We Can Welcome Immigrants And Still Defend Our Culture

I examine how assimilation, legality, and faith collide in daily life, asking where respect ends and prejudice begins. Through personal stories and current examples, I argue for reciprocity, equal standards, and the courage to push back against one-way demands.

• judging behaviors not entire religions
• reciprocity as the baseline for respect
• language, volume, and public expression norms
• legality as the floor for trust and belonging
• separating fraud cases from broad stereotypes
• historical guilt versus present responsibility
• personal experiences of racism from multiple sides
• America’s tendency to unite and risk overreach
• a plea to welcome newcomers while expecting integration

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Transcript

Framing The Debate On Assimilation

Weighing News, Anecdotes, And Bias

Bad Actors Versus Entire Faiths

SPEAKER_01 0:21

What's an incoming March behavior? Will we consider life? So today, what occurred to me that as a conversation starter, I was looking through social media and newsfeeds and everything is talking about these confrontations happening globally between primarily Islamic Muslim immigrants to countries and the failure to assimilate. Now I can only go by newsreels from what's going on in other countries. But it's just a few perspectives to look at. I mean, I keep seeing these things from Poland that apparently does not have the problem. I've seen videos posted by people who are clearly of Arab descent visiting Poland and talking about how they say they're being harassed by the police, if they've been stopped and questioned multiple times and they've only been there an hour or so. Then I see people posting different standoffs between Christian groups and Islamic groups. And I see posts of people in Scotland and wherever, whatever city they're in, the call to prayer going off so loudly, and you know, a guy coming out and playing the bagpipes. And, you know, I find myself as I'm looking through all of this, it's a funny thin line between acceptance, rejection, and we're the line of prejudice. Now, do I think that there are some people hiding behind this rhetoric on both sides, hiding their true intentions? Do I think that there are truly people who are anti-Islam, anti-Muslim because they are just truly white supremacist and they're hiding behind the wave? Sure. Do I think that there are Muslims that truly hate Christians that are, you know, seeking protection from possibly overly sympathetic groups? Yeah. Do I think all Muslims are bad? Not at all. I don't think that. Okay, if you if you look truly, every major ideology, you can find examples of wrongdoing. Christianity. You know, when they crusaded around the world, they were going to save everybody by bringing them to Jesus. They did some awful things. Do I think that makes all Christians bad? Absolutely not. The Catholic Church did much the same. In fact, they were the ones spearheading most of those Christian initiatives, like the Indian schools with the Native Americans, as one example. Um but the Catholic Church in recent years, you know, they had the stories come out about priests that were actually pedophiles hiding in the church. And do I think that that makes the Catholic Church unilaterally bad?

unknown 3:39

No.

