Some of those makes you list only sold convertibles that were extremely niche, short lived, and/or incredibly ancient history. I wouldn’t use them as practical examples.
Because as a non-citizen, you are technically still a guest?
If you love the place you're living in and want to actively participate in its governance, including implementing any changes, you should obtain citizenship.
And even if you do, your stake would still be less than those who've been living there all their lives, across many generations. Maybe the natives actually don't want the changes that the immigrants want to see implemented.
(not going to argue the finer details of ethics like racism or xenophobia, etc. which I acknowledge can often come up in cases like this).
A friend who came from a wealthy family went to an Ivy League teaching school. While she was there, her family went bankrupt and she had to take on student loans. Fast forward to today, she regrets going there, saying a cheap state school would have been just as effective for her career.
It was always ridiculously easy to get Japanese citizenship. 5 years of residency, don’t break any laws including traffic, pay your bills on time. Done.
It has recently been changed so that you now require 10 years of residency.
5 years. It's fairly easy to get. Sometimes it feels like half of the Beijing intelligentsia is in Tokyo now.
Lots of Chinese academics, engineers, investment bankers, and others shifted to Tokyo in the past few years. Even the kinds of salons and meetups you used to see at Tsinghua or Peking have almost entirely transplanted in Jimbocho based on my friends account.
I think it’s probably easier and safer for a Chinese national to obtain Japanese citizenship than American citizenship.
If you’ve got ten years (or until recently, five) of residence and can pass the interview process, the acceptance rate for Japanese citizenship is something like 95%+.
On the other hand the process of getting American citizenship can run up to twenty years or more, it’s very expensive, and throughout the process the immigrant has few rights and can be deported for basically no reason, up to the moments before the naturalization ceremony.
If I were a freshman at Fudan thinking about my exit strategy, I know which one I would pick.
20 years ago Singapore was handing out PRs and citizenships to Chinese students like candy. All of my classmates got PR a few years out of school, then citizenship again 2 years later.
And so many of them immediately moved on to the US.
Rather, where are their true allegiances? It is relatively easy to become a naturalized US citizen, versus say, a citizen of the PRC.
Highly, highly, controversial and politically incorrect tak, but are there people (and entities, including nation-states) that take advantage of that for their own purposes? I wouldn’t doubt it.
I know people who are naturalized US citizens (or even second generation immigrants) from countries friendly and allied to the US, who, if hypothetically asked who they would fight for in a shooting war, would pick their country of origin without hesitation.
You can use this argument to support literally anything:
> claim: these people have Chinese names, are they REALLY Americans??
> response: suspecting "true allegiance" based on peoples names is racist and was used to justify atrocities like Japanese internment in our country's history
> rebuttal to response: "art of being a Good Person these days, is never admitting that you know or suspect this, even if you've seen & heard it yourself."
Instead of defending the claim you're just claiming you're being censored.
The difference is, of course, the claim that blood is thicker than water has been a relatively reliable way of guessing where someone's loyalties lie for millenia; while the "response" is a cosmopolitan universalist tic common only to the past 70 years or so, and flying in the face of so much experience & common-sense requires shaming anyone who thinks otherwise.
I think you could make a better argument for nativism than "its been that way for millenia" and "it's common sense". Warring tribes were also around for millenia and were probably quite common sense.
Most people consider the modern state, society, etc, to be an improvement. Many people also consider not questioning people's loyalties by their surnames, to be an improvement, even though I'm sure it was common sense for a long time.
Top comment wasn't questioning anything, they just wrote the names of the offenders, which both sound asian. The conclusion they want us to make is that any American with an asian-looking name should be immediately suspect and face increased scrutiny, on this sole basis. This is undeniably racist.
That’s not my take. That the people involved are part of a particular race is less important than that they are likely originally from a country that is a geopolitical rival and potential enemy to the US.
Would you say the same if the people involved had names that sounded more Caucasian but from a similarly rival nation?
Disclaimer: I myself am an Asian American, naturalized citizen, with a distinctly Asian sounding name. I don’t think top commenter is racist.
thats not a controversial take. most left wing or even liberal people just think the moral and economic value from letting people live in a more developed country is worth the non existent security risk. both legal and undocumented immigrants commit less crime than us citizens so its actually a net positive for security.
no one i know really believes in nation states or national security (thats security OF the state, not the people who live IN it) or patriotism and being a "good citizen". our generation got over the "western civilization" propaganda. we know china is just another country that might be less rich and less democratic but its not the enemy, no country is. even the little kids know because they watch speed, he might not be the most politically literate person but his streams showed the whole world that we have more in common than the borders dividing us.
these laptop farms are only a problem because they run scams and steal personal info from hacked servers. if it was just about state and corporate secrets it would actually be a good thing, theres always a chance that info ends up leaked on public sites and transparency is always good.
As do some European high speed trains. I make it a point to book first class (or equivalent) tickets as that often comes with lounge access at the stations - which lets you mostly avoid the rampant pickpocketing and other petty crime that absolutely infests many European train stations.
Seoul is like this too. People look at the transit system and think it’s a model for car-less living. And while it’s fantastic, many Seoulites also love their cars. Those massive clusters of dense highrise apartment buildings you see everywhere? Most sit atop vast underground garage complexes.
My wife and I are DINKs. We drive a smallish CUV. Her cousin drove it, fell in love, and bought the same car.
It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).
Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.
Scolds are always around no matter what you do. It’s just a bit amazing what total strangers will feel is appropriate to comment, but you have to take it from a place of fear of the unknown. I’d say “or you’ll go insane” but if you have 3+ kids you’re probably already there. ;)
The key is to have people in your life who understand the struggle and don’t just rattle off “easy ways” to solve all your problems.
We had two kids (newborn and 3) in car seats and a Ford Focus. The other car was a Jetta.
The Focus even had a small aftermarket amp and sub in the trunk. Everybody and their things still fit, although the sub did come out for long trips for that extra cargo.
The Golf Wagon that came later still fit us and the dog. About 90lbs of her would fit in the back and she could drool all over the kids.
I know someone who had one child and then spent the pandemic finding a car and buying an overpriced, and significantly oversized Escalade. He of course detailed his struggles, especially financial the entire time to us wonder what the fuck was going on. Apparently the whole pressure was from his and his wife's entire extended family.
Jfc my parents raised me and my brother out of a fucking Buick sedan. Modern Americans are spoiled as fuck.
I live closer to my wife’s side of the family than mine, so I’m more familiar with them.
Out of the dozen plus adults I regularly interact with there, we both only respect one of the “elders” (as in our parents’ generation) as someone I can look up to as an “adult”.
Out of our peers (cousins, siblings, etc.) likewise we only really consider one person as an “adult”.
That’s not to say they’re bad people. They’re all mostly cool people we enjoy hanging out with. But they’re not people we’d have serious life conversations with.
Ironically, as one of two childless couples in the family, I’m sure some of them look at us as “not adults” for no other reason than because we’re not parents. I know there’s a contingent here in HN as well that have expressed the same viewpoint. Also, the aforementioned peer (a cousin) we respect as an adult - is the other childless couple in the family. We, and she (and husband) are independent while the parent couples are still quite visibly dependent socially, emotionally, and even sometimes financially, on the older generation. If anything, our parents have started to depend on us as they grow older, which is a responsibility we happily accept.
Doubly ironic is that more often than not many members of the family come to us (my wife more so) when they need “serious adult advice”. Even the elders.
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