Foreigners Are Heroes

Published on Mar 21, 2017 (updated Mar 21, 2024), filed under politics. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

Foreigners to our countries—expats, immigrants, refugees—are heroes. Foreigners, people like you and I, add to our lives and our cultures. Foreigners deserve our respect and our support.

Foreigners are heroes because moving countries, no matter whether temporarily or permanently, and no matter whether voluntarily or involuntarily, requires courage.

Foreigners add to our lives and our cultures because they bring change and variety, they challenge and expand our worldviews, and they actively help and actually strengthen us and our economies, no matter how hard some of our nations try to make it difficult for them to contribute.

Foreigners deserve our respect and our support because traveling and moving abroad comes with risks—therefore requiring courage—and always means leaving behind, and possibly never seeing again, people and possessions.

Foreigners are heroes. Let’s be kind and welcoming to foreigners, just as we wish to be kind to ourselves.

Exceptions, now, prove the rule, and then, perhaps, what the message probably boils down to is that we’re all heroes. That’s again what makes xenophobia so sad, and hard to understand: It’s against our humanness, and people would only need to examine their concerns, or try to be compassionate, or leave their country just once to see beyond.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, Frontend Dogma).

I love trying things—in web development and engineering management, but also in politics and philosophy, where I hold to one idea in particular: that we can only be well if we take good care of everyone. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my perspectives and experiences. (Interpret charitably but be critical—and share feedback and advice that makes my work better.)