YakimaGulagLiteraryGazett

You have to separate out the consequences of EU membership. I didn't originally support UK membership. But on balance I think that Britain is a more tolerant, open and human country than we would have been otherwise, if we had preserved a separate existence.

Ireland is a different country since membership - it's a country of immigration instead of emigration, thanks to the prosperity fuelled by the "Celtic Tiger" era that followed Irish entry. That era turned Irish society upside down in some ways. I don't know enough about it to say whether this was simply the consequence of EU membership or the inevitable impact of assimilation into the modern global capitalist economy.

We now have more unequal societies so the gains have not been fairly distributed and and rights we have gained are often balanced by the increased remoteness of democratic controls. In the end, though, we have to decide whether we would sacrifice the gains for what we have lost and return to how we were. I wouldn't.
 

When I first visited Ireland, it was before E.U. membership,

My last visit was since E.U. membership. I talked to a lot of different people and found a good deal of discontent with the E.U.

I am going on purely personal and anecdotal observation of what I saw and experienced, and of conversations with people I know or met there.

Most people I encountered and discussed the E.U. with felt that the E.U. wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Inflation for one thing has been pretty terrible, and hard on people in their daily lives. It's also been bad for the tourist industry, especially for the large numbers of Irish-Americans who go back to visit.

The good part has been Ireland becoming a desirable place to live for people from other countries in Europe. Some of that though really traces back to the 'Celtic Tiger' phenomenom much more than to E.U. membership.

I think that English people handle new minorities in their midst way better than the Irish people do. I think the English have a firmer grasp on what is not too important, what to give way about and what must be insisted upon. I observed in my brief stay in England that English people simply accommodate differences that would have Americans out rioting in the streets.

In England if a Sikh is a customs officer, he can wear a turban with his uniform, in Ireland or the U.S. that would never fly.

I consider these accommidations civilized, and good, I wish Americans were better about them. In America, you pretty much are at the mercy of your employer on these matters, and I am sad to say Ireland isn't good about them.

If I ran things in Ireland, I would order not 'diversity' classes all around, but 'cultural competancy' classes. Irish people have many wonderful qualities, but cultural competancy is not one of them.

I think in fact the economic side of E.U. membership is very good most places, but the cultural side of it has been a challenge, and a badly met challenge at that. It just stares you in the face in Ireland though.

I do have a fundimental distrust of complex alliances, they are no protection against war. In fact I think sometimes they make it more not less likely.

As for inequality, that is a real problem in the E.U. as well as outside. I think people handle inequality a little better if on top of it they aren't hit with a bunch of new and petty regulations.

The problem for other Balkans E.U. members has been the huge number of new regulations on EVERYTHING that people just do here, have done here which they have done unmolested for centuries, even by Communist governments.

I do hope that more open borders will be of help to people here in business and in their daily lives.

Part of the problem here is that if people want or need to go places it's VERY hard, impossible in some cases.

That isn't just because of E.U. membership or non-membership, that is because of unweildy and unfair immigration policies all over the place.

I could write a whole 'nother long rant about THAT! I consider tough immigration laws to be unhealthy and to enable genocide.
 

Yakima,

Are you sure a Sikh would not be allowed to wear his turban while carrying out official duties? America is nothing if not officially religiously tolerant. We have a lot of problems in this country, but for the most part tolerance of religious diversity is something we do pretty well. Just my two cents.
 

@Kirk, I may be wrong but I have a good many Sikh friends in the States, and the only ones I see wearing turbans at work are taxi drivers,some office workers, especially in high-end jobs, and the occasional person in higher education.
America is as you say officially religiously tolerant, but there is a good deal of inconsistency in how that tolerance is applied, especially if it is a visible difference. I think it depends a lot on what part of the country you are in, and which religiously different people, and what is different about them, and it depends WHICH jobs. I'm pretty sure a Sikh policeman would not be able to wear his turban on duty, and that the same would apply to a customs officer.
Sikh men further more are supposed to wear beards. Not all do, but religiously observant Sikhs do.
One thing religiously different people do with great success in the U.S. is to set up alternate economic structures for themselves.
The Sikhs in the State of New Mexico for example opened their own private security firm, in California they set up one of the largest organic dairies, providing employment to their members and allowing the members working in these enterprises to remain observant. Muslims in the U.S. have done this on a less noticeable scale, more often in a given locality they'll find an economic niche to take over, for example a lot of the dealers in Native American jewelry in New Mexico are of either Palestinian or Lebanese background.
In other words in the States the easiest thing is to simply by-pass jobs in the police, customs, etc.

When I went to England for a few days in 2001, there were a number of Sikhs at Heathrow employed as customs inspectors, security personnel, and even as janitorial staff.

Basically the janitorial people didn't have uniforms, they wore sort of an orange colored thing over their ordinary clothes,
the customs and security personnel had turbans that matched their light blue uniform shirts. There were quite a few of them. You'd never see that in the States.

I can remember the case in the U.S. of a Muslim nurse who got into awful trouble at work over the question of uniforms at work, these days it would be NOTHING. She wanted to wear scrub pants instead of the usual knee length skirt that went with nurses uniforms in those days.

She had to sue and for a time lost her job.

Kirk you'd be surprised at the stuff you can be fired for, and the stuff they can refuse to hire you for, it's some of it incredibly trivial!

The way they get around it is 'at will' employment.
 

Some Irish communities appear to have adapted really well to the strangers in their midst. I was listening to an interesting item on the radio about the Brazilian community in Gort in County Galway. There's more at http://brasilianfestivalgort.blogspot.com/ and http://www.irlandeses.org/healy_gort.htm
 

@Owen, wooohoo we are on in real time practically! :)

To be fair to Ireland, and the Irish people, it may be that small towns do better than big cities, and I think it could make a difference if there's a bunch of different sorts of immigrants, or just one or two types of immigrants.
As well it helps if the city's leaders, civil and religious help the locals understand, act as a bridge. That is harder in a large city, and harder if there are a lot of different sorts of immigrants. It's plain a bigger job of bridge building.