Ch. 11: Immigration and Acculturation

“A way of life. A set of social practices. A system of shared beliefs. A shared history or set of experiences. A culture may be synonymous with a country, or a religion, or a nationality, or it may cross several countries or regions. A culture may be synonymous with a religion, though followers of Christianity or Judaism or Islam may also come from different cultures. It is highly possible to belong to or identify oneself with more than one culture.” - Chris Rose, British Council
“I believe in America.” - Amerigo Bonasera, The Godfather

First of all, I used to use this in the beginning of the semester. When we were doing the “defining culture” thing. But I think it’s as useful as … here. This is from this guy Chris Rose, who’s from the British Council, and when he was defining culture he said OK, “Culture is a way of life. A set of practices…” - and I guess he means social practices - “a system of shared beliefs. A shared history or set of experiences. A culture may be synonymous with a country, or a religion, or a nationality, or it may cross several countries or regions. A culture may be synonymous with a religion, though followers of Christianity or Judaism or Islam may also come from different cultures. It is highly possible to belong to or identify oneself with more than one culture.”
Now, I don’t know if you remember the article I sent, the Macron thing where he talked about secularism - I can’t pronounce it but “Laicitie” - versus multiculturalism? I know how to read it, I just don’t know how to say it. Anyway, the debate - WITHIN France, alright? - Anyway, the debate. I don’t know if you read the article or not, but it seemed like Macron was kind of saying “Well, France is fine as a secular state, and the increased emphasis on multiculturalism is an outside and mostly negative influence mostly from… mostly an American influence and mostly through American media.”

I understand why he says that, and I understand why from his position that is what he wants the narrative to be. At the same time, I don’t think that it’s really the fault of the New York Times so much as it is an evolution of the way that people are - people in France are looking at French culture. You know what I mean? I mean, and I don’t know if I said this before with you guys, but it seems to me that younger people are - and Europe and in France especially - are interested in this idea of multiculturalism. And there’s something in it that speaks to them. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but what I am saying is that it’s a domestic thing. And in England it’s the same thing, in England there’s this strong sense of multiculturalism but there’s a lot of pushback against it.

Chris Rose, right here. “It is highly possible to belong to or identify with more than one culture…” More than one, multi. Culture. So the idea that you can be more than one thing at the same time. Right? So there you go. And that’s what we’re going to talk about a bit today.
But first, let me get some terminology out of the way. And I’m kind of assuming you guys know all this stuff already, but just, you know… so that when you take your test.

The idea of “Culture Shock”. Some of you guys have already written about culture shock - maybe not in this group but in some group and, you know, the stages of culture shock. Which, uh… You know, the first stage is the “Honeymoon Stage”, which is when everything is just amazing. It’s just like everything is just amazing, and you’re amazing because you’re in it. My American students go through this all the time, because they don’t really ever leave America until they’re - you know, if they’re really lucky - 19 or 20 years old. I mean, unless you have money in America, you pretty much just stay in America when you’re growing up. And so when you first go to Europe, you’ve seen it on TV and you’re like “Oh, my God! It’s real! This is amazing and the food is amazing and everybody is so goddamn sophisticated and…”

I dunno, do you have Lidl and Aldi in France? You must, right? Yeah, OK. So my wife’s cousins are from Chicago, and they had never come to Europe. Right? And they had this really romantic idea of what Europe was, because they’d only ever seen it in … it’s like that “Emily in Paris” thing that we talked about. That’s Europe, right? Accordions all over the place. And people in striped shirts and everybody’s smoking Galuise and having lots of complicated affairs and being sophisticated and drinking wine and all this sort of stuff. And then they came over and we’re walking around and we’re walking around Dublin and NO accordions and we’re walking around and my wife’s cousins are still trying to hold onto the dream, you know? A couple of junkies fighting over a sandwich, a seagull breaking into a car, but it’s EUROPE, right? And they’re going “Oh, my God! I can’t believe I’m in Europe!” And Europe and Europe and… And we pass an Aldi, and the security guy is throwing this drunk guy out of it and the guy smashed directly into the cousin. And I said “Well, the good news is you’re in Europe. But the bad news is this is Europe.” I mean, Aldi is Europe, right? Aldi is as European as the Eiffel Tower. As European as Polish security guys throwing drunks out of Aldi. It ain’t all “Emily in Paris”, I guess is what I’m saying. And New York isn’t all “Sex in the City”. And I mean on some level you already KNOW that, but man what a disappointment all the same.

And so the first stage is like the “Honeymoon Stage” and the second stage is the opposite. The second stage is like “GodDAMN it, can’t these fuckers get anything right? Why is their electricity so difficult and weak? Why is the plumbing so old? Why are the showers so cold? Why don’t they have any bread?” You know? All that sort of stuff. It’s the flip-side.

