In short, immigration has been a big part of the US since it was born while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. Sadly, I don’t feel a large portion of the European population realizes this given all of the backlash. Tbf most people in the US and Canada don’t realize that the age depopulation bomb is happening either or they would also be more open to immigration.
> while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration.
This is plainly wrong. There were always migration waves within Europe depending on conditions and political changes. Borders that you cannot cross are a very recent invention, and even since then there have been waves out of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece to name a few.
Even if you somehow consider the EU as a single country, there was significant immigration after WWII, during the reconstruction. That’s when you got the Gasterbeiter in Germany, the Windrush generation in the UK, or a lot of African immigration to France (also resulting from the war of Algeria and decolonisation).
That still doesn’t compare to the sheer size and scale of immigration to the US where immigration started at the very beginning in the 18th century, and not just in the modern era. Immigration controls were also just as terrible as Europe in prior decades in the US, and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism and assimilation. Looking at the data, it looks like the EU didn’t even really start ramping things up until around 2010.
I’m not even sure the EU can even beat Canada’s rate of immigration. Your populations are still largely homogeneous
Not on racism. We’re more or less even if we’re being honest. We’re just not hypocritical about it. we also clearly do a much better job with assimilation.
