Omnes, especially Moylando
Back to how an understanding of history can help in interpreting modern events.
During the fall of the Roman Empire, Gaul (modern France) was conquered by a Germanic tribe, the Goths, whose reputation as savage wreckers is thoroughly undeserved. Driven west and south by the invading Huns they liked and admired what they found in the Roman Empire so much that they decided to keep it. That included Roman legal systems. Documents exist from the fifth century in which Roman citizens sign over their villas and farms to their new masters in exchange for living in the same place as managers, not owners. The beginnings of tenant farming and Feudalism as exported to England and Wales by the Normans.
Those who get upset by the appearance of foreigners in the UK can console themselves. The incomers like what they see including most of the social customs. They want to preserve and not destroy. Lacking armies they can only compete using their brains and hard work which gives us a fair chance.
As a kid your views of foreigners are formed by the media including Hollywood and the TV news, by neighbours and relatives who have been there. Then you get to know some foreigners directly and your views usually change. History is all about getting to know foreigners including your own ancestors. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley. I liked foreigners generally. My mother played bridge with a Bolivian woman whose daughter married into a Greek - Italian family. Her grandsons went to an English Public School. Her niece, a UN interpreter, took me and the grandsons to the pictures whenever she visited. Other bridge players included a balalaika playing Russian fencing master who had been a seventeen year old Colonel in the White Army, a Thai diplomat, a Polish Jewish survivor of the camps. They were an asset to their adopted homeland.
I generally disliked Muslims. Many relatives and neighbours had been in the Middle East from Iran through Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt during the two World Wars. They were uniformly unimpressed. In the early fifties my older cousin married an Iranian engineering student. They had a son who was looked after by her mother while she worked all hours in a factory to support her husband and son. One day five years later, studies finished, he left a note on the kitchen table. He was going back to Tehran and his first wife. First wife! What first wife? The son joined the British Army in the late sixties and was one of the youngest to die at the hands of the religious and nationalist savages in Northern Ireland. So Muslims are not uniquely evil.
I had earlier moved to live in the south of England. I was regularly beaten by a Pakistani-born bus driver sitting across a chess board. He told me about reading the job advertisement from London Transport. Apparently the English did not like the shifts or the poor pay. Enoch Powell was alive and in full flow. Honest, intelligent, hard working and willing to integrate - what more could you ask? At the same time I worked with an Indian born Muslim employed on menial clerical tasks despite having a PhD in nuclear physics. He blamed racism from people who did not accept Indian qualifications and experience. I blamed a complete lack of social skills and an inability to communicate with women.
Back in the north I worked with a blue eyed blond man who in appearance could have been a poster child for the Third Reich. He spoke with a thick Arabic accent and was a Berber from Algeria. These are the descendants of another maligned Germanic tribe, the Vandals. Passing through France, already bagged by the Goths, they established an empire in Spain, Sicily and North Africa. Conquered by the Moors, they retreated into the Atlas Mountains. They adopted Islam but retained many Germanic attitudes including a much higher social standing for women. My Berber colleague worked well with western women.
Later on as a mature student, I met a Kuwaiti who only thought he spoke English and had come here to avoid conscription and get an education. Tutoring him in English and business was easier than trying to hide. He met and married an English girl (after twenty years, no first wife has appeared). He works in the UK and the Netherlands, his children are thoroughly Anglicised. I am introduced to visiting relatives. He now helps the children of of his, mainly paleface and Christian, fellow students find jobs.
All subsequent experience has confirmed my view that Muslims, Christians, Jews and any other religious or racial group are not all alike. Individuals choose from the teachings of their religion and culture what fits their own personality.
We learn from meeting different cultures, we learn from trading with different countries. When we stop learning, we may continue to walk and talk, but we are dead.
It does not matter who makes things or who sits at a computer keyboard shuffling money around the world.
It does matter how we understand the world around us. History, geography, economics, philosophy all help us make better decisions now.