[Cont.]
"I also do not see any initiative calling for migrants to assimilate to an Australian identity, YET, Australians are expected to understand other cultures and somehow pivot to their needs, 'lest we offend'."
- No, because a white person would be called racist by you immigrants if they said it.
It's not my job to assimilate to the country immigrants came from.
- It's immigrants expectations which offend.

"How then, can we sit in silence when the Australian flag is burnt and trivialised to 'just a piece of silk'?
- You can't control what others do, maybe they're burning it because there's too many immigrants telling us what and how to think.
People like yourself, whose opinions might one day become laws.

"Rather, we call for migrants to live as separate communities with their own identities."
That's not true, immigrants stick with their own because there is no real shared identity and people are naturally tribal, (just as you hang out with other immigrants and the university crowd) and especially so when they can't speak English.

Can you see, Aarushi?

By Armchair Critic's last response, he will NEVER accept you here, no matter how hard you try to appease him - Better stop trying!!

You come from a glorious culture of the great Rishis, who wrote down, studied and chanted the four Vedas in the divine Samskrita language, amongst whom were born and lived God's great Avatars, Shri Rama and Krishna, among whom Lord Shiva produced his magical Jyotirlingas, the culture which followed Sanatana Dharma and found and worshipped God in everything.

What is there to assimilate into?
A barbaric culture that worships booze, meat and gambling; which cruelly enslaved their own poor, bringing them here in chains, sentenced to 14 years of hard labour and the whip for stealing a loaf of bread; a culture that killed off the indigenous population with their alcoholism - the poor aboriginals who (good on them) for 10,000's of years built no previous genetic tolerance to that madira toxin; a culture who's highest ideals are commerce, entertainment and punishment and who use an akrita language to fit these "practical" lower ideals.

Nothing of course prevents you from CAREFULLY selecting and picking up some of their better achievements, such as in music, art, literature and material science.

Just ignore them who take pride in their slime and claim this whole God-created continent as if it were they who made it themselves, as if it was legitimately theirs by the sheer brute force of guns - it is naturally yours no less than theirs!

You make a good point Yuyutsu,
My Great great great great great great great great great great Grandfather Angus dating back to the 1810's (but I still couldn't find him in any fleet passenger manifest), came in chains for stealing a sheep. Was he a 'settler'?

You can't be accused of being a settler when you came here with a gun pointed at your head. Am I a settler because of the small amount of indigenous I have in me too, due to my grandfather marrying a part indigenous woman in the 1940's?

"By Armchair Critic's last response, he will NEVER accept you here, no matter how hard you try to appease him - Better stop trying!!"

I've got no problem accepting Aarushi as an Australian citizen or sharing her opinions, she has every right to do so but like I've always stated you put your views out there, and you're opening the door for others people responses.

She talks about educating people, and yet she's barely old enough to have any real lifetime learned wisdom, she's a student, may or may not still live with the parents, that said I credit her for having a go. This article might primarily be a product of many years discussion with her parents at the kitchen table.

Why can't you just call yourself Australian?
You think your name and photo doesn't give away your ethnicity?

This is no different than Foxy's old arguments when her parents were immigrants but she was born here.
Second generation immigrants still identify as immigrants and promote immigrants it seems.
Immigrants for immigrants, may as well have Albo here saying vote Labor.

[Cont.]
That said I'm not necessarily criticising Aarushi, rather the substance of her article.
She seems to think we should all be re-educated to think the exact same way, in a way that accommodates her.

But we are not all cloned robots, we are all unique individuals and we all have different opinions based on different life experiences, and there's no law stating any of us have to agree with each other.

And lets face it the blue collar worker used to be the majority before manufacturing nose-dived, and that made the white collars the only game in town, but these University people never seem to be completely in touch with things to begin with, living in their insulated echo chambers.

You tend to have these kinds of generic opinions from University students, because that's how they are trained to think, especially when being prepared for business environments when companies can be exposed to liability and litigation.

And I just binge watched 8 seasons of 'Suits', these legal people are supposed to be smart thinkers, and I think Aarushi hasn't yet dug into the nuances of the topic deep enough, but she's only young.

She doesn't identify as a second generation Australian,
She identifies as a second generation immigrant.
If that's how she sees herself, as an immigrant, then why complain and tell everyone else they need to be educated?
She's the kid at school, assuming everyone else is an idiot beneath her.
My distant indigenous relatives died in the Frontier wars, does her article give me a 'fair go' when she calls me a settler?
We ALL read the Rainbow Serpent in primary school, those of us that went to primary school in this country that is.

How many generations do you have to have until you just call yourself Aussie, and stop being divisive.
I don't need to be educated, I don't need to assimilate to anything.
She's the one identifying as an immigrant and trying to rewrite the rules, not me.
Her idea of Australia seems to be an immigrants hostel.
That said I wish her well.

Dear Critic,

«Why can't you just call yourself Australian?»

- Because we are not, neither me, nor you nor Aarushi, nobody is.

We were already born trillions of times, not only in different countries but also in different planets, galaxies and universes, not only as humans even, so what has the country in which we happen to presently park our body for a while, to do with us?

Coming from an Indian background, Aarushi should be able to quickly understand my first post where I explain that identity is a disease, so one better not acquire another one. Yet for you who comes from a culture that believes that we live only once, getting this concept may be more difficult.

I am not calling myself anything.
I try to rid myself of any existing vestiges of identification, all false - not acquire another, least of all to identify with violent organisations such as states.

I do not identify with my passports: I used to need them for travel, wishing we didn't have to have them in the first place, but now as I am unlikely to ever travel again in my current body, I probably no longer need them. Mind you, when our present body falls dead and we migrate to another baby body in a different country, we carry no passport and no human is able to check where we came from and decide whether or not to allow us into our new country of birth!

«Second generation immigrants still identify as immigrants»

Possibly, but like any other identification, that limits them and thus does not make them any happier. It is best for them not to identify as anything whatsoever. People consider me as a first generation immigrant, that is their choice, nothing I can do about it, but I do not identify as an immigrant and laugh it off when new immigrants think of me as a native Australian who has always been here...

Dear Yuyutsu

I take your point about sharing, but the author does seem to cherish both Australian values and her own cultural heritage.

I don’t read in her tone a desperation to be accepted, but rather a willing embrace of something she values. Most migrants, myself included, are here because we chose to be here and have an active preference for Australia over the places we left and other places we could have gone. For this reason, migrants sometimes have a deeper appreciation for life in Australia than the native-born who take its blessings for granted. For second-generation people such as Aarushi, things can be more complicated. They rightly share the rights and privileges of Australian citizenship but need to work out their identity and can be affected by racism and social disadvantage suffered by migrants and their children. By the third generation much of this often works its way through. Racism against people of Italian ancestry was once common in Australia. Now it is rare.

As I recall this has been called the “three As” – assimilation, alienation, accommodation – across the generations.

I see your point about “over-proving”, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Some of the hostility to migration we have seen recently is a backlash against overt support for Islamofascism violence seen in demonstrations, for example the ones celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October and subsequent marches including chants of “death to the IDF”, along with the horrific rise in anti-Semitism. If Australia’s relatively high migration intake imports these attitudes to the detriment of our society, then migration will become a divisive issue as it is becoming in Europe, and may lose its “social licence”. And hostility to migration can quickly morph into more generalised racism. That’s why I agree with the author’s calls to better integrate migrants into the community and be more selective in who we admit