Absolutely, it’s a spectrum rather then perfectly defined groups, just like pretty much everything else about humans not just psychological but even physiological.

That said, looking at my own country, Portugal, which had people having to emigrate due to poverty during the Fascist times (which was well before the “strong” passport), then most people not really having the emigrate (80s, 90s, 00s) unless they wanted to, then people once again having to emigrate due to poverty (the youth in the last decade and some, because of low salaries and an insane realestate bubble), most of those who went to live abroad were very different in different phases and it’s almost a joke around here that those who emigrated during that first phase are more rightwing than those who stayed (and you see a similar phenomenon now with Brazilian immigrants in Portugal: the immigrant vote in Portugal for the Brazilian Presidential Elections is invariably far more to the Right than the vote in Brazil).

I believe those with wunderlust always leave in more or less the same numbers, but during the hard times the number of those leaving because they have to rather than because of their desire for new experiences, is far larger and outstrips those driven by wunderlust (and, as you pointed out, when everybody is poor the ones with wunderlust both want to and need to leave).

Although from this one might expect that immigrants from poorer countries will be more rightwing in average because of the higher fraction of economic relative to wunderlust immigrants, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point I’m trying to make is that in their host countries there are two kinds of behaviors of immigrants because there are two kinds of drives to leave one’s homeland, which is as true for richer countries as for poorer countries, even if the ratio of one kind to the other kind is different because poverty makes more people leave for economic reasons.

Basically people shouldn’t be assuming shit about all immigrants because of effects like the one described in this article: whilst the aggregated numbers might project a certain impression, in reality there are different kinds of immigrants with different drives to emigrate and hence different behaviors in their host country, and the wunderlust ones who are the minority in the immigration from poorer countries shouldn’t be tainted by the way the other kind behaves as they’ve very different and behave differently.

You seem to be coming at what I wrote and the whole subject starting from a political ideology and then trying to force reality to comply with your political views.

Immigrants and refugees are a lot more than just political slogans that either American political party uses in their Theater Of Democracy to bait and enrage the local muppets, and any genuine and honest thinking about immigration must be hard-nosed and principled and certainly not in any way form or shape influenced by the hyper-simplistic portraying of immigrants, side taking and baiting-slogans from the deeply fucked up American politics.

As for your personal definition of where the border in the scale of “need” between “immigrant” and “refugee” is, it’s entirely subjective and down to personal preference, hence as irrelevant and valid as your taste in food: there is really no right or wrong, but yours is no better than anybody else’s.

I’ll go with the legal definition, because I expect it was thought through by several people trying to find a good balance and it’s widely accepted.

That said, I misused the word “Greed” since I meant it in the sense of “personal upside maximization” - just the normal general want to have more stuff that drives most people, immigrant or not - whilst the dictionary definition of Greed is “excessive want”, which is not at all what I meant when I used it. So my bad on that.

I don’t think Economic Immigrants are worse or better than the native population, I just think that the normal want to have more shit in somebody wanting to go live in another country isn’t something that makes them deserving of special treatment whilst I do think having a level of need that qualifies one for refugee status is something that makes that person deserving of special treatment.

Your post and the one before together neatly summarize exactly the point I was trying to make.

Personally I think there’s a strong difference in mindset between people who seek personal economic benefits when immigrating from those who seek other kinds of benefits (personal freedom, education, satisfying their wunderlust) and from there come differences in their general behavior, including being more leftwing or rightwing.

The very same thing exists in the population in general when it comes to their main drive in life, but for me it’s even sharper in immigrants because emigrating is in my personal experience a huge change - you’re literally choosing to leave a place were people behave, expect you to behave and judge each other in familiar predictable ways to go somewhere were all that is different and it’s more so if they speak a different language, so it’s a proper big change in one’s life well beyond just merely changing cities in your own country - so I believe that what drives somebody to do something that big is a stronger indication of who they are as a person.

Clearly you didn’t really read my post: nobody actually thinking about it whilst reading it could interpret “they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland” as being about refugees.

I only mentioned refugees in passing at the very beginning because I don’t think of them as immigrants at all (they’re not leaving their country out of choice) but some people might, and I didn’t expand on those at all on my post because you can’t really deduce anything about a person’s mindset based on what they’re forced to do, but you can based on what they chose to do, especially something a big as emigrating which I know from personal experience is a big leap to take as you’re not just leaving everything you know but even the familiarity of people behaving, expecting you to behave and thinking in certain ways which is one’s country - moving countries is way bigger than just moving cities because from your point of view, in another country everybody around you acts strangely and speaks a strange language.

