immigration

[knot]

Which part of it sounds like the Daily Mail? A Dutch PhD student recently wrote her thesis on the Sharia courts in the UK.. I think were are around 50

It's a cultural problem as much as anything. The people arriving don't necessarily share the same European values, and that can create ghettos of intolerance. At the same time it can invoke a reaction of intolerance among local populations. Norway's intelligence service even went so far as to say the biggest risk posed by the influx of migrants was a violent reaction from far-right groups rather than Islamists infiltrating the country.

Yes, it's a lose-lose situation, so why allow people in? The consequences will be terrible for everyone. Help them out in their local areas instead. Send them weapons to fight against ISIS or something. How come female Kurdish fighters seem to have much bigger balls than all these men? Wtf

Now that's all bad and it needs managing, but the way these problems are depicted is often out of proportion and it risks painting everyone with the same brush. Which in turn perpetuates this distinction between 'us' and 'them' in order to exclude migrants from our sphere of moral consideration.

Well, it is us vs them. Just take a look at the PEW polls and see what attitudes European Muslims hold. They despise liberal values and infidels ( but dont seem to mind the welfare state -.- )

Helping Syrians is a clear moral duty, not charity. They meet any standard for recognition as refugees with a “well-founded fear of persecution”, under the terms of the UN convention on refugees.

UN's human rights are garbage since they grant protection to the even the most hardened terrorist regardless of what consequences that has for everyone else. If we weren't slaves to these insane human rights we could strip returning ISIS fighters of their citizenship for treachery. Instead they get to roam the streets freely after getting some counceling \:D/ . Also I dont really see why it's our moral duty to let people in.. but I can agree with supporting them in their local areas

Arrivals in Europe have rocketed this year not so much because the civil war is worse than ever - though it is - as because the situation in the countries neighbouring their homeland has grown desperate.

They only come because they know they will be taken in. Stop taking them in, and they will stop coming. Continue taking people in, and exponentially more people will come. Europe can't house all the people of the world's failed states, or it will end up becoming one itself.

It's a correlation, yes.
Newcomers need housing, schools and health care. There is some evidence that they depress wages for the low-paid, though barely. Where labour markets are rigid, migrants can become an underclass (and resort to crime), as is the case now in many countries.

Migrant workers tend to be disproportionally represented in the bottom segments of the national earnings distribution in most Western European countries. Unemployment rates are also higher among migrants. And these disadvantages are particularly pronounced among non-European immigrants.

Some of those reports in the wiki link are adjusted for socio-economic status, and in those cases Middle Eastern immigrants still commit 2x as much violent crime. It's a problem of Islamic macho/honor culture

[miniboes]

Some of those reports in the wiki link are adjusted for socio-economic status, and in those cases Middle Eastern immigrants still commit 2x as much violent crime. It's a problem of Islamic macho/honor culture

How do you know it's a problem of islamic culture? How do you know the problem is not that non-European immigrants tend to be less educated, and therefore have lower wages and higher rates of unemployment? How do you know they even commit more crimes, can it not be that they are overrepresented in statistics because of police biases?

Well, it is us vs them. Just take a look at the PEW polls and see what attitudes European Muslims hold. They despise liberal values and infidels ( but dont seem to mind the welfare state -.- )

Who are "them"?

[knot]

Some of those reports in the wiki link are adjusted for socio-economic status, and in those cases Middle Eastern immigrants still commit 2x as much violent crime. It's a problem of Islamic macho/honor culture

How do you know it's a problem of islamic culture? How do you know the problem is not that non-European immigrants tend to be less educated, and therefore have lower wages and higher rates of unemployment? How do you know they even commit more crimes, can it not be that they are overrepresented in statistics because of police biases?

No I'm saying some of those studies already adjusted for SES and they still commit more violent crime even then, so it's not about education or jobs. My explanation: cultural difference (specifically influenced by Islam). You can choose your own interpretation or maybe there's a study that explains the difference

Who are "them"?

Well, we could make the cut-off at the 68% who want people arrested for insulting Islam, or we could go for the 34% who are a-okay with sucide bombing

[miniboes]

No I'm saying some of those studies already adjusted for SES and they still commit more violent crime even then, so it's not about education or jobs. My explanation: cultural difference (specifically influenced by Islam). You can choose your own interpretation or maybe there's a study that explains the difference

Citation please?

