I recently relocated from Canada to Western Europe.<p>It is absolutely mindblowing to my wife and I how casually racist Western Europeans are. We have had numerous people we met for less than 5 minutes drop passing references to other nationalities and ethnicities (indian, muslim, black) in a derogatory manner that would never fly in conversation in North America.<p>Maybe I'm in a bubble, and all the friendly strangers I'm used to talking about at the dog park were also secretly nationalist, racist, and islamophobic in Vancouver. But somehow I doubt it.<p>Basically, it boils down to immigrants to Canada and US seeing themselves as Canadians/Americans first. I don't know what in the culture leads to that, but it does. Meanwhile I've met people in the country where I'm living that have been there for 3 generations, speak only the local language, but see themselves as exclusively the country of the origin of their ancestors. Maybe because it's only an hour flight away?<p>One only needs to look at /r/europe and see the awful shit that gets regularly upvoted to understand that Europe simply has not figured out how to welcome or embrace immigrants that are unexpectedly different from themselves in a way that is sustainable and does not self-perpetuate animosity.<p>Unfortunately I do not have any solutions for this, only my own anecdotal observations.