@emma_cogdev Yep! I also just find it interesting that he doesn't even bring that up, especially as he's inside Fortress Europe. As much as people love holding up this "continent" as being a good place to go, they have a lot of the worst systems for immigrants that they've implemented.

Like, I think it's interesting that he doesn't even engage with how we pay for things like unemployment or sick leave and often can't access either service and ignores the whole visa system and how that prohibits workers from accessing things (work-related visa holders can't really be unemployed for a length of time because they need a sponsor; freelance visas and the like mean that we... have no employer, so no one is responsible to pay for us when we're sick or if we can't work for a period of time, even if it was our employer who put us on those visas to skirt the law in the first place).

And I know not all of Europe is identical, but a lot of us complain about the same things. (Also, here's another fun one: As a third-country national who has a long-term residence, I can't transfer that to another EU country. Even though EU citizens get to move, I'm effectively stuck here unless I want to do the whole immigration thing all over again for a long-term/permanent residency. This is just one of those things that makes me want to scream when people say the EU has open borders within itself. They're still closed!)

@emma_cogdev As an immigrant to where I live who is forced to pay for (but cannot always or even mostly access) the services we're being used to hold up as a "productive and fiscal base," this kind of framing always makes me gag a lot. Even on positive framing (like receiving countries should make migrants more welcome), it always feels like they're focusing on how we can be used... even when we can't access the things we help support (through coercion, if I'm honest—I wouldn't pay for either the "public" health insurance at the private company here or the social insurance if I could get away with it, since both are effectively useless to me due to access barriers).

(Tangentially, I also do have to roll my eyes at the whole we "have gained 40 years of life." I really wish people would have to learn life expectancy statistics and what actually made the historical averages lower, which is that... children were dying more frequently. And now they're not, which is a good thing. But if we factored out child death, the age of life expectancy for people who managed to get through being a child and into adulthood is higher. Yes, we are living longer... but not 40 years longer... Also, we might need to factor out people who were forced to die for powers who sent them elsewhere as fodder... Because that doesn't help us in understanding life expectancy related to the more 'natural' causes of death, but I fear that'd make things even harder for statisticians.)

@mynameistillian I'm also thinking of all the ways in which we've trained people throughout their whole lives to "be civil." We never really trained people to intervene in obvious bullshit, never really cultivated a culture of realising that there are good moments for telling people to fuck off or get punched in the face (ala Richard Spencer)...

But we wasted a lot of time teaching people that there are always two sides to every story, as if that's universally applicable. Two wrongs don't make a right... blah, blah, blah.

And now we're stuck with a bunch of folks who think it's disrespectful to beat the shit out of a Nazi (because that's ~violent~), even though that person's angling to get some folks hurt (at best, which is still not good) or killed (at worst).

@angelteeth So much this. It's also about what people do with those protests. When these things are led and organised by people who have, for example, an electoral goal? It's likely not going to have the same impact as when people just straight up deny access to platforms to politicians and instead focus on both protesting and building connections between people.

Also, also! It's about what people do to make these events accessible. Are there multilingual people in the organising that enable people who don't speak the dominant language of a place to participate and also stay safe so they know what's going on? Are there people in the whole crowd who are aware of what's happening so that chaos is less likely to occur (if cops or opposing protesters attack)? Are people ensuring that the event is safe for disabled people to exist in any capacity (masking, communication, etc)? (Part of the reason I will not go to protests where I live is both because I usually cannot hear any of the speakers, no one knows what's going on when cops choose to close in and scare people, and my language skills aren't that great. Plus, way too many citizens still love leaving immigrants to get caught so they escape, despite us being way more precarious in existing here than they are.)

Because even if those events don't do something in the immediate, being very prominent about building communal care into something and pushing people to do it? Can be helpful, too. It might even shift the way people behave in other events or protests, making them easier to participate in for more people... which can only help them.

(Side note: I keep wanting to call 'protests' as 'manifestations' because I keep hearing and seeing people use the closest English translation, lol.)