So I’m reading the news about the varying European immigrant crises- one being the number of unwanted African immigrants dying in droves while trying to cross the Mediterranean in rickety boats, and the other being huge numbers of Middle Eastern and other refugees and immigrants migrating westward. The US had a similar problem a few years back, with the huge numbers of Central American children migrating here all at once.
I started thinking about it and came up with a bunch of questions and observations and figured maybe this would be a good place to start a discussion, even if my post is kind of rambling.
On one hand, it’s heart-wrenching to think of these desperate people taking such terrible risks, and wondering just what they’re fleeing to make them willing to take such risks, and the suffering and death that happens during their attempts.
On the other hand, it’s not like the EU nations have unlimited capacity to absorb what usually amount to desperately poor, unskilled immigrants who neither speak the language, nor fit into the culture.
It’s not really reasonable to expect any country to just absorb any immigrants who show up and want to live there; most places have resource constraints, and the people who already live there may have opinions as well- the Italians apparently don’t want African immigrants to come and live in their country, so why should they be required to take them in? It’s their country and their tax money, and ultimately their consciences who would deal with the problem.
Should the Western nations intervene somehow to fix whatever shitholes these people came from, so that they can eventually go back, and so that the immigrant flow ceases?
Is there a reasonable expectation that if your standard of living sucks where you are, that some other country should be required to accept you living there so that your standard of living improves?
I don’t know the answers, but it seems like most Western nations are grappling with these questions in one way or another.
Are you not a descendant of people who fled to your country seeking a better life? Or perhaps you are a First Nations person? If not, aren’t they the first, in your land, to be overwhelmed and subjugated by refugees coming to their shores?
Either way, why was it okey dokey for your ancestors, but not for this suffering mass?
(I am enormously embarrassed that my own country is doing so little. Ours is a LARGE nation, lots of room. Enormously diverse, and welcoming to other cultures. And there is no excuse of a large anti immigrant population or political party. It’s shameful.)
That is the alternative indeed, but somehow the same people that opposes immigrants also oppose helping other nations develop. Nice Job Breaking It, Heros
Regarding Central America I should point that the first exodus from countries like El Salvador to the USA was caused first by a cleansing of Salvadorans from Honduras (Not as bad as the fight between Tutsies and Hutus from Ruanda, but Salvadoreans were cleansed from Honduras nevertheless) . Then the civil war came it was made much worse by the pig headed support of military thugs that only needed to claim that “we are killing communists” to get billions in military aid from the USA. The thugs ended preferring to kill students, teachers, worker leaders and priests.
So a lot was broken and El Salvador is still having to deal with former military, former rebel forces and some of the worst gangs in the world fueled in big part thanks to the deportation of many of them from the USA to El Salvador.
I do agree on deporting those guys, but then again I do think that putting them in EL Salvador with no resources for the country to deal with that onslaught was and is asinine. So yeah, besides El Salvador other countries have and are suffering for the past actions of the big powers, in the middle east it was not only thanks to the Iraq invasion that we are seeing now what ISIS is doing, earlier the Europeans were the ones that carved the territory and supported dictators to get the resources.
So IMHO there should be an accelerated effort to find the best refugees to accept in Europe and make better efforts to improve the conditions in the affected nations, and/or to really effectively support the refugee camps so the people will have more incentive to remain there until the unrest ends. (Speaking of Syria, most of the refugee camps are located in Syria itself)
(Hans Rosling explains the tragic crisis in Syria, more than half of all Syrians have left their homes. Where are they?)
It all depends on whether there a point (vs. just purely administrative reasons) to having different countries.
That is, what makes your country your country and not another country? Is it the ethnic make-up? Is it the prevalent shared cultural values? Is it the history/traditions of the country? Or is it purely the administration, borders and set of laws that apply within them that make it your country and not another one?
If your answer is just the administration/borders and laws, then sure mass immigration will not change your country.
But if your answer is one of the others - ethnic make-up, prevalent shared cultural values, history/traditions etc. - then mass immigration from places that are not closely related to your country will destroy your country, in the sense of changing it beyond recognition. I am not talking about a few thousand here and there. I am talking immigrant wave that would be a significant percentage of your population from places that have extremely different cultures/mores/traditions.
If you have no problem with that, or think that the country will change to the better, then go ahead and advocate mass immigration.
There is an essentially unlimited amount of people worse off than Syrians who would like to emigrate to Europe (or other Western countries). Africa’s population is expected to triple by the end of the century, to nearly 4 billion people. Of these, a great many of them will be desperately poor. Essentially, mass immigration to Europe (which is less than 1 million so far) will be a trivial drop in the bucket of impoverished and war-plagued people. There’s simply no way Europe can accommodate everyone who wants to live there.
As humans, we generally do have some moral obligation to help our fellow man. But the mass immigration debate is quickly becoming a neo-White Man’s Burden, wherein Americans and Europeans essentially care for the welfare of everyone else in the world. That isn’t sustainable in the long run.
America and Europe are large entities. But, for example, 1 billion Indians alone would emigrate to the US if given the chance. And India doesn’t even suffer from war or substantial sectarian violence. America is the greatest country in the world, but we can’t accommodate everyone.
That’s a natural and slow process. With immigration from a disparate culture, it is imposed, and much faster. A house will last 50-100 years (sometimes multiple centuries) until it needs to be replaced. Or if it is neglected and squatters are allowed in it may be destroyed in a couple of years.
BrainGlutton, that’s great that you can quote famous authors, but is it realistic for the UK to take in, say, two millionm refugees this year? How about four million?
Forget culture; where the hell are they all going to stay? Right now they’re staying in camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Is that okay?