I have a friend, and he’s from Chicago but he lives in Ireland, and when he was nineteen - and I think this goes from stage one directly to stage two - when he was nineteen he and his best friend, this other guy from Chicago, decided that when they graduated from High School they were going to spend the summer in Europe. They were going to buy some backpacks and they were going to save some money and they were going to go to Europe and they were just going to travel around. And then they were going to go back to Chicago. And so they’re saving up their money and they’re talking about how great it’s going to be and - “this is going to be great, this is going to be great” - and so he and his friend get on the airplane in Chicago and they fly across the ocean and they get off the plane in Barcelona. Right? And so “OK, here we are! We’re in Barcelona, and….” and they get out of the airport and they walk around Barcelona for, like, twelve hours. And at the end of the twelve hours, the guy - the best friend - says “OK, great. I’m going back to Chicago. You can come with me or you can stay here or whatever, but I’m leaving”. And my buddy goes “Yeah, but we’ve been here for twelve hours.” and his friend goes “Yeah, I’ve seen what I want to see. I’m done. I don’t want to be here.” And the guy literally got back on the plane that night and flew back to Chicago. He was so overwhelmed, I guess, or it somehow so deeply messed with how he defined himself when everything around him was so completely out of his control … whatever. I think this guy went through every stage of culture shock in twelve hours. And then got back on the plane. So I guess that’s a massive stage of stage two.

Stage Three is kind of the reintegration, where you kind of reconcile yourself to… “Yeah, alright. I mean, the plumbing’s not great and the - there are some things that are better about this culture and there are some things that are better about that culture, but I’ll survive.” It’s not entirely unlike the stages of death, you know? What is it? The first one’s denial, then anger, then bargaining, then acceptance, then… I think Stage Three is basically “acceptance”.  And then Stage Four, “Gradual Autonomy” - I guess really THIS is “acceptance”. Where you stop thinking about it. Right? Where it just kind of becomes “Right, OK. I know what to do.”

And then “bi-culturalism” is that really obnoxious stage (well, obnoxious for everybody else) where your friends visit you from France and you’re in New York, or your friends visit you from New York and you’re in France, and you say shit like “Oh, you know, sometimes I forget that I’m French at all! I just feel so New York!” And everybody hates you. As they should. But “bi-culturalism” is just when you are equally at home in two cultures.

Which I used to be, right? I mean, until I was 31 or so I grew up in New York and then … I mean, I was 31 before I moved to Ireland. And so it took a while. And then I got to be comfortable in both, kind of. I mean, I have two passports, I have two citizenships. I know my way around Dublin like I know my way around Manhattan. All that sort of stuff. And THEN - because I’ve been here in Dublin for twenty-one years now, now when I go back to New York it’s this kind of reverse culture shock. Which is kind of interesting. I mean, I don’t think you guys are old enough to have had this experience yet, but sometimes when you leave the place that you are “from” - for a long time - and you go back, it’s really weird. Because some of it’s really familiar. Some of it’s like it hasn’t changed since you left. But mostly, it has. And on some level you kind of expect everything to freeze when you leave and then just start again when you come back. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie “The Truman Show”? With Jim Carrey? Where everybody else is acting around him? And they’re waiting for him to come back into the room so they can resume doing the thing they were doing when he left? It’s kind of you expect it to be like that, but it’s really not. And then, you have to redefine yourself… You’ve said “OK, I define myself as somebody from this culture. Now that this culture has moved on without me, who am I? Who am I in relation to everything I’ve been defining myself by?”

A few more terminology things. The idea of a “third culture” kid, which is a… which is a result of globalization, and usually it’s the children of diplomats or the children of businessmen or businesswomen. Or the children of people in the military. I’ve got a friend named Dave who grew up in this small little American suburb on an air force base in Germany. You know, everything OUTSIDE the wire was Germany, but inside the wire it was as American as St. Charles, Illinois. But, you know… you’re an American kid but you grow up in Paris, or you are a French kid who’s growing up in New York. And it’s not like an immigrant family, right? Where you’ve cut off your original… where your family has left China to go to France. You’ve still got a house in Paris, but work is bringing you to New York for a long period of time. So you kind of adapt to the idea that you don’t have one central and defining cultural identity. I think that places you firmly in the category of “global elite”. You’re kind of fluid in a bunch of different identities.

And I’m sure that you guys…  I mean, in a place like Paris or New York, or London, you’ll come across this a lot. And the interesting thing is… I don’t know if you remember when I talked about “folk culture versus elite culture”? The Clement Greenberg thing when we talked about non-verbal communication? And I said that folk culture was the, you know, it wasn’t a literate culture but it was rooted in farming and it was rooted in the land. It was defined by place, right? And then there was the elite culture that was in the cities? Do you remember this? Well, what’s interesting to me is that if you grow up in London, and your family’s got some money and some education, you have more in common with a kid who grew up in Paris or a kid that grew up in New York than you might with other people in England. If you grew up in Paris, you have more in common with people who grew up in New York or people who grew up in… wherever, than you do with people who grew up in France generally. Because there is this kind of urban global culture that isn’t connected to the land. And increasingly, I think a lot of people are living in THAT situation, right? I mean, we’ve essentially shifted from agricultural to urban animals.
I mean, my kids are a little bit different, because they were born and raised in Ireland, and their mother is Irish, but at the same time I’m an American, and I hang onto a lot of American culture, so when they go to America they’re not exactly foreign, in a way. If you know what I mean.
OK, a couple of more things, in terms of terminology to get out of the way. Categories of acculturation. Cultural adaptation. These are not stages, exactly. These are different categories. And again, there are degrees to all of them.

