I mean… people in Berlin are complaining that Swabians aren’t integrating. The question is less whether there ever was cultural homogeneity anywhere in Europe (there wasn’t), but how many new-comers people are accustomed to, how many can come in over some time-frame before people go “wait, this is too much, we’re getting overrun”. By and large, at least in Germany, people don’t really move between regions. It’s not common to see a Bavarian taking up a job in Holstein. The Bavarian might move to the city, or to another village around the same city, maybe to the big city, anything else is an exception.

An often quoted statistic is how in the German east, where anti-immigration sentiment is highest, there’s the fewest foreigners. That fails to mention both the outflux of east Germans towards the west, the steeper rise in percentage of foreigners in the past decade, as well as this being the east’s first immigration wave. Total number still is and probably will forever be smaller than in the west but the perception is way different, and the west never had an immigration wave following right after an emigration wave.

Honestly for the majority of people the problem would be solved if this is simply accepted as fact. That it’s not wrong to feel a bit like you should be protecting culture a bit, and then maybe join a club to practice some local tradition. If, “It is important to me that local tradition is preserved” is immediately met with “you hate brown people” then people are going to be pissed, and rightly so. As the German saying goes: “Is this available in one size smaller?” Let people run around in fancy three thousand year old masks or whatever the fuck.