
Originally Posted by
Watchman
Well-meaning official policies aren't worth a badly drawn four-dollar bill if the practical reality is prejudice and ostracization in daily life. People only learn to be with people if they are with people, and that goes for immigrants in a new land just as much as growing kids. Poor sods already have their platters full dealing with culture shock, language barrier and trying to get a life started; getting welcomed with thinly veiled (if not open) hostility doesn't exactly encourage anyone to try to "fit in" so to speak, but instead encourages them to turn inwards towards their own "peer-group". Unemployement (which already plagues the natives who don't have the additional handicaps immigrants and "foreigners" have to deal with on the job market), poverty and ghettoisation only heighten the effects, doubly so as the natives tend to have a bad tendency to avoid moving into the same neighbourhoods. Throw in the extra problems of the younger generations and post-11/9 discrimination, and you've got one damn toxic soup ready for serving.
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