The first one is marginalization, which is probably the most traumatic of the categories. Marginalization is when you have left your home culture, or your cultural identity, but you don’t adapt to a new one for whatever reason. So you leave a place, you go to another place, but you don’t establish any connection or plant any roots there. So you don’t really belong anywhere. What was that movie, that… There was this kind of dumb Tom Hanks movie where he lived in an airport for five years? Do you remember this movie at all? He was from a country, and he wanted to go to New York… yeah, “The Terminal”, right … where he didn’t really have a home. Right? Because he had left his home, and while he was in the air that country had a revolution, and so he couldn’t go back there, but he also couldn’t leave the airport and go into New York either, so he was just sort of stuck in this … the word “liminal”, I don’t know if you know the word “liminal” but it essentially means stuck in a place between places that isn’t really a place itself. And that’s marginalization. And it can really…

The person that I knew who was most like that was a guy from Belfast, in Northern Ireland, who had to leave Northern Ireland because his family was involved - deeply involved - in a lot of very bad Northern Irishy things, so he moved to New York but he never adapted to New York. But he also couldn’t go back to Northern Ireland without getting shot. And so he was just sort of lost.
The other way it can happen is like in the Tom Hanks movie, where the country itself is gone. Right? There’s a war, there’s a revolution. Whatever. And all of a sudden it’s like “well, who am I now? Where am I from if that place doesn’t exist?” So that’s the first one.

And then you have separation and segregation. You’ll find this a lot in immigrant communities. In New York I used to see a lot of Irish guys doing this, this idea of “OK, you left Ireland and you moved to New York, but you moved to a neighborhood where everybody is Irish. And every night what you do is you go to an Irish bar, where they have Irish sports on TV. And there’s a grocery store down the street and all they sell is Irish groceries. And there’s a church and the priest is from Ireland and…” And so basically what you’re doing is you’re not assimilating into the New York culture, you’re just sort of hanging on to your original culture in the new place. You’re trying to recreate your original culture in The Bronx, or Queens. What does the book say? It says “maintaining one’s original culture and not participating in the new culture…” Like in “Ray Donovan”? Uh, I never saw “Ray Donovan” but I guess so, yeah. Is that kind of that “New York Irish Bronx” kind of thing? Where everybody just kind of stays in their cultural comfort zone? I like that actor a lot. I used to kind of know his brother… OK, yeah. And all they do is complain about how it’s not as good as Ireland. And you want to say “Well, you can get back on a plane” but for whatever reason they can’t. Usually economics. No jobs. Anyway, back to the book, “A strong sense of ethnic identity, connoting a judgement of superiority and inferiority, as well as prejudice and hatred between groups.”

And, you know, there are usually pretty good reasons to hang on to your original tribal ethnic identity, right? I mean, if you go back to Malthus and the competition for resources, you know, your ethnic group is your tribe, and you need numbers to compete with other tribes for resources. So, you know, once upon a time the Italians were over here and the Irish were over there and the Jewish guys were over here and the Chinese were over there and everybody was in their little groups. But, you know, after a couple of generations you hopefully don’t really need that anymore. You assimilate into, or you sort of integrate into, a new host culture that’s now different because you’re there.

OK, and then assimilation. Which is when you give up your original culture. Right? You completely go for the new thing, at the expense of your entire original cultural identity. I had a friend who … from New York, and she moved to Ireland for like a year. And then she came back to New York. And she had an Irish accent. She’d say things like “Ah, sure. It’s grand.” And it drove everybody crazy. “You’re from New York. What are you doing?” But she went for it, she really wanted it. It was like a fantasy version of… there’s an expression for it, to be more Irish than the Irish. People come here with this romantic idea of it and suddenly they’re wearing a costume. It’s like a performance of Irishness. People probably do that in France, too. I’m sure they must. Probably rich Americans, who go to France and pretend they’re French. Striped shirts, berets. Lots of scarves.

And then integration, which is probably - I mean, it goes back to the multiculturalism thing - but integration is really the way that a culture develops, by taking aspects of new cultural influences in the culture and incorporating them into the host culture. Right? I saw a presentation the other day from one of the groups of students and it was about cous-cous, right? Which I thought was really kind of interesting. It was the second presentation I’d ever seen about cous-cous, it seems to be a growing trend. But that it comes from this North African tradition, and that there’s a Muslim/Arab tradition and there’s also a Pied-Noir Sephardic tradition and then it goes into France and then it becomes a French tradition as well and that’s part of the development of culture. Right? You bring your own stuff and that stuff becomes part of it. So what does it mean to be “French”, right? I mean, we talked about that before.