The scope of this is difficult to process. Canadian politicians are bragging in the midst of a campaign about how many refugees they’d bring in, with one upping the ante to a staggering 25,000. Wow, 25,000! In the scope of the wave of refugees, 25,000 is materially equivalent to zero. The number of refugees can’t be counted to an accuracy within that number. It’s great for the 25,000 the guy claims he’d bring in (how precisely that would be accomplished is a detail left to the voters’ imaginations; Canada is notably distant from Europe and the Middle East) but doesn’t really constitute solving the problem.
Such simplistic thinking is not going to solve the problem.
For generations the United States absorbed massive numbers of immigrants. Canada absorbed smaller numbers, and so did Australia and Argentina and other countries. People worried about immigrants. Would they be able to adapt to the values and laws of their new home? Could the country absorb such large numbers? There was always some friction involving immigrants, but at least in the USA and Canada it was generally overcome and everyone learned to live together in peace.
But the USA and Canada of 2015 are not exactly identical to the USA and Canada of 1845. European countries of 2015 are not identical to the USA and Canada of 1845.
The countries that immigrants are fleeing from are not identical to what they were in 1845. The world is not the same now as it was then. Among other obvious differences:
[ul]
[li]Because of globalization and technology, it’s much easier for vast numbers of people to move in a short period of time.[/li][li]Also, technology makes it easier for people to communicate over long distances. Immigrants are no longer cut off from their country of birth. Economic and social ties can therefore remain much stronger after they settle in another country.[/li][li]For the waves of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, there’s a justifiable fear that members of Al Queda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups may be among them. Given the many instances of Islamic terrorists traveling between Europe of the Middle East and commiting bloodshed in European cities, it would be foolish not to be concerned about this.[/li][/ul]
In practice it is not everyone so you are grossly wrong, check the Hans Rosling link and stop with the Appeal to fear arguments.
Not to mention that the point I made was about helping other nations develop, not to send them handouts but help to deal with the mess that the powerful nations left behind.
It’s not that individual terrorists may sneak in. It is that the culture that produces such terrorists in those countries is mass-imported with the immigrants.
Today we might think of Irish and Italians and Jews as part of the American culture, but it didn’t seem that way 150 years ago. The US went through a lot of cultural change back then, and fairly quickly, and I suspect most of us think it is for the better.
But saying cultural change is good is different from saying any country can absorb a lot of immigrants at any one time.
But I’ve got a solution - let’s send Donald Trump to Europe. And don’t let him come back. He can just yell at the immigrants and negotiate with them and then they’ll go home.
Its a problem, its not an insurmountable problem. The UK has taken large numbers of refugees throughout its history, various species of Frenchmen escaping over the centuries, Eastern European Jews, Irish, S Asians from Uganda etc etc.
The current Mayor of London is the great grandson of an exiled Turkish politician. The former Leader of the Opposition was descended from Jews from Russia.
The numbers do not support this “mass” importation argument, in reality virtually all refugees are fleeing the violence and do not want to bring it where they and their families are moving too.
If you were correct then you would had seen many Vietnamese among the ones doing terrorism acts in the countries they moved too.
I agree with sources that point out that it is the absence of legal migration channels what is responsible for large scale illegal immigration, which diverts law enforcement resources to combating terrorism.
But that is not my point, more efforts should be done to identity the best refugees to allow in, and for the rest offer better aid and support on efforts to get the refugees to remain close or in the countries affected by unrest.
Yes, but the cultures were not wildly different. You really cannot compare the differences between German, Irish and Italian cultures in 1800s to the differences between US/European culture on one side and Syrian/Iraqi/Libyan culture on the other. It’s like comparing a creek to a Grand Canyon.
Let me put it this way - I would think that everyone understands that if there was some kind of bizarre disaster in Europe and the whole population of Belgium - 11M - needed to be accommodated elsewhere, it would not be that problematic for the US/Canada (or the non-French Europe) to absorb them, while doing the same for 11M Syrians/Iraqi/Libyans/Egyptians etc. would be hugely problematic.
Even when skills exist, there can be a problem when it comes to proving them. A wholly legal migrant may have problems such as being asked for proof of having passed a post-college certification exam which the receiving country requires but hers doesn’t (I’ve met people in that situation in several countries); a refugee usually won’t be carrying diplomas and records of grades. For trade jobs, differences in code and customs in different countries can lead to someone being considered unqualified, not because they don’t know how to [insert task here] but because the ways they know aren’t correct in the new location. To pick an example from a kind of task most of us know how to do: a three-point turn is common enough in the US that I was asked to perform one in my driving exam, but in some countries performing one would be a quick way to lose your license (or not get one, if done during your exam).
I don’t know how many refugees the UK can handle. But the point is that, in terms of British national identity, this presents a situation not in any important way different from what it would be if an equal number of equally poor and desperate refugees were coming to the UK from a white-majority Christian-culture English-speaking country – which is exactly what Terr appears to be denying.
Yes, there is a huge insurmountable difference in culture between countries who are both on the Mediterranean, and have thousands of years of interaction, like Italy, Greece and Syria:dubious::rolleyes:
Consider the American experience: Our population has been supplemented by several large waves of immigrants over the centuries, most of them from “a disparate culture” from the POV of the native-born Americans of the time. Even the Irish and the Germans were “the other” when they got here in the early 19th Century. And no doubt each wave has changed our culture somewhat, but none has “destroyed” it, not even the Chinese, who came from a culture as alien to America’s as any on Earth. And – here’s the important thing – none of this is has turned out to be in any way regrettable, except perhaps from the POV of American Indians/Native Americans/First Nations.