My post is about the two main mindsets that drive people to chose to leave their country for another country: personal upside maximization (i.e. make more money, i.e. greed) or satisfaction of a psychological need for meeting different people and doing new things (i.e. wunderlust)

I don’t think you can tell anything at all about a person’s personal drives from them being a refugee because the big change which is moving to another country was de facto forced upon them rather than them choosing to make such a big change.

From my own experience as an immigrant, there are two kind of immigrants (well, three if you count refugees as immigrants, though those are a very special case), Economic Immigrants and Cultural/Wanderlust Immigrants.

The first are self explanatory - they move somewhere to make more money than they could make in their homeland - whilst the second are the kind of people who go live elsewhere because they want to experience different ways of living.

These have vastly different kinds of personality, with the Economic Immigrants being the kind that brings along a slice of their country with them and tends to live in neighborhoods with lots of others from the same country and even little stores and entertainment venues with products and in the style of their homeland, whilst the other ones tend to integrate more in their host country, at the very least living in mixed communities, and don’t seek the venues of their homeland or even the company of their countrymen.

Unsurprisingly, Economic Immigrants are often Right-wingers - they have been driven by Greed to immigrate, remain strongly wedded to the values common in their homeland when they left (so are naturally conservatives) and don’t tend to be open-minded, whilst the others are pretty much by definition open-minded (after all, they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland) and hence tend to be Left-wingers.

So, yeah, there’s often a willingness to “pull up the ladder now that I’m in” from Economic Immigrants, but I haven’t really seen that kind of posture from the other ones (maybe there is, but they were a lot rarer than the former kind in the countries I lived in so I never really had a large sample of those).

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The British Inquiry Into The Iraq War found evidence that both the US and the UK were guilty of the War Crime of Pillaging in Iraq, exactly because they forced the Iraqi Government which they themselves put in power to hire US and UK firms and to give US and UK firms oil exploration contracts.

Obviously, neither of the War Criminals (Bush and Blair) ever saw the inside of a jail cell, though I think somebody actually tried to do a citizens arrest of Tony Blair once.

Yeah, I think I get what you mean.

My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it’s a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,

People look up to Britain, copy what’s done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the “success” of Britain isn’t the product of what they do now, it’s just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.

That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Oh, I don’t at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.

In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, “knowing your place” in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.

(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you’ll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)

In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they’re Working Class) rather than blue collar.

(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it’s funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)

Most don’t really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that’s all that they’ve known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it’s only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.

Couldn’t agree more!

As far as I know, in the countries were Portugal set colonies up, mixed race kids were just Portuguese on account of having a Portuguese parent.

When the Revolution in Portugal happened in 1974, Fascism was brought down and most of the “colonized” countries became free (Brasil had been independent for over a century by then, so it was only nations in Africa) and any Portuguese national who wanted it was repatriated, quite independently of skin color, and many were mixed race hence why I think a large proportion of the mixed race offspring just got Portuguese nationality on account of having a Portuguese parent and was in a normal Portuguese family.

That said, I vaguelly remember that during the Fascist Dictatorship the authorities didn’t want mixed race people in Portugal, but after the Revolution nobody really cared.

I guess that during Fascism the Portuguese authorities were fine with people having mixed race kids as long as the whole thing happened in the “colonies” and stayed there.

Certainly the stories I’ve heard from that time don’t really include in the “colonies” the level of segregation I’ve heard about with for example the English in places like India, though in the “Homeland” it was different.

Not to say Portugal was or is some kind of Racism-free paradise. It’s probably culturally just a bit less elitist and relaxed about “enforcing rules” on people than many other European nations who had their own “colonization” projects.

And then of course there is the example of Brasil were there are all skin tones possible, so clearly for many generations a large percentage of people haven’t really cared about keeping races segregated since originally there were only white Portuguese, black African slaves and the natives, with the latter actually being the smaller fraction of the population. I see it as an indication that the dominant original culture (the Portuguese one of the XVI and XVII century), didn’t care much about stopping people from having sex across races.

If they pay an indulgence, even the rich will get into Heaven.

(So there must be a massive divine operation passing camels through the eyes of needles)

Look into any situation where there is a massive disparity of power between some people and other people and that’s were you will find the most abuses and I totally agree it’s for the reasons you said of there being far less risk for the abusers due to their “status” and that such places actually attract the worst people in society so it’s a bit of self-fullfilling prophecy that putting too much power and not enough transparency and accountability in a position will invariably end up with it being abused, even if you start with the purest of people and the purest of intentions.