OK, let me keep going. This is just another example - probably a “Ray Donovan” example - and I think this is really kind of interesting because … So this is a picture of the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, I don’t know if you have this in Paris, probably not. But, you know, it’s the day the Irish march up 5th Avenue and everybody gets drunk and all that sort of stuff. I don’t think the kind of Irish people that go to Paris would be into… No? I didn’t think so. But in New York there’s a huge Irish population, and these are the guys… like, their families would have come over in the 1840s or maybe their families would have come over in the 1950s, there was a big wave of immigration then, or maybe the 1980s, when there was another big wave of Irish immigration. But basically, they are recreating a set tradition of what it means to be Irish in New York. Meanwhile, this other photo is of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. Where they don’t worry so much about maintaining their Irishness because they don’t have to. Because they’re in Ireland. So the parade in New York, there’s a lot of policemen and firemen and soldiers and it’s all very serious and very macho. They march past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and get blessed by the Cardinal and all that. And meanwhile, the parade in Dublin is kind of fun, it’s considerably more lighthearted. People dress up and they wear these crazy kind of costumes and they have floats and puppets and all that sort of stuff. And a couple of years ago - well, maybe twenty years ago - there was a big controversy because there is a gay and lesbian Irish group of people that wanted to march in the parade, and they weren’t allowed to by the people that run the parade, this group called the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who said basically “No, of course not. This is an Irish Catholic parade, and we don’t have room for gay and lesbian people in the parade.” Because that’s not “Irish”. Meanwhile, in Dublin, it was like “No problem! Sure! We could use a gay and lesbian group in our parade.” So, you know, the culture in Ireland moved on because it could afford to, and the culture in New York was kind of preserved in this older idea of what being “Irish” meant, if you know what I mean.

Which kind of goes back to that thing I was saying before, this thing about going back to your culture and realizing that the culture has moved on without you. Which is tough, and which you fight if that’s a big part of how you define yourself, so it’s a mistake just to dismiss the Ancient Order of Hibernians as JUST a bunch of bigotted assholes. I mean, maybe they ARE bigotted assholes, but they’re bigotted assholes for a reason.

OK, this next thing I think is pretty easy, pretty obvious. But let’s go through it anyway. They did a study on… I like this picture, by the way. This is from San Francisco in, I think, 1920? And it’s a Chinese family, right? It’s a family. And this is the father, and that’s the mother and that’s the kid. And it’s sort of stages of acculturation in one photo. And I didn’t really think about this until now, but there would have been more of an expectation for the men to acculturate or westernize or whatever than on the women. Because the men had to go off and work, and the women had to stay home and maintain the “home” culture. So, you know, the new language and the new clothes and all of that, that would have been on the men, because that was the access to money, whereas the food and the cooking and the child-rearing and - Actually, it kind of goes back to the Hofstede thing, the “Maternal/Paternal” thing, the “Feminine/Masculine” thing - that would have been maintained by the women in the immigrant community. Which could really put them at a disadvantage in a new environment where they can’t speak the language, for example, and so are dependent on their more assimilated husbands. So in this photo, the father’s dressed in these western clothes, and he’s got a western haircut and the beginnings of a western mustache, and she’s not. And I guess with the kid it’s too early to say. But there you go.

Anyway, predictors of acculturation. Basically, how easy is it for somebody to acculturate. Well, you might be surprised to learn… These are all really obvious, but I’m going to go through them anyway. The first one is similarities in cultures. Obviously. If, uh… if you are from Canada, and you want to immigrate to the United States, it’s not that tough an adjustment. Right? I mean, it’s a fairly similar culture. If you want to go from Ireland to England, it’s the same. It’s really not that difficult. But if you want to move from Ireland to China, or from China to Ireland, there would be more of an adjustment. Obviously. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is the age of the immigrant. Obviously the younger you are, and the less established you are in your definition of yourself, the easier it is to move. And this can be tough. I remember back when I was teaching English, and we’d get these student immigrants from Brazil, and the young ones had a great time. They could form new friendships, they didn’t really mind working shit jobs in fast food places or whatever, some stayed and some ended up moving back to Brazil but it was all very fluid. But then you’d get these older students, who had left jobs or marriages or whatever - things that took them a long time to build - and they came too late. When you’re twenty-two, it’s one thing. When you’re forty, and you’ve given up your apartment and sold your car and trusted your dog to your brother, it’s something else entirely. 
The third one, the educational level of the immigrant. Which, er… I was thinking about this the other day. I don’t know what it’s like in Paris, but the people that immigrate to Ireland for example, generally speaking, like you go into a shop and there’s some guy from Bangladesh who’s working in the shop, or some guy from Brazil or some guy from Romania, and they’re wearing their polyester uniform and they’re cleaning off the counters and they’re making sandwiches and they’re selling you your lottery tickets or whatever, and whatever. But those guys, they tend to have pretty impressive university degrees. You know, they tend to be … back in Brazil, he’s a … I had a student, back when I was teaching English, and he was like a thirty-two year old architect. You know, he had a couple of buildings up. But then he moved to Ireland, and he’s working in a flower shop. Because it’s the only job he could get. I had another student who was a marketing manager, and she’s working as a cook in a fast-food chicken place. So, you know, the people that are selling you your cigarettes at eleven o’clock at night or whatever, and dealing with the drunk guy who won’t leave the shop, it’s like “Well, yeah, I have a Master’s in I.T., but anyway you want ketchup on your sandwich?” So this education of the immigrant category, to an extent you have to have a pretty good education just to get the shit job in the new place.

