# European immigration debate **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 28, 2015, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171 "2015-08-28T13:58:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Donnerwetter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b2d939/32.png) [@Donnerwetter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Donnerwetter)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/61 "2015-08-29T12:25:08Z")
> [@Hiker](#): > > Right. If your small business owner stops paying his insurance bills, he will lose coverage. If the reason he lost it was because his enterprise went bust and he is now broke, he can apply for social welfare, which includes health insurance. As long as he does not do that, he will have to pick up his medical bills himself, and if he cannot do that, his medical provider will sue. > There is no scenario in this, where he will not be given necessary medical treatment though. I do not see how you get from that observation to your “asylum seekers have it better” conclusion. Setting aside the asylum seeker issue for a moment, that’s exactly the German welfare state dilemma: If you worked your ass off for decades and you happen to fall on hard times, you are treated exactly the same as somebody who has never worked a day in his life. And if you were stupid enough to save some of your income for your children or for a rainy day, you have to use up that money first. ---
**Author:** ![Hiker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3be4f8/32.png) [@Hiker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hiker)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/62 "2015-08-29T12:54:09Z")
> [@Donnerwetter](#): > > Setting aside the asylum seeker issue for a moment, that’s exactly the German welfare state dilemma: If you worked your ass off for decades and you happen to fall on hard times, you are treated exactly the same as somebody who has never worked a day in his life. And if you were stupid enough to save some of your income for your children or for a rainy day, you have to use up that money first. Yes, and I can absolutely understand why someone in that situation would be angry or disappointed. But you need to understand that the welfare system was never about justice. Some claim that it is, but that is not true. The motivation for the welfare system can be found in article 1 of the Grundgesetz (the German constitution). It is about dignity. The state must not allow any resident of the country to fall to a level of poverty that won’t allow him or her to live a life in dignity. In order to achieve that preeminent goal the state is allowed to take away money from those who have it and give it to those who do not. But that justification cannot include giving welfare to those who still have their life savings. An employed worker might ask why his welfare contribution should go to a millionaire, who no longer has an income because his company went belly-up, but who still has his Porsche parked in front of his villa in Bad Tölz. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/63 "2015-08-29T17:26:28Z")
> [@Stoneburg](#): > > No it does not. The reason the rape statistics are skewed is from what I understand because of the way these things are measured, as well as Sweden having a (fortunately) high rate of these crimes being reported. > > When I looked into this I found out that in Sweden, if a woman is raped multiple times by a single person, that is reported as multiple rapes, and this apparently isn’t the standard internationally. Since most cases of rape happen within existing relationship (I think only like 10% are perpetrated by “strangers”) this is fairly common and would lead to a very big increase in the statistics. > > Immigrants do seem to be over represented in this statistic but nowhere near to the extent that the anti-immigration populists would have us believe. It’s still problematic, and I for one am not very fond of the view of women that some of the immigrant groups have as a cultural baggage. Then again, I’m not really fond of any cultural baggage at all. Isn’t their methodology being different from other countries’ only a problem if they’ve changed it? I mean, if it has always been measured in the same way (multiple rapes by one person = multiple rapes in statistics) it’s still possible to see if the trend of the numbers have changed. If their methodology is consistent, you could compare their old and recent stats to other countries as well via whatever method has always been used to account for the difference. ---
**Author:** ![Construct](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/50afbb/32.png) [@Construct](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Construct)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/64 "2015-08-29T17:28:35Z")
> [@Stoneburg](#): > > Our people? > > I’m a white male Swede and reading what you wrote, I’d like you to take me off the list of your “our people”. I don’t want to be part of that tribal and racist nonsense. There is no “our people”, there’s just people. Your ignorance and cultural bias is your own. Sweden, obviously, is going to be the first Western nation to collapse under the load uneducated, violent third world trash. That’s why, for example, Sweden’s Human Development Index is [expected to decline](http://ww.rrojasdatabank.info/HDRP_2010_40.pdf) continuously in both absolute and relative terms until at least 2030. Hopefully, however, their failure will provide an important example to the rest of the West about the danger of importing people who don’t share your values, your religion, your genetic predispositions, or your way of life. ---
**Author:** ![Hiker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3be4f8/32.png) [@Hiker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hiker)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/65 "2015-08-29T18:32:19Z")
> [@Construct](#): > > Sweden, obviously, is going to be the first Western nation to collapse under the load uneducated, violent third world trash. That’s why, for example, Sweden’s Human Development Index is [expected to decline](http://ww.rrojasdatabank.info/HDRP_2010_40.pdf) continuously in both absolute and relative terms until at least 2030. Hopefully, however, their failure will provide an important example to the rest of the West about the danger of importing people who don’t share your values, your religion, your genetic predispositions, or your way of life. Yep. According to the report you cited the Swedish HDI will actually fall below that of Lybia. Wait - Lybia? Isn’t that country full of the people you like to call “third world thrash”. Now how does that fit your racist agenda? ---
**Author:** ![Stoneburg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df705f/32.png) [@Stoneburg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoneburg)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/66 "2015-08-29T20:15:11Z")
> [@Construct](#): > > Sweden, obviously, is going to be the first Western nation to collapse under the load uneducated, violent third world trash. That’s why, for example, Sweden’s Human Development Index is [expected to decline](http://ww.rrojasdatabank.info/HDRP_2010_40.pdf) continuously in both absolute and relative terms until at least 2030. Hopefully, however, their failure will provide an important example to the rest of the West about the danger of importing people who don’t share your values, your religion, your genetic predispositions, or your way of life. Yeah… But the thing is, YOU don’t share my values, my religion or my way of life. And none of the people that I know who come from the “third world” are violent trash, neither are all of them uneducated. And from your comments, I am pretty sure I prefer sharing my country with them rather than you. Unlike you, they have respect for other human beings. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/67 "2015-08-29T20:57:21Z")
> [@Construct](#): > > Sweden, obviously, is going to be the first Western nation to collapse under the load uneducated, violent third world trash. That’s why, for example, Sweden’s Human Development Index is [expected to decline](http://ww.rrojasdatabank.info/HDRP_2010_40.pdf) continuously in both absolute and relative terms until at least 2030. Hopefully, however, their failure will provide an important example to the rest of the West about the danger of importing people who don’t share your values, your religion, your genetic predispositions, or your way of life. “uneducated, violent third world trash”? “genetic predispositions”? This is just trolling. I doubt that even you believe that sort of nonsense. This is a Warning to knock it off. If you simply must clutter up the discussion, refrain from comments that are deliberately chosen to get a rise out of other posters. [/Moderating] ---
**Author:** ![Huvudtvatt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Huvudtvatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huvudtvatt)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2015, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171/68 "2015-08-29T22:09:17Z")
> [@Construct](#): > > Sweden’s Human Development Index is [expected to decline](http://ww.rrojasdatabank.info/HDRP_2010_40.pdf) continuously in both absolute and relative terms until at least 2030. If you really read that report you will find that the only value judgment the authors make about Sweden is that they place it in the highest cohort of development, and the point of the report is to point out that countries in the same cohort tend to have the same trend of development. The negative data about Sweden only comes in a table in the appendix where they contrast their own method with numbers from other sources. If I understand it correctly they took a few numbers from these other sources from 1975 and 2005 and then drew a straight line into the future. The premise of this is obviously flawed, and the predictions will be increasingly inaccurate, especially for thirty years into the future. By the same table we can learn that libya is on a steady rise and will pass Sweden by 2030. yeah, ok. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-immigration-debate/729171.md?page=3)