To add to your anecdata, had you visited London during the time of Dickens you would have had your possessions thieved by a charming raffish urchin that spoke English in a dialect you also wouldn't have understood.

True, but at least it would have been by a Brit in a Brit's country.

Point is, if you immigrate, you assimilate best you can with current "native" society.

I gotta be honest, I find the point of view that says "It would have been better if I were accosted by a native-born national" fascinating.

It's like being a lot happier getting half your crops taken by the local king instead of a wandering warlord, or burned at the stake by God-fearing Christians instead of "heathens." It's a kind of belief in a specific just order of reality that I don't think I'm in a place in my life journey to feel.

There's a fascinating book called Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson that talks about the place nationalism took in the zeitgeist of much of humanity, displacing previous tribe-structuring concepts of shared faith, same-village origin, or vassaldom to the local lord. Reading between the lines, it makes an interesting case that nationhood, while a useful fiction (it gives a person in East London a reason to care about the fate of someone they will definitely never meet in the Falkland Islands and made experiments like "The British Empire" possible), is no less a fiction than the people-unifying stories that came before.

And if the fiction is making a person care more about the fate of someone they'll never meet on an island in the Patagonian Shelf in the South Atlantic Ocean than a person who is so physically near to them that they just stole their laptop... Maybe the story could use some tweaking, yeah?

You'd prefer if your immigrant MacGuffin had nailed your head to the floor like Dinsdale Piranha or the Kray brothers?

Maybe done you over with blunt instruments and broken glass like a couple of 'scouse trainspotters?

Traditional native British violence then, none of that soft foreign stuff?

You're wise to consign such thoughts to a meconium account.