OK, previous travel history. Are you accustomed to travelling?

Economic level? This is so obvious, I’m a little embarrassed. Economic level. It turns out that the more money you have, the easier your life tends to be. There you go. The more money you have, the easier it is to immigrate. And the better you’re treated when you do.
And finally, technological advances.

This one, I think, is interesting. Because you would have no… you’re too young to know this. But, uh, like even in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet and all of that, if you wanted to… friends of mine that left Ireland and moved to New York. Phone calls were expensive. So you didn’t call people just for the hell of it. You didn’t call your mother once a week. You’d call people on their birthday, maybe. You call people at Christmas. There was a TV show, there was a half-an-hour once-a-week TV show from some public station on Long Island where they would show highlights of Irish news of that week, and so everybody would watch the show just to see what was happening back home. You could buy a newspaper, that took like three days to get to New York from Ireland, and they cost a lot of money so people didn’t tend to do that. But basically, you were cut off. When you left your culture, you were cut off. And that’s totally different. Now I … I mean, I’ve lived in Ireland for twenty years, right? And all the radio stations that I listen to are the same radio stations that I listened to back in New York. Which is pretty funny, because I can tell you what the weather is in New York, but I can’t tell you what the weather is in Dublin, because those aren’t the stations I’ve been listening to. I mean, access to television, access to ALL the media. So I think, across the board for everybody, technological advances certainly help ease the process of acculturation.

OK, so some of this I know we’ve gone over before. This thing, this is when we get into the tension around immigration. I mean, it’s all very sweet until… anyway. You remember the whole “Eve Theory” thing, right? About why people migrated and why people still migrate? And the central causes of migration? Basically, you know, safety and … political safety … and, uh, resources. You go where the food is, you go where the jobs are. The reason Brazilian architects are selling flower arrangements in Dublin? And I think that was pretty much it, right? You want to survive. People immigrate to survive. People immigrate so their kids will survive. The Irish guys did it. And the people in Mexico do it. And the people from Syria do it. And somewhere - if you go far enough back in your family - somebody in your family did it, too. Because that’s the ongoing pattern of migration. And that’s how cultures are formed and how they change and how they exist at all.

I thought this was kind of interesting, although I have a hard time understanding it. But it’s about who immigrates from where to where, basically. “The bilateral flow between 196 countries…” Uh, and so… one of the weird things about this chart is … that can’t be right because according to this chart nobody goes to France. But, uh, Italy. Very popular back and forth between North America and Italy. And what is this, Egypt? OK, Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. OK, I didn’t know that. OK, South Asia. Bangladesh to India. That makes sense. India to the UK and Canada. Well, colonial blowback, right? OK, and a lot of India to the United States. But it’s essentially the correlation, right? I mean, I used to have a lot … the Brazilian students that I had all wanted to go to Italy. And the reason they wanted to go to Italy was because there were a lot of Italians that went to Brazil. And if you could get an Italian passport you could live in Europe, right? And, hey, for their grandparents or great-grandparents, Brazil was where the opportunities were. Same thing, just reversed. So you can’t blame the Brazilians heading to Italy any more than you could blame the Italians for heading to Brazil. So it’s historical connections, right?

I think, uh… Yeah, right? I mean, this map. I’ve shown you this before. But, you know, why are there people from Algeria and Tunisia and Morocco in France? Well, because the French were in Algeria and Tunisia and Morocco. And Cambodia, and the Ivory Coast, and Vietnam, and yadda yadda ya. So it’s not “blowback” exactly, I shouldn’t have said that. But it’s the idea that there’s a reciprocal relationship between the historical colonizer and the historically colonized. And that that’s part of the deal, right? I mean, if you go to a place and you establish a colony and you say “OK, you guys are all now French” - well, when you leave the colony, you’ve got generations of people who identify themselves, sort of,  as “French”. And so, when the definition of your country changes to where it doesn’t make any sense to your own sense of self-definition, what we were talking about before, you go to where “France” is. Which goes back to that thing where “France” isn’t a place, it’s an idea. “France” isn’t in Algeria anymore, though I guess it used to be.
You know, you guys… it’s amazing to me how many of you guys, the number of students who have written about this. I had no idea how many of you guys were from North African “Pied-Noir” - and I’d really love to know where that term comes from, by the way. Anybody know? Why is it the “Blackfoot”? In America, there was a tribe of Indians called the “Blackfoot”, and there’s a subculture in one of the Carolinas that call themselves the “Tar-heels”  - I’m just wondering if it’s connected somehow, I’ve got to look it up. I’ve got to read about that history, because I don’t know enough about it. It’s really interesting. But the idea that, you know, “Well, once the French leave Algeria if you still want to be French you’ve got to go to France.” 

