Immigrants in Europe

Finally I can breathe a little. After the Japanese class this week my amount of homeworks is at a bearable amount, especially because of the big holiday next week (Wednesday is holiday in Japan, and the university festival will be from Saturday to Tuesday).

I say that because I spent some time doing Japanese homework after the last weekend until today. We should read a Japanese newspaper article (not easy), list words we don't know and write questions about the article. Mine was about those characteristic double-decker red buses in London (called Routemasters). They'll be gone by the end of the year. It's something about accidents and, more than that, adequating the public transportation to EU regulations. And one of them determines that public transportation should consider handicapped people, who can't ride the Routemasters.

But, during class, we discussed another article about the riots in France. I guess most people should know about that, but there's a link with some information in case somebody doesn't. An interesting point of view was comparing countries policies about immigrants in Europe and the "results". England, which has supported immigrants in keeping their own culture had a terrorist attack by English muslims. France, which has "forced" immigrants to adequate with the "French way of life" (prohibiting use of the "muslim-style" scarf - I forgot the name of it, sorry - in schools, for example) has riots. So none is effective? Then what's the way immigrants should be treated?

Ok, that's not the way the comparison should be done and there's more to it, but it leads to the point of how dealing with immigrants and what's the risk of other countries having problems like that in the future. For the last question, the answer is a high probability for countries where, like France, have most immigrants belonging to lower social classes.

Now other countries are worried about the immigration issue as well. Germany has adopted a policy between British's and French's and now should decide its path. Japan has a decreasing workforce and is deliberating if immigration could be a solution. It's just my opinion, but I think that Brazil don't have a situation so different than France in that aspect. I mean, most poor people are from which echnicity? (Not muslims, of course, but there's also a majority.)

Talking about Brazil, during the discussion the topic turned to Japan for a while (that's when the comment wrote earlier about Japan was said) and I remembered the Brazilians working as "dekasseguis". Most immigrants who went to France, for example, also went to do manual labour... And also most who went to Brazil in the beggining the the 20th century (that includes Japanese). They usually don't reach higher classes in society and sometimes suffer some prejudice. Many riots already happened through times because of that... Guess it's History repeating itself. People go to other countries seeking a better life that may happen, but they're always "strangers" and "excluded" what makes riots happen...

I like to say we learn from our mistakes, but if this situation happens from time to time, does it mean that mankind haven't learned how to deal with that yet?

Oh, and it's getting colder here. It's almost like winter in my Brazilian hometown at night and I was told that this year it's getting colder later than usual... Argh! The good news is that I may be able to look for good places to see the leaves' color changing and take pictures...