This is also probably why there was (and only time will tell if that’s still or not the case) so much child sexual abuse in the Catholic church: adult in high standing in the community and implicitly trusted by all vs child (generally from a poor background).

Thinking about this over the years (mainly for Politics, but it applies to other areas) has led me to conclude that the “good” exercise of power is impossible to get from a static situation (i.e. the idealistic idea that “give power to honest people” solves it) and instead it has to be setup as a dynamic mechanism with frequent rotation of people and multiple unrelated (ideally, competing) people watching over each other other (which is probably where the ide behind the Three Pillars Of Democracy) and whose power balances.

Yeah, I’ve seen some Legal Acts were discrimination on nationality was defined as Racism.

I am very wary of using Racism for discrimination based on nationality because, having been victim of discrimination based on my Nationality whilst being an immigrant abroad and having the same “Race” as the people in that country (basically I look the same as they do) and also having seen the discrimination in that same country against acquaintances of mine with the same Nationality as me but not the same Race, the treatment I got was not the same as they got, prejudices against me were was far less frequent and those against them were far worse (though, this one time, negative culturally prejudiced expectations about me did snowball into something huge and highly damaging to me).

My experience - as a Southern European - having lived in various countries in Europe is that people did not see me as having a different race.

They saw me as a having a different Culture, but not actually race, and whilst on more than one occasion when living abroad people expressed prejudiced opinions about me when they didn’t knew me well as a person but knew where I came from (which they couldn’t tell from the way I looked or even my accent, since I looked like them and my accent was the product of living in multiple countries), when I mentioned that I had lived for almost a decade elsewhere, in Northern Europe, suddenly those prejudices would vanish, all of which leads me to believe it was about the dominant Culture in my life rather than any racial markers.

Further, those people I knew abroad who grew up in the same Culture as me (so, Portuguese) but had a race other than White got an entirelly different treamtment (significantly worse) than I did and which was pretty similar to other people of the same race and not to other Southern Europeans.

Hence why I think that there is Cultural Prejudice which is different from Racial Prejudice and what I read in these posts here sounds a lot more like the former than the latter, though I grant you that it’s unclear where one ends and the other starts.

Yeah, ok, there are Prejudices around Southern Europeans in general and those are on something other than a specific nationality, though whether or not it adds up to Racial Prejudice rather than Cultural Prejudice is unclear.

I can tell you you that as a Southern European I was an actual victim of Prejudice at times when living in Britain, but only when people actually knew were I came from, since they couldn’t actually tell I was from Southern Europe merelly by how I looked or even from the way I spoke (because I had lived in a Northern European country for almost a decade before Britain and had an unusual accent).

Personally, I never felt it was because the way I looked (I easilly passed for English) and instead it was entirelly down to were I grew up in and, interestingly, if I mentioned the years I had spent living in a different country in Northern Europe, those prejudiced expections would normally go away.

That said, I knew of people from my country in Britain who are mixed race and the kind of prejudice they got was very different (and way worse), so maybe there is at least some racial component (i.e. the way they see White Portuguese is different from the way the see Black or Mixed-race Portuguese) in it, but maybe not in the direction the previous poster thinks - it seems to me that Whites only get Cultural Prejudiced whilst those who are Mixed-race and Black get Racist Prejudice.

I’m Portuguese and I get the impression that the way the Portuguese were different from most European colonialist powers is that the Portuguese would fuck (in a literal sense) just about anybody, which is a huge contrast with for example the English that tended to not mix with the natives.

Brasil, the only place outside Africa which was a Portuguese “colony”, is a wonderful example of racial mixing (though it has its issues).

Not saying that Portuguese colonialism was good (it was not even close to positive), just that it serms to have had this unusual higher tendency for people to mix across races, not because it was done with good intentions but it just happened to there being something in Portuguese culture (damned if I know what) that led to that.

Patriotism: “What can I to for my country?”

Nationalism: “What can my country do for me?”

In my experience living in a couple of countries in Europe, generally the bigger the country the more the nationalism (though Germany is maybe exceptional on this) - small countries have very little tendency for people and business to display the flag and have flag-themed products and objects whilst larger countries have more of that.

That said, the far-right everywhere are flag-shaggers and during periods with large international sports events (for example, the World Cup) many normal people will display a national flag, though even then it’s more so I large countries than small ones plus in some countries other flags are used (for example, in Britain they use the flags of the nations rather than the UK flag and in The Netherlands they use the “Oranje” flag rather than the Dutch flag).

I think the only country in Europe with nationalism close to America is the UK and I don’t believe it’s anywhere the same level (for example, they have nothing like the Pledge Of Alliegance).