The same thing happened in England. When the English left Jamaica, and Jamaica became an independent country, you know… everybody up until then, if you were Jamaican you were British. You had a British passport. And so everybody, you know… as they were leaving the British government said “OK, look, you guys are British. If you want to continue to be British, you have to do that in England. You can’t continue to do that here anymore. So we’re going to send a ship to Kingston and bring you back. So pack your bags and get on the boat. The boat is going to sail you back to England.” And it was called The Windrush. It’s a famous thing in England, in English culture. “The Windrush Generation”. Because basically this boat docked in London and all of a sudden all of these black British people - passports in hand - got off the boat and in an afternoon Britain was a multicultural society. And it was all unicorns and rainbows after that. I mean, yeah, there were black and brown people who lived there before, but not to that extent, and not to that extent of (justified) entitlement as British citizens. So with the landing of one boat, the national identity and character of England changed. From “White” England to multicultural England. So there’s that.

And then I thought this was interesting, too. This is basically a chart of net migration in Europe, circa 2017. Put together by the CIA, of all people. Basically, it’s the ratio of people that leave to the people that come in. So for every… I guess, for every one person that leaves Ireland, four people come in. Or for every one person who leaves England, two and a half people come in. And I was sort of surprised by some of these figures. Like Luxembourg? For every one person that leaves Luxembourg, fifteen and a half people come in. Who’s immigrating to Luxembourg? I guess rich people, right? I mean, who else would be going to Luxembourg? But one of the biggest surprises here is that France is relatively low, you see that? And I don’t know if that’s because people aren’t leaving, I don’t know. Because it’s not huge, right? The number isn’t huge. It’s not like for every person that is going into the Ukraine, by contrast ... For every person that’s moving to the Ukraine, four and a half people are leaving the Ukraine. But with France, for every person that leaves, somebody comes in. It’s one to one. It seems higher than that, as far as cultural impact is concerned. Right? Doesn’t it?

Like, that’s the thing. Like, in England, there’s a big panic that the immigrants are coming and they’re taking over and all that. But if you look at the figures themselves, in England for every one person who leaves, two and a half people come in. OK, I get it. But you compare that figure to Spain, where for every one person who leaves Spain, almost eight people come in. Or Ireland, for every one person who leaves Ireland, four people enter. But there doesn’t seem to be a panic - at least not yet - about immigration. That’s not the central … and so what’s interesting to me is not so much the reality of it, but the perception of it. I mean, the central anxiety that led the Brexit movement was the narrative that the immigrants are coming in and they’re taking over … Well, not compared to Ireland. Not compared to Norway. Not compared to Sweden. And I don’t know if it’s the same mainstream hysteria in those countries. Italy. It’s much higher in Italy than it is in England, and France? It’s kind of neutral. One for one. But, you know, you can play on the emotions. “Here they come! Here come the zombies! And they’re coming to take over Europe!”
I mean, “traditional” Europe is getting older and birth rates are declining and, as we’ve already gone over, people do need work opportunities and they need to get out of war zones and get their kids out of war zones and so people migrate to safety and opportunity. AND, we talked about this before, but Malthus’s thing about competition. Right? People are coming in and there are only so many resources, and so the more people that come in the greater Malthus’s “State of Crisis” - which is really about competition - we are in. You remember this. We talk about this all the time. Who gets the job? Who gets the drinking water? And now, who gets the ventilator and who gets the vaccine? And when you take that dynamic and then … and we’ve talked about this before, too, but when you look at U.S. demographics and as it shifts from a dominantly white Northern European culture to a more multi-ethnic culture - I mean, basically mass immigration from Europe stopped by the 1920s and more people from Asia and South America starting coming, which is not coincidentally when the U.S. Government started passing laws restricting immigration, and this goes directly back to the Malthus thing. You know, people are coming for work opportunities, but the work opportunities aren’t there like they used to be.

Looking at the U.S. Manufacturing share of the GDP, looking at this serious decline from 1950, when it was between twenty-five and twenty-seven percent of the GDP, and now it’s a little over twelve. You know, these are the jobs for the working-class … you know, manufacturing. You work in a factory. You go make things, right? Well, in the 1950s you could get that job. And now you can’t. Fewer jobs, more people. Which means there just isn’t as much opportunity for the working class that were already in the country, because with globalization the factories have moved and you create a post-industrial economy and with the competition gets fierce because the opportunity - the job resources - are lower. I mean, we looked at the global population figures yesterday. You remember, there were two billion people in 1928, and seven-point-seven billion people now? And added to that, you have people coming in, and they don’t look like you, and then somebody like Trump shows up and says “Mexico must apprehend all illegals and not make them make the long march up to the United States … Our country is full!” We can’t take any more people. Well, you know, that’s a more attractive message to an unemployed or underemployed domestic working class than - and it’s certainly a more convenient message for somebody like Trump to deliver than - “we moved our manufacturing to Mexico because Mexicans are cheaper. WE did that, not the Mexicans.”

And this goes back to the idea of hegemony. This goes back to the idea of an influencing cultural agent. And we talked about “othering”, the political uses of “othering”. Political uses, creates and “us versus them” dynamic. “They are taking your jobs. They are taking food out of your children’s mouths.” Mexicans and Syrians. AND we talked about this, this image of Marine Le Pen standing in front of the Jeanne D’Arc statue, you know, “vanquish the invaders!” They are coming and we’re under attack.