Well, we could make the cut-off at the 68% who want people arrested for insulting Islam, or we could go for the 34% who are a-okay with sucide bombing

Or we could acknowledge that it is not "us" versus "them", but rather a conflict between good and bad ideas. Polarization isn't going to help anyone.

[inator]

Well, it is us vs them.

I think we can't really have this discussion if we don't at least agree on the basic premise that nationality/cultural background is not a reasonable criteria to take into account when deciding on the moral consideration that we owe human beings.

The current orthodoxy rests on the vague assumption about the community's right to determine its membership, and that helping "outsiders" is a sign of charitable character.
A consequentialist would think instead that immigration policies should be based on the interests of all those affected. Where the interests of different parties conflict, more pressing or fundamental interests take precedence over less fundamental interests.

Yes, it's a lose-lose situation [...] The consequences will be terrible for everyone.

The most pressing and fundamental interests of the refugees are at stake.
How much the residents of the recipient nations will be affected will vary. We shouldn't assume that the residents will be affected for the worse - the economy may receive a boost from an intake of newcomers, which is very probable in the context of the ageing and shrinking population of Europe.
There are also other possible and more diffuse consequences that we need to think about, like that taking large numbers of refugees might encourage the flow of refugees in the future, or that it will enhance resentment in the local population.
If we help them, we have a complex mix of consequences to be considered, some definite, some highly speculative.

Not helping them will result in some definite negative consequences, and these will be mainly directed towards the migrants - which makes it easy for us to say "not my problem". Morally, it is though.
However, it wouldn't just lead to negative consequences for them. It's also not politically feasible for Europe, since the alternative can have potentially worse consequences.

So why allow people in?

You may say that what is moral is not necessarily politically acceptable. Let's consider the political alternatives to letting them in. There are more possible points of intervention:

One thought is to try to attack the problem at its source by ending the civil war in Syria. This is much easier said than done — Russia recently entered the scene, complicating a battlefield already divided among multiple players with radically different motivations. From the EU's perspective, this is not a viable approach.

Another component would be to move one link further up the chain and request Turkey's cooperation to stop the flow of migrants. And Turkey's price is quite high: Erdogan asked for 3 billion euros, the relaxation of visa restrictions on Turkish travel in Europe and a jump-start to Turkey's EU accession.
Brussels could likely raise the money, but the other two conditions are more difficult. Especially Germany is home to the vast majority of Turkish immigrants into Europe, and tensions have long been high over the issue. A solution that mitigates the refugees issue but brings in more Turkish migrants would simply replace one problem with another.

This brings the EU another step along the route, to Greece, which could hypothetically return to the draconian measures of the previous administration to discourage migration. Greece's immigration policies were already criticized on human rights grounds and if Brussels called for this publicly, it would face backlash. Even if they did, boarding and seizing vessels in international waters is only a palliative measure that will have a limited effect.
More importantly, if the EU were to ask a favor from Greece, Syriza would be able to use this as a bargaining chip, after Brussels spent the first half of 2015 forcing Athens to adopt economic reform - the last thing it wants to do is give Athens an excuse to delay.

After the migrants leave Greece, it becomes harder for the EU to contain the problem. The Syrians have a particularly strong case for asylum, and it's extremely hard to repatriate them. The EU wants to keep the Balkan countries from confronting one another over migrant flows. At the same time, the bloc wants to keep borders within Europe as open as possible to preserve the union's structure and core functions.

I wouldn't blame Europe if it decided that trying to find better ways to absorb refugees is more feasible than keeping them out.

[inator]

Do you think migration should be restricted depending on the different motives that people have to migrate?

It's a complicated issue. I think it's definitely wrong to say we should not allow economic migrants in at all. I think in the long run, economic migrants can have very positive effects on a western economy. (A good read: http://business.time.com/2013/01/30/the ... s-and-why/). I think economic migrants in the Netherlands are filling jobs that Dutch citizens are largely unwilling to do. I feel like the Polish, Morrocan and Turkish immigrants are not stealing our jobs as much as filling the holes we leave.

Yeah, interesting read.
The fundamental point is that Europe needs migrants. It has too few workers to pay for its citizens’ retirement and to provide the services they want. Migrants are net contributors to the public purse.
While states may not be able to pick who comes in search of protection, they want to choose who comes to work. A willingness to accept legal migrants gives countries more opportunity to turn back the illegal sort - liberalizing the issuing of work visas may give countries of origin a stake in the system and therefore a reason to co-operate in curbing illegal flows.

Ethically, I think clearly political and geographical migrants (those who have to flee because of unsafe situations) are a no-brainer; they have to be cared for.

