It is unfair to label everyone who is disturbed by migration as racist, former President Barack Obama told a town hall meeting in Berlin over the weekend, Newsweek reported.
Obama gave as an example that “it's not racist to say, 'Ah, if you're going to be here then you should learn the language of the country that you just arrived at because we need to have some sort of common language in which all of us can work, and learn and understand each other.’”
The former president conceded that "It gets more sensitive, obviously, around religious issues... I don't have simple solutions to all of that... What I think we have to do in order to push back against... what are clearly racist motives of some... we can't label everybody who is disturbed by immigration as a racist. "
He also urged "a humane, intelligent, thoughtful, orderly immigration policy that is grounded in our better selves and our better values."
Obama added that it is important “to figure out how do we make the people who are already in a country feel comfortable with newcomers. That requires education and exposure and reducing fear on the part of people who are already there. It also requires some levels of adaptation from the people who are coming in."
The former president stressed that “I worry sometimes... [that] we think that any moves towards assimilation of newcomers to the existing culture is somehow betrayal or a denial of people’s heritage,” according to Townhall.
He emphasized that “if you’re going to have a coherent, cohesive society then everybody has to have some agreed upon rules, and there’s gonna have to be some accommodations that everybody makes."
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