Category: Immigration

Let’s hear it again for that wonderful thing called “diversity”:

Racist Aldi customer yells in female worker’s face that ‘everywhere I move there are fucking Eastern Europeans’ in xenophobic rant.

Okay, a couple of points.  A British man shouting at an Eastern European woman isn’t “racist”, any more than an Israeli shouting abuse at an Arab is racist — both groups are genetically identical, the Brit to the European, the Israeli to the Arab.

That being out of the way, let’s look at the larger issue.

The only thing the newspaper headline got right is that the tirade was xenophobic.

And what, I ask, is that wrong with xenophobia (literally, a fear of strangers, now magically transformed into a hatred towards strangers)?

Here’s the thing.  When you grow up in an ethnically-homogenous society, it is an inherent human trait to be suspicious of strangers, for all sorts of historical reasons which go back so far they’ve become genetic — countless millennia of social conditioning have seen to that.  It’s precisely the same impulse which gets parents to teach their children not to get into the red van with a stranger.  Outsiders, as any respectable anthropologist or Old Western sheriff will tell you, are potentially dangerous because they have no roots in the community, and often have values and morals which are completely different from (and in some cases are hostile towards) a settled community’s values.  (And for a reality check:  immigrants all over the world engage in criminal behavior out of all proportion to their actual numbers.)

Oh I know, in these modern oh-so tolerant and accepting (ha!) times, we should seek to deny our human nature because it’s eeeevil and diversity is wonderful and all that.  The “melting pot theory” fantasists are completely wedded to that concept, even though both history and the human condition have proven that it is complete bullshit.  The plain fact of the matter is that if foreigners are to come into a settled community which is ethnically and socially different to theirs, they are the ones who need to assimilate, to make the effort to submerge themselves into the dominant culture — it’s not up to the locals to accommodate them, even though you’re still going to find those irritating “Habla Español” signs everywhere.  (That, by the way, is a courtesy and not an obligation, although many would say it’s the latter.)

I’m acutely aware of this, of course, because I myself am an immigrant and still speak with something of a South African accent after nearly forty years’ residence in my beloved adopted country.  (Blame my vocal cords, which had stiffened beyond adaptability by the time I got here in my early 30s.)  But culturally, I defy anyone, native-born or naturalized, to be more American than I am because when I came here, I was determined to become an American and not remain some malcontent foreigner forever rooted in my home country.

This is not always the case with immigrants, though, and that is why people like that Brit in the article let loose:  he had reached the limits of his xeno-tolerance.  Race had nothing at all to do with it.

Here’s the final word.  In one of those little exquisite twists of irony, the Aldi supermarket chain is actually of German origin.  But when you step into an Aldi store here and in Britain, all the signs are in English, not German;  and the currency is local and not euros.  And while Aldi often hires non-locals, that’s an economic rationale because immigrants are prepared to work for lower wages than locals, and Aldi’s marketing policy is to be the low-price retailer in town.  But even this approach is fraught with hazard:

“You can ban me from every Aldi in the fucking world, the sooner this fucking store is shut down and kicked out the fucking UK the better.”

I bet he’s not the only bloke in town who feels that way.

Looks like New Wife just snuck in under the wire:

President Joe Biden has issued a travel ban on South Africa, stopping most immigration to the United States from the country, and reinstated bans on Europe and Brazil to slow the spread of the Chinese coronavirus.

My only question is:  why stop at South Africa?  When it comes to strange and wonderful diseases that can kill you faster than sharing a needle with Pete Buttigieg in a Turkish bath, the whole continent of Africa (along with China) is pretty much the world’s Petrie Dish Of Pox:  West Nile virus, Wuhan virus, SARS and, speaking of Mayor Buttplug, AIDS — to name just a few off the top of my head.

Anyway, New Wife has her green card, but that hasn’t really made her feel much better.  She has two grandchildren in Oz and soon, another one appearing in Seffrica — none of whom she’s had a chance to see other than through Zoom and suchlike.  So she’s suffering from a severe case of Grandma Cuddle Deprivation (GCD), and all these travel bans and such are not doing her temper any favors.

Even worse, she barely drinks any booze so I can’t distract her with pints of champagne or Pimm’s No.1 (her favorite tipples on birthdays, anniversaries and high holy days only).

Frankly, unless all this Chinkvirus shit gets sorted in the near future… well, she doesn’t know how to use a gun (shuddup) and in any event, she’s one of the gentlest people in the entire world, so there’s unlikely to be any rough stuff as her GCD worsens.

I’m probably just going to need to buy her favorite chocolate by the metric tonne…