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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

  > this guy wasn't really a migrant

He was migrant by defintion. Not a refugee though.

  > he was pretty close-minded in regards to integrating into a new
  > culture/diet/environment

I wonder, what is the percentage of those hundreds of thousands who do not have the same mindset. Alas, the thinking of those pro-Europet-taking-in-refugees is somewhere along the lines:

  1. Take in all the refugess
  2. ...
  3. Integration done.

There is no magic for the step 2. And there is the big misundrestanding how deep the difference between the cultures is. Also, the not undrestanding that Islam is not just religion, is the way of life—and the way not very much in agreement with the western one. Especially when the western way is considered subpar and the wrong one. Good luck in thinking that a few lecutres on European values will change all that.

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  > 2. ...

If they want to be integrated, it would be really helpful if they learned Finnish. The first guy in the article said he spent most of his time in the gym, and hanging out with other Iraqis, which isn't really going to help with integration.

Learning Finnish won't solve every problem of integration, but without it, I would suggest that integration is impossible.

I don't know how Finland handles asylum seekers, but chances are they keep them together while they determine whether they are refugees, rather than economic migrants. If so, his choice was more or less between hanging out with Syrians, Somali, or other Iraqis, neither of which spoke Finnish.

Also, chances are Finland doesn't teach asylum seekers Finnish while they await that verdict. That makes sense if that process doesn't take much time, but it is hard to make due process take little time if there suddenly are many asylum seekers.

> If they want to be integrated, it would be really helpful if they learned Finnish. The first guy in the article said he spent most of his time in the gym, and hanging out with other Iraqis, which isn't really going to help with integration.

This is such an important point - I'm German, living in Australia, and the Germans here tend to hang out almost exclusively with other Germans, same goes for the Chinese etc. I haven't yet seen a good solution for that "insulation" - It takes real effort and motivation to step outside of your comfort zone, you can't force people to do so, they'll quickly bounce back.

This is a more general phenomenom, like tends to hang out with like, not necessarily out of bigotry towards the un-likes, but just out of familiarity. It's really "seperate but equal" all over again.

Honestly, it just comes down to being open minded, which has to happen on an individual level. I'm open minded by necessity, because there are very few of my race in the USA, much less my current city.

I suppose typically first generation migrants seldom adjust culturally fully to their home country, and only the second generation become truly native?

This isn't a surprise. There's a reason large cities have Chinatown, Little Italy, etc. Immigrants are more comfortable keeping their lives mostly within their own community that shares the same language and cultural elements. While I don't think it's all that healthy to avoid integrating with the society you move into, it's understandable to see people take the easy/comfortable route. Hell, I'd probably wind up doing the same.

I have a Greek acquaintance who lives in my city's unofficial Greek neighbourhood. Everything from groceries to bakeries and cafés, it's all Greek and he doesn't like to stray much from his routine in these shops. All the owners and patrons know each other personally. They get to feel like they're still back home. It keeps them sheltered a bit too much from the rest of us, but hey - they have a real community versus me that doesn't know the first name of anyone that serves me in any of the shops I frequent.

People move somewhere for a reason: most migrants (they are white so they are usually referred to as expats) in my neigborhood in south Spain are Brits who came for the weather and low prices: a lot of them simply want to live in a cheaper and sunnier UK. They do not want to integrate as that is not why they came. Same for the Germans; we have an entire town where everything is in German. Some come for the different lifestyle and Spanish culture; those integrate fast but it is a minority.

Germans in Australia do speak English. Also, I don't think the number of Germans who mostly meet Germans everyday is big. All my German (and French, and Russian) friends in Australia had girlfriends from other places. But sorry, communautarism is visible, generalizations over one's communautarism is frequent but communautarism itself isn't that much.

Integrated to what exactly? You are never going to be integrated with people that want you to speak the local language, even if you do speak it. The thing is, once you leave your country, you are an expat, an expat doesn't do well with people that want to force their local/close minded way of doing things on you.

There are values that are the same across all Europe and those should be the focus of integration. Learning local language is not one of them.

Lee Kuan Yew has had the same experience with the close mindedness of certain cultures and being hard to integrate. My parents noticed the same with people from the same countries as them. Even I noticed early on in school how hard it was for teachers to mention certain progressive ideas without pissing off a bunch guys in my class. I never gave it a second thought until recently.

It's an uphill battle for any country that relies on sweeping issues under the rug instead of managing them up front.

I presume you're referring to Lee's comments about Malay Muslims in Singapore? http://www.singapore-window.org/sw99/90915loy.htm

If you're going to talk about "integration" (read: assimilation), it's worth remembering that they were there first, and it's the Chinese immigrants who are now the majority that has sidelined them.

