries that I would prefer foreigners not to study.


Illegal immigrants have it much worse, no doubt, but we do hear about some of their horrible woes.
Why are legal residents in many countries truly second class citizens?

Because they haven't yet "made it"? Because we are complicit in it so as not to jeopardize our beliefs that we are equal before the law?

Anthropologists and psychologists, of course, would come up with some cool sounding verbiage about non-human mammals and group behavior, again, a little too close for comfort.

One more thing:
Leave the first generation alone. They have enough of adapting to do, finding work, raising a family. Help their children, and it'll be fine.

Another pompous post brought to you under the influence of way too much of the cheapest coffee from the local discount grocery.

[Update 16 August 2013] A higher administrative court let the grandmother off the hook, reports the German press today. She will not be required to go to German class. Cool. 

[Update 1/26/2016] Known from the U.S., the real problems tend to arise with the second generation, the children. This article in Der Spiegel from 2005 describes the situation of Russian Germans in the northern town of Cloppenburg, where a quarter of the population is from Russia.