And then you have newspapers, like this copy of the Daily Express, that create the atmosphere for all of this panic. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to England, but the Daily Express is a very very conservative tabloid designed for a working-class audience, and we talked about the political uses of heroes before. Le Pen using Jeanne D’Arc, and the emblem on the masthead of the Daily Express is a Crusader, and English Christian Crusader. With a cross on his shield, and who’s protecting the white Christian values of the English people. Which is how the Daily Express would essentially define English people. And this is the headline: “Muslims tell British: Go to Hell!” Do you remember the story I told you a while ago, about the Polish guy and the Irish guy and they got into a fight in a bar, and the Polish guy punched the Irish guy, and the Irish guy hit his head and died? And one of the newspapers said “Immigrant Kills Local Father”? It’s all in the way you tell the story in order to manipulate public opinion. That’s Gramsci’s hegemony, right there. In this story that the Daily Express is covering, what happened was there was a student who tried to kill a member of Parliament. And he was found guilty and as he was being sentenced he shouted out in court “Go to hell!” This was one student, it wasn’t “Muslims”. But this is a very emotional headline, right? Deliberately so. 

And, ironically, the only recent ACTUAL murder of a member of Parliament was done by a far-right anti-immigrant white English Christian guy. Who I’m sure saw himself as a Crusader, protecting the white Christian values of the English people.

And Boris Johnson, who I’m sure you know, who’s the Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, he was a newspaper guy. That’s what he did, that was his job before he became a politician. And this is from an editorial he wrote in 2005, when he was starting to position himself as a politician. He wrote “it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain … That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.” I mean, Boris Johnson had a deliberate political agenda when he was saying that, but I think that’s the same kind of thing people are accusing Macron of saying, and obviously for their own - the accusers - political advantages as well. But the idea is essentially that the culture is not going to change to accommodate you, you have to change to accommodate the culture.

And again, I’m not endorsing this argument. I’m also not really attacking it. I’m just trying to articulate it. Do you guys understand what I mean by that?

And again, this message makes a lot of sense to a lot of people who are already feeling like they are on the losing side of demographic shifts, of globalization, and all that. Who actually ARE on the losing side of demographic shifts, and of globalization, and all that. “We’ve already got our backs against the wall, and now you want to come in and bring in your cultural values at a time when we are already running out of opportunities.” That’s an understandable position. And so somebody like Trump comes along, or somebody like Boris Johnson comes along, or somebody like Le Pen comes along, they’re able to manipulate that message and turn it into a cultural war - instead of maybe an economic war - between the Muslims and the Christians when it’s … I don’t think it’s about the Muslims and the Christians, I think it’s about economic opportunity. But that’s just my opinion.

That was an English example. This is an American example. This is a speech that Trump gave, again like Johnson when he was positioning himself as a politician, and he said “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down … And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering … It was well covered at the time. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.” Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that’s just not true. It’s literally … he just made that up. But again, it’s the idea of this “othering” thing, over here. Creates an “us versus them” dynamic. You know, during the worst terrorist attack in American history, “they” were cheering. Well, I mean, if you want to get down to it, “they” - the Arab population in Jersey City - were American. And are American. They’re Muslims, sure. But they’re also American, and there was an editorial in the New York Times a couple of days ago about Trump saying this. And they said “Well, a lot of Muslims were killed in the September 11th attacks. From Jersey City. A lot of New Jersey Arabs were working in the buildings as they came down. So the spirit among the Arab community in Jersey City was not “Yeah!” It was more along the lines of “Oh, shit! I hope my mom comes home.”

And this is the Brexit poster, the “Breaking Point” Brexit thing. Which we’ve talked about before, but the idea that the zombies are coming. You know, “we must break free of Europe and take back control of our borders. Because we are at a Breaking Point.” The EU has failed us. We are at a breaking point because, again, the economics have changed and … or “When Mexico sends us its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Well, and so the climate gets a little scary. I mean, the temperature goes up and up and up and up and up. And if you believe the story, the story you keep being told, the reason you are in trouble is because the refugees are coming and basically … it’s easy to go from .... Look, if you believe it, if you believe the message, and you hear somebody like Le Pen or Johnson or Trump, and you see newspapers like the Daily Express or the New York Post, and you’ve got Fox News on and your Twitter feed keeps giving you the validation you need, you end up basically on a war footing. We are at war. We are being invaded. The immigrants are invading. They are taking Europe. They are taking America. They are taking France. Whatever. They’re taking England. And so you have this climate, this very tense climate.

What does this sign translate into? “Non au Camp de Migrants” I guess is “No Migrant Camps”? Which I guess is about Calais? This one I think is interesting, because it’s in Norway but the signs are all in English. And in Sweden, and in Poland. I guess this brings us back to that CIA chart. Across Europe. And in America, you’ve got this at the Charlottesville alt-right rally, this “You Will Not Replace Us” - or in some cases “Jews Will Not Replace Us” - and again that theory of displacement. That French guy we talked about, remember we talked about Renaud Camus? I mean, these guys all use his theories of the Great Displacement.