Drawing Lines On Demands And Respect

Minnesota Fraud Claims And Profiling

Sharia Courts, Community Norms, Authority

On Shame, Language, And Legality

Personal History With Racism

Loopholes, Accountability, And Fairness

History, Slavery, And Collective Guilt

Reciprocity In Respect And Holidays

Guest In A House, Guest In A Country

Why Come If You Won’t Integrate

America’s Cohesion And Power

Finding Middle Ground Before Overreach

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Uh the Baptists, you know, they have I can't think of the particular church, but there was one church that when Matthew Shepherd was brutally murdered, in Wyoming, I think it was, you know, they showed up with t-shirts made of his photo with flames and right in front of his family saying he's in hell. That group, that same group, did many other bad things. Do I think that makes all Baptists bad? No. But this is just my two cents on it. I think that any group that insists on their way or the highway is a problem. Any group that arrives someplace and expects everyone to assimilate to their way of doing things is a problem. And that seems to be what's happening with a lot of these Muslim groups. So there's that line. You know, prejudice exists from every angle. But this is something that I really think that we all need to think about because I I see on social media, I see an interesting confluence. I see groups of people that normally would not go together, banding together, black, white, uh both sides of the political aisle, and agreeing on this topic. You know, we have what's happening in Minnesota, and you know, it keeps getting mentioned, Somalians, Somalians, and you know, the rhetoric is we're picking on Somalians. Well, I'm not picking on you if you happen to be the group that's guilty of the crime. And that's a whole nother lane to go down. You know, is it profiling? No, not necessarily, because that happens to be the group of people that are getting caught in all of these fraud cases. Now, it could be said it has nothing to do with the fact that they're Somalian. But the Somalian part comes into play because they are here at the pleasure of this country. They are not natural-born citizens. So that does make where they come from a problem. I hear what's happening in the UK. You know, they're allowing apparently cities to have sharia courts. And I've read articles that say, well, those courts are only for, you know, they don't really have weight, they don't supersede the government's courts. This is just about, you know, locally handling small problems, property settlements, etc. And they say, or I've read that supposedly the Jewish communities have something similar. But you know, I'm looking in the United States and seeing this going on in Texas and other places, and it's like, you know, it's gone too far. It's gone too far when people, white people, Christian people, are being made to feel ashamed of who they are and what they believe in, and that they should support this behavior. When honestly, I think it's the Muslims and the people on the other side of the aisle that are actually demonstrating what my experience of prejudice is. They're insisting that what has always been an English-speaking country assimilate and learn their language. They are insisting that even though they're here illegally, we are somehow wrong for calling them to task on that. And I don't know how you can say that. And they tell you, oh, ICE is bad, and they're putting people in these bad places. And well, when you break a law and you put yourself in an illegal situation, don't you kind of know when you go in, like if I decide I'm going to go rob a bank as the answer to my financial troubles, I know, or I certainly should know, that one possible outcome is that I get arrested and I get sent to jail. So if I enter a country and I know that I'm there illegally, and I don't lift a finger to make that right until the government comes and arrests me, then all of a sudden I can find every lawyer on earth and have my face in the newspaper. Didn't I know or shouldn't I have known that when I took that chance of being in that country without proper documentation, that this was one of the possible outcomes? I mean, I really am against prejudice. But like I said, I think the groups we're defending are the ones that are actually acting what I know as prejudice. You know, I mean, I've dealt with racism. I'm biracial. I was born in the 60s in the South. Southern United States was not super accepting of interracial marriages in the 1960s, if any of you are not familiar with the history. And I've experienced racism as a child and all throughout my life. And I have a very unique view of it because when I have been in the company of white people, they don't know that I'm another race. And it's been very easy to find some racist people because they felt comfortable to talk in front of me, to speak freely. And I've experienced it from black people that because my skin was too light, I wasn't black enough. So I know a little bit about this. And I'm I'm not pro-picking on anybody. But I think this is a problem that we do need to look at. I think that it's becoming more and more clear that what we have are a group of people who took advantage of major loopholes in our immigration, came here to a country that is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest country in the world, has a lot of opportunity available, took advantage of those opportunities, took advantage of loopholes in the system. And now that they're slowly being called to task, they're trying to cry foul and cry racism. You know, I mean, the same thing is happening in the United Kingdom. I mean, they're getting denigrated for colonialism, et cetera, et cetera. But come on now, we all know that first of all, slavery still exists in this world, and some of these people that you are defending, their countries still practice slavery. A lot of these Arab countries that are Muslim ruled. For one, but the slave trade was not strictly England and colonialism, it was warring uh African tribes that sold other Africans that were taken in battle. I mean, there are African countries that are now telling people around the world if you have a DNA test and show that you are from this country, we feel so bad about having participated in that, we will give you citizenship. So, you know, do your homework. Secondly, you know, we can't keep digging back in the past. I mean, every civilization has some part of their past that they're ashamed of. So guilting the British people about something that was part of their history a hundred years ago is wrong. Guilting white people in general is racist. Picking on Christianity is racist. So I'm imploring people to stop and think about what you're defending, because you don't seem to realize that you're defending racism. Just because it isn't coming from the usual place that you expect it, which I guess would be a middle-aged white