Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

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Nobody is being "replaced", you make it sound like they are taking highly educated German people, dispose of them in some secret way, and then fill their free positions with random Syrian refugees.

As a native German, I can assure you that no native German people are being "displaced". This is just a semi-ancient right-wing trope about "Them foreigners stealing our jobs", with the occasional "and women" attached to it.

In the 90's these same people were railing against eastern Europeans, and how their culture and values are supposedly not "compatible with Western Values". Now, over a decade after the EU eastward expansion, rarely anybody seems to remember that part of history and the formerly marginalized are now so "assimilated" that they are part of the very same mobs which used to marginalize them.

Nothing about this whole topic is new, even the surrounding social unrests ain't new and are comparably civil compared to what went on not too long ago [0]. The only thing that's changed is the color of the people that are being scapegoated as the source of all problems and controversy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots

If a country's birthrate is low and it needs immigrants to fill in the gap in workforce that low birthrate is creating, it's essentially replacing those people over time.

Since your German I'd urge you to read the book Strange Death of Europe. Assimilation isn't an easy process and mass migration in this scale is indeed a new thing.

> Assimilation isn't an easy process and mass migration in this scale is indeed a new thing.

It isn't really and most certainly not for central Europe or Germany. People too often ignore that the 20th century has seen constant and massive population movements [0].

In Germany particularly with Turkish guest workers [1], fall of the Iron Curtain triggering mass migration from eastern Europe, later refugees from the Yugoslav wars mixed in. More migration after the 2004 enlargement of the EU eastwards.

Now you could argue "All these people have the same culture, they are not weird Muslims", which is a moot point because these same "their culture is too different" claims were made about eastern Europeans for many many years before they became part of the club themselves.

It should also be noted that nobody ever talks about the reasons why these refugee streams exist in the first place: US foreign policy.

Even back in 2002 Afghani people made their way to Germany, followed by Iraqis and people from many other MENA countries, fully escalating with Syria.

This isn't some sudden new thing, one could literally watch this happening over a timespan of nearly 2 decades, yet nothing was done. It's so painfully obvious that some people consider this as part of US strategy [2].

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/refugees_01.sht...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-guest-workers-transformed-germ...

[2] http://www.voltairenet.org/article187588.html

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