Being foreign: The others!

• You do not go into somebody’s house and start rearranging their furniture.
• Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live.
• Perhaps foreigners are, by their nature, hard to satisfy. A foreigner is, after all, someone who didn’t like his own country enough to stay there. Even so, the complaining foreigner poses something of a logical contradiction. He complains about the country in which he finds himself, yet he is there by choice. Why doesn’t he go home?
• How much greater might the adventure be, how much more intense the sense of foreignness, if there were no possibility of return?
• The true exile is somebody who could “return home neither in spirit nor in fact”, and whose achievements were “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever”.
• The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.
• The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging.
• Yes globalization is making more and more foreigners. But its also making foreigners less and less foreign, as cultures converge.
• Being a foreigner has the advantage of being an observer.
• I neither live in the country of the ethnic group I belong to, nor the land where I was born,and am therefore doubly a stranger/outsider/foreigner, my life is immennsely enriched by the people whose lives I'm priviledged to share.
• end up becoming foreigners in our own homes, against our will, as a result of mass immigration
• Immigration brings diversity which is almost always a positive influence in any static society.
• Foreigners can be hard to satisfy is some regards but, at the same time, foreigners are more comprehensible in multiple circumstances because they developed eclectic personalities.
• Returning to ones native country seems an even bigger step than leaving, since no one will appreciate your foreignness at home.
• Should I return to my birth land, as I left in the early 1980's, I would be at a huge disadvantage -- it is, after all, the only place where people expect me to act as a native, and I am now incapable of it.

the original article:
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108690

and the comments:
http://www.economist.com/node/15108690/comments?sort=recommend#sort-comments