man, it's racism nonetheless. I mentioned a moment ago that I've experienced racism within the black community, and I have. And it wasn't any better than the racism I experienced in the white community. So you need to look at some of these groups and realize that they're they're pulling the wool over your eyes. They're trying to make you stop thinking just by guilting you. So I think you need to dig a little deep in your news, dig a little deep in your social media, and really take a look at what's going on. Because when you open a mosque in a community and you decide that you're going to play loudspeakers with calls to prayer several times a day, don't you think that that disrespects other religions? And I really I know that this is like kicking a dead horse, but this whole happy holidays thing it's not disrespecting another religion to disrespect mine. I am a Christian. We say Merry Christmas for a reason. It's in the name. So please don't disrespect my religion by taking a common saying that is used as respect and remembrance during our holy days and ask me to change it. Because I'm not going to. When you celebrate Kwanzaa, I'll say happy Kwanzaa or whatever's appropriate. If it's Ramadan, I don't know what you're supposed to say, but if you're supposed to say something, I'll say that. I won't ask you to change it under the guise that it somehow takes away from my religion. See, that's the kind of thinking that I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you reverse the tables. If you're not sure, take the conversation and flip it. What this Muslim Somali illegal immigrant is saying to me, if I said that to them, would it be racist? And if the answer is yes, guess what? It's still racist, even coming from them. So I'm not here to pick on anybody's religion. I'm here to stand up for one: Christianity. And I guess I and other Christians don't really care what you think about it any more than you care what we think about your religion. But we do ask that you respect it. And I'll respect yours. I'll respect your holy days, I'll respect your holidays, your customs, whatever they are, when I am in your house. And that is another statement that gets me thinking. In your house. When you come to another country, you are in a house as a guest. I don't know where you were raised, but where I was raised, I don't go to someone else's home and behave how I want to behave. That's why I have my own home. I do what I want in my house. In their house, I show respect and I do things how they do it. And if I think it's intolerable or I don't believe in it, I don't go to their house. Well, it's no different in a country. If I take a vacation and I go to a foreign country, I am a visitor in that country. And regardless of how I want to act or how justified I feel in that, I am going to behave accordingly. I am going to respect their customs and I'm not going to sit there and expect them to behave like me. And if I come to a country and I have temporary citizenship or recent citizen, again, I came here for a reason. Okay, and when you come here and you suddenly start trying to turn my country into your old country, it makes me question why you came here. Maybe you didn't actually come here because you liked my culture. Maybe you came here to overtake my culture. And how do you disprove that? By being respectful. If I want American, I should have stayed in America. And etc. So you see my point. Now I know I'm possibly going to get some comments about this, but that's another thing about freedom. We all have a right to an opinion. And again, I defend everybody's right to practice their religion, but absolutely not at the cost of mine. You can live how you want to live in your house. And I hope that you defend my right to live how I want to live in my house. And if you choose to live in a country that speaks a different language than you, I think it's respectful to learn that language and use it. Not to expect that country to learn my old language from my old country. So anyway, these are my opinions. I I just implore you all to think, to consider all angles of this, because I really do think that it's it's heading to a very dangerous precipice. And in order to avoid it taking a bad turn in any direction, we all need to stop and think a bit. And something that people need to consider about the United States, that we will be celebrating our 250th birthday this year. Let's go back 250 years and really consider what we did. The British Empire at the time was the fiercest empire on the planet. And we were part of them. And we were this tiny little colony over here. And we didn't like how they treated us, and we kept telling them we don't like how you're treating us, and they kept dismissing us. And we took them down. And 250 years, as civilizations go, is a pretty young country. And in that amount of time, we have become a superpower. The wealthiest, the most dominant military on the planet. And you know how that happened? Here's the thing during the American Revolution, there were a lot of people that did not want to commit treason. They did not want to go against the British Empire. And that's the key with the United States. We are kind of like a dysfunctional family. We argue amongst ourselves terribly. We seem so separated. But if you think back, if you were alive during 9-11, how we suddenly banded together. And you know what? That's what we're really good at. At the end of the day, depending on what's being fought over, you'll have a white supremac standing next to a black guy having a battle. At the end of the day, we suddenly become Americans. And you know, that can turn out very badly if we don't really begin to think about these things. We have to find a middle ground pretty quick. Because I'm not worried about the fall of the United States. I'm worried about us really flexing our muscles and maybe going too far in the other direction. So we need voices out there. We need people thinking. We need people correcting rather than accepting every bad behavior. Start correcting people, start pushing back that no, you're welcome here. We want you here. You're great. But you need to be legal. Because if you're going to ignore that law, what other laws are you going to ignore? And if your home country is so horrible that it would be horrible for ICE to send you back there, I suggest you start acting like an American and respecting America. Something to think about, people. Anyway. Leave me texts if you have comments. I'm sure some of you may. And have a good rest of your week.

unknown 21:50

I'll just hate on everything, it's killing me.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Thoughts build quick, causing different possibilities. Negative thoughts will cause different disabilities. So do better. Work hard under pressure. If you got no time, work smarter than ever. Don't ever let them tell you that you can't ever say never. And turn your mind into the truest to go better.