An issue that I see is that the UN convention uses a definition for refugees that was originally designed to meet the dislocation caused in Europe by the Second World War. It's a narrow one and it has failed to cover the large scale movements of people in times of famine or civil disturbance that have occured since. It just kinda defines away the problem.

We can also decide as a nation that we accept the slight threat of an incease in the likelyhood of a terroristic act in favour of helping people in need.

I wouldn't be so quick to make the refugees-terrorist attacks correlation just yet... But as you say, even if there was evidence (which there isn't) that the current flow of refugees will lead to overall slightly negative consequences for us, their need to be helped outweighs this. Morally speaking. Politically, you'd need public support for that.

[miniboes]

Yeah, interesting read.
The fundamental point is that Europe needs migrants. It has too few workers to pay for its citizens’ retirement and to provide the services they want. Migrants are net contributors to the public purse.
While states may not be able to pick who comes in search of protection, they want to choose who comes to work. A willingness to accept legal migrants gives countries more opportunity to turn back the illegal sort - liberalizing the issuing of work visas may give countries of origin a stake in the system and therefore a reason to co-operate in curbing illegal flows.

Yes. It's interesting to look at a nation like Japan, where they do not accept many migrants, and see that their economy is suffering greatly from an ageing population. In the Netherlands we struggle with that problem too, but I've for a while now thought it's rather easy to solve; healthier eating and immigrants. The people that say multiculturalism in the Netherlands has been a 'disaster' are in my view delusional. The vast majority of muslims here are law-abiding citizens with liberal values.

We can also decide as a nation that we accept the slight threat of an incease in the likelyhood of a terroristic act in favour of helping people in need.

I wouldn't be so quick to make the refugees-terrorist attacks correlation just yet... But as you say, even if there was evidence (which there isn't) that the current flow of refugees will lead to overall slightly negative consequences for us, their need to be helped outweighs this. Morally speaking. Politically, you'd need public support for that.

Terrorism is sort of a non-issue on itself. I don't remember the exact statistics, but I'm pretty sure more people died in the US of falling furniture than terrorist attacks. The dangerous part of terrorism is how people react to it. The rise of the far right in Europe is the manifestation of the real danger of terrorism; the western world retracting progress and freedom in favor of safety it barely needs. One of the terrorists of the Paris attacks was a Syrian 'refugee'. The fact that that the others were one Argentinian, one Frenchman and 6 Belgians is ignored. This is what sensationalist media does. This is what populist politicians like Geert Wilders do. That's where terrorism gets dangerous, and therefore I think we need to be careful who we let in. Even if that is not a good reason, people still feel like this should be done and if progressive parties do not express that view the far right parties are the only ones who will.

[inator]

Yes. It's interesting to look at a nation like Japan, where they do not accept many migrants, and see that their economy is suffering greatly from an ageing population. In the Netherlands we struggle with that problem too, but I've for a while now thought it's rather easy to solve; healthier eating and immigrants. The people that say multiculturalism in the Netherlands has been a 'disaster' are in my view delusional. The vast majority of muslims here are law-abiding citizens with liberal values.

Here's another good article about that: https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/why-e ... mmigration

Terrorism is sort of a non-issue on itself. I don't remember the exact statistics, but I'm pretty sure more people died in the US of falling furniture than terrorist attacks. The dangerous part of terrorism is how people react to it. The rise of the far right in Europe is the manifestation of the real danger of terrorism; the western world retracting progress and freedom in favor of safety it barely needs. One of the terrorists of the Paris attacks was a Syrian 'refugee'. The fact that that the others were one Argentinian, one Frenchman and 6 Belgians is ignored. This is what sensationalist media does. This is what populist politicians like Geert Wilders do. That's where terrorism gets dangerous, and therefore I think we need to be careful who we let in. Even if that is not a good reason, people still feel like this should be done and if progressive parties do not express that view the far right parties are the only ones who will.

I agree. It's important for populists to have their views expressed in politics, though I'm not sure what's a better idea - to create this window in mainstream decision making or to create opportunity for far-right parties to represent those interests...

One thing is for sure, if nationalists don't get their views represented at all, that can lead to a charged atmosfere and explosions of violence against migrants. Demonising them might help galvanize the resistence.
Through the end of October in Germany, there were 429 attacks on refugee shelters, including 93 arson attacks (statistics by the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung and PRO ASYL, two immigration advocacy groups). That compares to 153 attacks for all of 2014. There were also 118 assaults this year and more than 200 injured foreigners.
Austria and the Netherlands have also seen a sharp rise in refugees this year but nothing near the type of violence that went on in Germany. In contrast to Germany, there the far-right is part of the political establishment.

