Going to quote Calamity Jones, who sailed in these waters back in the 00s before he got a grip, an education and a will to work with game development even if it meant moving to Germany, on his views on Brexit:
I am a British guy living in Germany, working for a German company. My girlfriend is German, and my roommate is French. At work, just in my team, we have people from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Finland, Sweden, etc. I now know people from at least 20 of the 28 European Union states, and they all seem pretty bloody similar to us British. In every other century but this, we would have been stabbing, shooting or bombing each other - not drinking beer and making video games.
I can understand many of the arguments against the EU, but it seems that the major concern on the minds of many is immigration. This is a subject I can discuss, since I am an immigrant myself... Who wants to see their neighbourhood, town or even country change beyond recognition due to an influx of immigrants from other nations, bringing their strange cultures, ideas and ideologies with them? I can understand this discomfort at change, but it's just a reality of living in such a densely-packed cluster of varied nations. What I think is at fault here is not immigration, but integration.
I have not lost my identity as a British person, and I do not intend to. But if a huge number of Brits moved into an area of Hamburg, started prancing around in bowler hats and monocles, shouting at German bars for selling Pilsner and Hefeweizen instead of bitter and gin, replacing all the local restaurants with Greggs outlets and chippies - I reckon a lot of locals would be pretty pissed off - and rightly so.
What, then, is an "appropriate level of culture to retain"? I would never try to obnoxiously impost my British values of boiling all food and fighting after eight pints of lager on a Tuesday night on these lovely Germans, but I would equally not expect to be forced to be ruthlessly punctual, stubborn and obsessive about rules. I am not German, but I pay my taxes and speak some of the language.
Migrants coming to other countries should not be expected to completely sacrifice their identity in order to integrate, but they similarly should not be allowed to impose their culture upon the country in which they live. It's what one might call "common sense". Unfortunately, we are now seeing people with extreme views on both sides - the notion that we must drop everything to avoid offending immigrants, and allow unrestricted access to our countries to everybody who wants it is just as ridiculous and terrible as the "throw out everybody who isn't British" view.
We need to take a rational, moderate approach to immigration, not some crazy, gut-feeling, extreme response. Leaving the EU is NOT a rational, moderate decision. Leaving the EU will not completely stop immigration. Leaving the EU will not magically fix every problem affecting the country. We need to make decisions on these things as an organised whole - as a unified Europe - not as a collection of small, self-interested countries who used to have a bad habit of stabbing, shooting and bombing each other.
I'm voting remain, because it's the sensible, rational decision.