I still call it integration as it was predominantly secular before a surge of Wahhabism from oil, now there is a divide.

You can look into Iran, Iraq and even Afghanistan. Unfortunately they didn't have a Lee Kuan Yew to draw in the line. My mum told me how no one cared about Halal only sections in Iran, my dad said the same about Iraq even though they would identify as muslims.

http://youtu.be/1KDjjXUx9bY

Step 2 in Australia after WW2 was basically: - education - counselling - socialising

It worked well enough for the influx of Vietnamese refugees too.

Vietnamese communities tend to integrate well. At least in Easter Europe, in Poland or Czech Rep they are doing quite well, no issues at all.

In France too. In fact I notice I know many Vietnamese descendents, but I didn't realize it until I counted. They're Frence-rooted to me. Successful integration.

Step 2 in Australia now is mandatory detention, and step 3 happens some undetermined time later (if ever). Interesting to see how we've gone backwards.

Well, asylum-seekers are a massive political football at the moment, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to other migration - Australia has 500k in and 300k out for an annual net migration of 200k in. Excluding kiwis, permanent migrants in are about 86k. Asylum-seekers are very much in the media, but they are also very not typical of the usual migrant situation here.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/3412....

With 28% of our population being born overseas, we're doing integration okay (21% if you discount UK and kiwiland - and our #1 country of import in recent years is China). For comparison, the UK is 12% and the US is 14%. If you look at the current migrant rate (migrants/1000 pop/year), there are only two sizeable western countries higher than Australia, being Norway and Spain. If you exclude conflict areas, there are no other large countries higher than Australia[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

Basically, the WAP is dead as a dodo as of 40 years ago. The idea that Australia is an insular country afraid of immigration is clearly a myth once you look at the stats. Of course, that doesn't sell newspapers.

In short, no, we haven't gone backwards. We're actually a success story, it's just that we have a very visible wart on our nose at the moment (thank you, politics).

[1] this data is from 2014, which is before Germany took in 1% of it's population in the form of Syrian refugees

I spent some months in Australia and got a completely different idea: multiculturalism is completely an illusion. It's a "timebomb" slowed down by abundance of resources: while everybody is getting more then they need, everything is ok.

Edit: For half a decade I was an expat in a monocultural country. Being open-minded (giving in more often than demanding) and member of a too small community to be considered a threat I could enjoy peace to a greater extent than everywhere else before - even as a member of the majority group in my own country. Probably that's why I'm very bearish regarding multiculturalism.

It's funny how you can tell your political/idealogical leanings on this topic by your phrasing:

> I wonder, what is the percentage of those hundreds of thousands who do not have the same mindset.

Rather than wondering how many people do share that mindset you wonder how many do not share that mindset. This comes across (to me) as if you're coming from a starting position of "they all share this mindset" and are looking to see how wrong you are.

No, that doesn't reveal anything. If the poster is trying to illustrate that others think differently, either phrasing illustrates it just fine.

Your sensitivity to it maybe illustrates that you are much closer to it politically and are easily offended.

They are Islamists. They do not come from a multi-cultural society, e.g. a society of tolerance and acceptance. I think it would be quite deluded to expect something vastly different of them. Whether of not they will adopt Western culture and philosophy is a different question, but at the time of arrival it should be quite clear what culture and values they represent.

Perhaps you mean they are Muslims.

Islamism is an ideology -- or arguably a catch-all term for a number of ideologies -- that want to force Islam into the government, law and everything.

http://www.danielpipes.org/954/distinguishing-between-islam-...

The average Iraqi or Syrian isn't Islamist. E.g. the Alawites in Syria aren't Islamists, and the former Baath party in Iraq wasn't either.

Honor killings were both legal and prevalent in Iraq under Sadam's rule. The Baath party also operated para-military militias that enforced "morality" rules mostly targeting prostitutes and homosexual. Extra marital sex was punishable in Sadam's Iraq and it was commonly enforced by either the family or the government which quite often resulted in death. The picture as far as Syria goes isn't that different the only major difference is that unlike Iraq Syria had and still has specific laws that target homosexuals rather than just "extra martial sex".

> I think it would be quite deluded to expect something vastly different of them

How about we treat their opinion as "unknown" rather than a foregone conclusion (for either side)? Is this too much to ask?

I suppose parent may have been extrapolating their willingness to integrate from that of other immigrants from Muslim cultures who have been living in France/Germany/UK for decades.

How about we work with the information we do know and approach the problem using logic and prudent risk management like we would with almost any other topic?

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