Far-right parties, however unsavory they may be to the mainstream, can help defuse radical tendencies by giving voters who feel abandoned by the political establishment a voice, and also channel and possibly divert the frustration felt by many voters.
And the more extremist they are, the less chance there is that they'll get significant support.

A referendum would be necessary to ensure the support is there.

Directly consulting the public specifically on the question of refugees would probably make matters worse than they have to be. When making the decision whom to elect, people have to consider a variety of factors and many don't choose the far-right in spite of the terrorism scare, because they may feel strongly about other issues too and not feel represented by them in those departments.
A referendum might be polarising and force mainstream politics to take stronger measures against immigration than a far-right voice in parliament would.

[knot]

Citations?

Look at the wiki article I posted on last page, some of those countries have adjusted for SES. I think it was Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands

Well, it is us vs them.

I think we can't really have this discussion if we don't at least agree on the basic premise that nationality/cultural background is not a reasonable criteria to take into account when deciding on the moral consideration that we owe human beings.

Why not? Some cultures produce bad people, others produce better ones. Islamic cultures tend to produce significantly worse people than other cultures. An atheist doctor from Taiwan has more moral worth than an illiterate Islamist from Afghanistan, because he's likely to cause less harm

The current orthodoxy rests on the vague assumption about the community's right to determine its membership, and that helping "outsiders" is a sign of charitable character.

I don't mind helping them out where they are. I just dont want this social experiment between secular society vs Bronze Age theocracy to play out in my backyard anymore

The most pressing and fundamental interests of the refugees are at stake.

Governments should be mainly focused on the interests of their citizens. I dont see a reason to be concerned with the interests of immigrants who are fundamentally against our interests of maintaining a liberal democracy. Most Muslims favor theocracy and are (to varying degrees) committed to achieving it either by violence or by using the principles of democracy against itself.

How much the residents of the recipient nations will be affected will vary. We shouldn't assume that the residents will be affected for the worse

Things are gonna get ugly. Sweden will be the canary in the coal mine. I predict economic collapse and total civil unrest + violence. People really don't like being treated like 2nd class citizens in their own country. Also I'm not that concerned with the low birth rate of Europeans. I think there are many ways to solve this problem that don't involve bringing in millions of people who have very problematic views

Dont have time to properly respond to the rest, but basically I think that, based on what's been happening with immigration in Europe over the last 30 years, the benefits minus costs equation is negative in both the short and long term -- it's a terrible idea on multiple levels... and we should look to countries like Japan who far better understand how to maintain their culture and cohesive society

[inator]

An atheist doctor from Taiwan has more moral worth than an illiterate Islamist from Afghanistan, because he's likely to cause less harm

Probably, possibly not. In the end it depends on what those individuals actually do. It's easy to realize that nationality is the most unrelevant characteristic in that mix. Why not compare an Afghan doctor and an Afghan islamist illiterate? You'd get the same result.
When it comes to Syria, everyone is fleeing, from doctors to illiterates.

Governments should be mainly focused on the interests of their citizens. I dont see a reason to be concerned with the interests of immigrants who are fundamentally against our interests of maintaining a liberal democracy.

Politically speaking, there's some truth to that. It's what miniboes was talking about - governments must address the interests and views of their citizens, however wrong they may be.

But morally - what your own rational view should be - it's different. It should be based on consequentialism, not just a personal interest while excluding the consequences for other people affected. That's what we're discussing here, the question of who should be included in our sphere of moral consideration.

But as I said, even politically it's difficult to find a viable consequenceless alternative.

Things are gonna get ugly. Sweden will be the canary in the coal mine. I predict economic collapse and total civil unrest + violence. People really don't like being treated like 2nd class citizens in their own country. Also I'm not that concerned with the low birth rate of Europeans. I think there are many ways to solve this problem that don't involve bringing in millions of people who have very problematic views

Assumptions, speculation, ignoring alternative solutions, and "all hell will break loose" mentality promoted by sensationalist media.
There are more like 1 million in all of Europe (0,2% of its population), and 40% of those applications come from people from the Balkans. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_ ... _Civil_War)
In contrast, absorbing the influx of refugees (4 milion) has been an enormous challenge for Syria’s neighbours, with strong implications for the stability of the entire region.