Do you get used to all the shabbiness?

The same is true of most countries VS Taiwan, right?

Actually may be assuming here, all the “list of countries by crime rate” sites don’t have Taiwan in them…

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I don’t need to google search to know that the British tried to use their colonies to get rid of prisoners, the US included in that. In the case of the US, that’s literally why there are places in the original 13 colonies that are incredibly poor (like, lucky if you have clean water level poor, literacy and education is really lacking) to this day while other parts are insanely wealthy and well-resourced beyond even what the average American considers to be “quality infrastructure” . As for the rest of the colonies, I don’t dig into those histories as much, but they do all rhyme – “here’s some land in x faraway place to the rich person and some servants or slaves (people who the crown decided owe the crown something) to help you along”.

As for immigration, again, the US anyway was a place where anyone who showed up on the shores came in. Whether you had rights or not once you go there was far more based on your race and country of origin and not the piece of paper that said you were American – there were plenty of deportations of American-born American citizens because they weren’t “the right race” over the years. All the years. Enforcement of “immigration law” based on actual citizenship status is a very new thing in the US.

Depends on the time period, the colony, and even which part of the colony… you’re condensing 400 years, colonies in Africa, Australia, the Pacific, the Americas, and saying they were all prison colonies. That’s just not true. NZ for example had no penal colonies at all. Even Australia only had convicts shipped over for an 80 year period, with one shipment happening in the last 20 of that, and if you knew anything you’d know it stopped happening because the free colonist population did not want any more prisoners (anti-transportation league).

I’m sorry, but you’re well out of your depth here. Just because places are foreign and far away doesn’t mean you can just guess what the history was.

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Recommended, as well as its “prequel” 1982’s The Nine Nations of North America (written by a different author). Canada/U.S. is waaay less monolithic and more EU-esque than most people realize.

I’m sorry, but you sound pretty condescending considering that you hail from a country on the edge of civilization where sheep literally outnumber humans 10 to 1. It’s like using the historical experience of little Luxembourg to extrapolate on conditions in the rest of Europe, or the scientific community in Antarctica as an encapsulation of all of humanity. Canada, the UK, the U.S., and Australia have 10x to 100x the experience with non-Anglo immigration than NZ does. It’s you who are out of your depth.

I am not an exceptional immigrant to Taiwan. Just a mere uneducated mortal with limited ability at anything except playing chess. At least at chess I play with some skill. I live in a tin shack in the wilderness and my wife often scolds me for looking like a homeless tramp.

I scrape out a meagre simple lifestyle.

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Only because they don’t have these on the mountain trails.
My wife calls me Dances with Cobras.

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Are you really pulling the “your country is smaller than neighbouring countries therefore you don’t know anything” card on a Taiwan forum? :rofl:

Regardless, I gave the example of Australia, widely regarded as “just a penal colony”, when it had a large and growing freed population who campaigned to shut down all convict shipment. Do you want to go over Canadian colonial history? The American colonies?

I’m very sorry if I’ve upset your friend, but they patently admit to just guessing/making up history in lieu of actually knowing any. Maybe you won’t call them out but I will.

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I’m not talking about literal boats of prisoners being sent to penal colonies. I’m talking about who was sent to the British colonies from Britain on the whole. The indentured servants of the 16 and 17 hundreds whose descendants now live in Appalachia in the US were not sent to the US as prisoners. They were sent there as indentured servants. Their living conditions have obviously improved with the times but one can hardly make the case that they’re living large on centuries of family wealth. Contrast this to people who were sent to the colonies by the crown. Many of those families are sitting pretty on generational wealth today.

Back to the immigration, who exactly do you think was vetting immigrants back in the 16, 17 and even 1800’s in any of the colonies?

Remember, this is what you said. The British colonies were all… and then you listed things that not all British colonies were.

Glad you’ve hit wikipedia since then, but too late for me to take what you say seriously I’m afraid.

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I haven’t hit up Wikipedia since. I consider everything I’ve said so far to be pretty common knowledge by anyone who was educated in any of the current or former British colonies beyond middle school.

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Yes, I am. New Zealand has 5 million people. That is the population of Alabama and the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam. It’s statistically irrelevant to the greater world. I’m sure we can learn lessons about immigration from Greenland and Liechenstein as well.

The population of Taiwan is insignificant in the grander context of chinese speaking Asia as well. What of it? Do you ignore what they have to say and instead only listen to the wisdom of mainlanders?

Very strange road you’re going down.

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Exactly. As a Ouachita-American (those are little hills, but since I suspect not many people are familiar with it - next to the Ozarks and very similar to Appalachia), this is America 101. Once again:

Well if only you’d have been so lucky, you might not have made such a fool of yourself.

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Ehhh compare Taipei to say…Lisbon or Paris?
Taipei is more like Athens with some skyscrapers and malls.

I thought parts of Genoa were rougher than anything in Taiwan except for Keelung. Also outskirts of Milan are like Taiwanese industrial suburbs.

But then you have Florence.:blush::+1:

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I do like what they’d done to downtown Keelung since I was there last. Shopping center, new railway station, that observation thing. Sure it started from a low place, but I couldn’t believe how much it had changed and improved in a couple of years.

I read that thread here about Taiwan in the 90s. A lot of progress made. That’s commendable.

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How have I made a fool of myself? The history of all the current and former British colonies rhyme. I am more familiar with the US than others, but they all have a very familiar tune. Others on here are pointing out various books on the topic that support what I’ve said. I’ll recommend “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” to add to the book list.

What I am trying to get across to you is that different British colonies were… different. Settled in different centuries, by different sorts of people, doing different sorts of things. It spans centuries, and the globe.

Some colonists came to some places - as you rightly point out - as indentured servants, little better than slaves. Some came as petty lords, ruling over local workers. Same paid good money for passage and a new life. Some were just civil servants, there to keep things running. Some came in chains.

American colonial history is very much “foreign” to me. A source of great fascination, because I really don’t hear many rhymes at all. Britain underwent massive cultural changes when the Americas were first colonised to when we were first colonised, or even Australia. A 17th century colony in one part of the world and a 19th century colony in another part of the world are going to be radically different, even if the colonists were the same.

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Learned about them from watching that series Mountain Men. Tough countryside.