Learning a new language, spending some time living in another country where I was not a speaker of the language, and just traveling around other countries has made me really appreciate at a deep level how tough immigrants and foreigners have it, and how shitty their treatment is even in the most "progressive" and "enlightened" countries.

I've never felt more embarrassingly like a child and an idiot than when trying to communicate to someone else using my primitive language skills. I must have sounded so stupid, with my monosyllabic, one or two word sentences. Yet inside I knew I wasn't, and had a lot to say, and really wanted to participate in the conversation on a much more sophisticated level, yet I couldn't.

Experiences like the above made me be a lot more understanding towards people making the effort to speak my own language when their native tongues are something else. Of course, I'd always known on an intellectual, abstract level that people who struggle to speak my language aren't necessarily stupid, but it's quite another thing to repeatedly go through such experiences yourself. It's much like the empathy one gets for really sick people when one has spent a good deal of time as a patient in a hospital yourself, or suffered from some serious, chronic illness.

I also hated being discriminated against and feeling like a suspect just because I was different or spoke another language, and hated being forced to comply with all sorts of discriminatory and protectionist laws. Work permits are one small example, where I really didn't see why I should be forbidden from working in another country if I could do the job as well as any native -- except obviously the natives want to unfairly advantage themselves in the job market. Really annoying.

There are harsher examples, like being treated like dirt at immigration/customs while the natives get cheerily waved through. Or being treated like a cash machine by hustlers, thieves, and law enforcement just because I'm a foreigner.

So, yeah, these and other instances of discrimination were just little tastes of what being a foreigner in my own country must feel like -- except worse in many cases, because people are often forced to work menial jobs where they're treated much worse than I was, getting attacked by xenophobic natives, having their children bullied because they look different or speak with an accent, even having a President who got elected based on his hatred of and intention to deport millions of immigrants, etc.

Being exposed to other cultures, which is an inevitable part of language learning (except for the learning of artificial languages like Loglan or programming language, which have no culture) also helps one to be more tolerant and appreciative of differences.

Food is a great example of this. Many people spend all their lives in their own country, sometimes not even ever leaving their home town, and only ever eat the same food they were brought up eating. When you get exposed to other cultures, you often try their food, and your world is enlarged, expanding your idea of what's possible and what's good. You might find that once you try it, you actually like some weird, alien food that you used to turn your nose up at, or maybe didn't even know existed.

I'm convinced that much of the hatred towards immigrants and foreigners stems from lack of travel to other countries and exposure to other cultures. Way too many people are far too insular and provincial, and even in the rare cases when they do travel to other countries they tend to stick to their own kind and what they're used to at home, defeating much of the point of leaving home in the first place.