Immigration

So, last night, Bert and I went for a walk to clear our heads. It wasn't what we thought of as late at night - more like around 9.00pm-ish. Nor was it dark yet.
Apparently though, in the town we live in, that's no excuse not to be drunk on a Saturday night.

On rounding the corner, a door flew open in front of us and 6 or 7 people spilled out into the street, shouting and gesturing at each other. 2 men in the centre were going at it, hammer and tongs, one of them with a piece of wood clutched in his fist. (and there we were, about 3 metres away from walking into it...)

Luckily (we thought) there was a security guard station nearby for the local university. We ran over to tell them what was going on, and to ask them to notify the police of a domestic. One of them went to phone the police, only to discover that on a Saturday night, the police weren't answering their phone. The security guys also lamented that in other case like this where the police had picked up the phone, it took them up to three hours to respond to a call.
Great, so what you're saying is that I can live in this town relatively consequence-free? I mean, I couldn't rob a place, but if I wanted to hit someone, I could probably get away with it. Unbelievable.

Meanwhile, we can still hear the sounds of the fight going on, although the participants have migrated further down the road, and closer to our house.
The security guys went on to tell us that it was usually the immigrants of this area (I really wanted to contradict him on this, but the people in question weren't actually English-speaking). That they were always drinking and causing fights. This made me very uncomfortable, considering that Bert and I are both immigrants - the only difference being that we are English-speaking immigrants (which is not always enough to save us from racism either).

In fact, the kind of attitudes that you experience directed towards immigrants here is really unbelievable. It shocks me that I now live in a place that is so predominantly white that I'm different enough to be targeted. That even Bert is different enough.

Recently, Bert taught a lesson on debating to one of his classes, using the subject of immigration. Having talked to them about it the day before, he had an idea of which kids were already anti-immigration, and tried to take them out of their comfort-zones by asking them to argue as though they themselves were immigrants. This was met partly with flat-out refusal ("But I don't want them in my country") and partly with speeches about how immigrants were coming in and taking all the jobs - which, unfortunately, was met with applause from the other students.
This attitude is so deeply ingrained that it was impossible to even get them to stop and think about the other side of the argument.

I still don't know what happened with the fight, since in the end we just had to detour around it and go home. And apparently, according to attitudes, nobody else cares.