OK, so you’ve got the climate and you’ve got the theories, and I don’t know if you remember this guy or not, this guy Anders Breivik. It was a while ago now. But Anders Breivik was this Norwegian guy who saw himself as a modern soldier in a war against multiculturalism. A modern soldier for Europe, not a million miles from the Crusader guy on the cover of the Daily Express. And he set off some bombs in Oslo, as a distraction more than anything, and while the police were all rushing to the bomb sites, he went to a summer camp where he dressed as a cop and started killing a bunch of kids, basically. It was a summer camp for the kids of people from the labor party, and they thought he was a cop so they came closer to him when he gestured to them and then he shot them. And it was a fight against … well, here, I’ll just read you his explanation. He wrote: “Around year 2000 I realized that the democratic struggle against the Islamisation of Europe, European multiculturalism was lost. It had gone too far. 40 years of dialogue with the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists had ended up as a disaster. It would now only take 50 - 70 years before we, the Europeans, are in a minority. As soon as I realized this, I decided to explore alternative forms of opposition. Protesting is saying that you disagree. Resistance is saying you will put a stop to this. I decided I wanted to join the resistance movement.” So he killed 77 people.

And so the way he looks at himself, if you go back to the Crusader guy, he sees himself as a modern Crusader. Defending Europe against the invader. From his perspective, it might have been regrettable what he had to do - this goes directly back to that Hannah Ardnt quote we talked about before, “what terrible things we had to witness in order to fulfil our duty” - but he’s at war. And it’s not just him. You’ve got the guy in New Zealand, who wrote the manifesto - again quoting Renaud Camus’s idea of the Great Displacement - who went into a mosque and killed 49 people. And then in America, in El Paso, Texas - which is on the Mexican border - you got this guy who went into a Walmart and shot everybody that he thought looked Mexican. I think ultimately he killed 23 people. But, as far as these guys are concerned, they’re in a war. Against the invader.

And then you add some deliberately provocative satire like the “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons into the mix, and then you get the Kouachi brothers. So, yeah, OK, fine. I guess there IS a war. If that’s the way you want to go about it. And what’s interesting to me about these guys, the Kouachis and all, is that … yeah, I don’t know where they were born. But they’re French. These photos, they were French kids. It’s not about the foreigner coming in, it’s about … we talked about assimilation and integration and something happened somewhere for the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the Bataclan shootings to make sense. Do you understand what I mean? So yeah, I’m not saying that people don’t see this is a war, because people obviously do, but I’m also saying that the environment leads people on both sides to see this as a war. And so the question is, like … I mean, I get the whole “multiculturalism versus laicite” thing, I do, but then the question comes down to the same question that the Marcon New York Times interview was about, which is basically, how do you approach this shifting culture and this shifting society? Do you embrace the idea of multiculturalism or do you embrace the idea of … I mean, one of the appeals of laicite is “Well, this’ll just stop if everybody conforms to the preconceived idea of what French culture is.” But the problem is that doesn’t necessarily accommodate the people who are in France.

Like this guy here, who’s saying that you can have more than one culture at any given time. Which goes back to that Chris Rose quote at the very beginning of the class. You can be French and … you know, the Boris Johnson quote, where “faith must be compatible with British values and loyalty to Britain. This means disposing of the first taboo and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.” Well, I mean that IS what Boris Johnson would say, but to approach it from a multiculturalist point of view, you’d have to say “No, actually French culture, or France itself, France is only what its people decide it is” Right? So, the culture has to change along with the people that constitute it. And the people have to change along with the culture. You can’t approach it from a rigid determined binary “this is the right way, and those are the wrong ways” … for the culture to work for most of the people in it, it has to be a compromise. An uneasy compromise. And I think to an extent, when you get something like Anders Breivik one one side or the Kouachi brothers on the other, what you’re seeing is a fight over the narrative of that culture. And both sides saw themselves as the good guys under attack.

And yeah, it’s complicated. It’s messy. But, if you go back to the Thomas Jefferson quote, you know.

But French History came first? Yeah, but this is history, too. Right? This is part of French history. It doesn’t just stop. I mean, that’s the thing. Once you go “Oh, OK. The culture stops here, and everything that comes after this goes against the culture…” that’s not really how it works. That’s how a lot of people would LIKE it to work, but that’s not how it works. If French culture is going to continue to exist, it needs to find a way to incorporate what’s happening now as part of its development as much as the stuff that happened before, right? As much as the Huguenots and the Revolution. I mean, I’m sure the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was regarded as just as unthinkable. Because otherwise you have this “No to Migrant Camps” group and they’re arguing that this is where French culture ends. Or everything that comes after Jeanne D’Arc is an invader and not part of the development of the cultural essence of the place. But we talked about this, culture is a constantly evolving thing.

That’s about all I’ve got.

We talked about this before, culture is shared, dynamic and mutable. The self is defined by the other, and then you have to redefine what you mean by “self” now, because this guys is part of France now. The guy holding the sign that says “Francais & Musulmans … Fiers de nos Deux Identities” is as French as you. This guy’s as French as anybody else. And so then if you go “Well, OK, if this guy is as French as anybody else, I need to reconsider what I think of as French.”