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Comment by angry_octet | Hacker News Reader

If you are in Europe, how can you not be aware of undocumented refugees from North Africa and Syria? What you are saying is completely delusional.

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Where in Europe are you talking about? The majority of immigrants in any EU country come from other EU countries. Of the remainder, less than 10% arrived as refugees. The vast majority of refugees (over 90% I’d guess) are documented and those from Syria or North Africa constitute only a fraction of all refugees.

The average European is highly highly unlikely to have ever encountered an undocumented refugee from Syria or North Africa.

There are not as many as for example southern US but there are illegal immigrants. Usually people who smuggle themselves here but fail to get asylum but goes underground and works shitty jobs for very shitty pay. Or keep away to try to seek asylum again after some time.

You also have those that are in limbo as for example there are several countries that are not taking back their citizens if they are forced there. Afghanistan used to be one of those countries for Sweden so even if someone got a no on their asylum application they could still just say no and stay. However now Sweden has a deal with Afghanistan so people who are not leaving willingly are put on chartered planes down there.

Then there are those internally within EU like beggars who are officially not allowed to stay as long as they do but no one is checking of course.

Don’t understand the downvotes. If anyone has any references to there being a large number of undocumented immigrants in Europe, I’d be glad to be corrected.

Most of Europe is very different to the US in this regard. Without being legal/registered, you’ve no chance of getting the equivalent of an SSN, drivers license, opening a bank account, leasing an apartment or in some cases even buy a mobile phone. Consequently, the number of undocumented immigrants is minuscule.

I get the impression that in the US it mightn’t be unusual for the average citizen to encounter undocumented immigrant gardeners, nannies, etc. - this almost never happens in Europe.

Well based on media discussion of a current major UK story - that 39 immigrants died in a refrigerated lorry, it's spawned a lot of stories into illegal immigration and why 39 people were trying to get to the UK. Police are currently investigating the lorry having been one of a convoy of three - so potentially around 100. One of the reports, that I can't find again, I think someone at Rotterdam port discussing that some unbelievably low percentage of trucks are checked properly in the major EU ports, and few even have capability to check for presence of people. Just a check that seals are intact, papers are right, and a camera to see passing vehicles.

So it's probable that many Europeans could have encountered illegal immigrants without realising.

The common point is there a selection of low pay service jobs that attract illegal immigrants, who then become trapped. Some by debt and threats to family, and other more direct slavery. Anti-trafficking and similar groups have been warning of issues for years, and mostly ignored.

It remains a truth that the vast majority of immigration in Europe is legal, but there is a significant level of illegal migration. Thanks to the free movement of peoples within the EU, it is far harder to detect than before those border checks were pulled down.

Here is just one of a selection of pieces that have come up this week across all the press:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/oct/25/trafficked-vietn...

Sorry, but you have no clue how many undocumented immigrants are all around you. Just because most of them are white you don't notice them in streets and they work shitty and hard jobs so you don't meet them either... I personally know like a dozen guys from Serbia and Bosnia who live in Austria and Germany illegally, and that's a dime a dozen. Us, Albanians and Turks are for EU what Mexicans are for US...

Sorry but an anecdote about your personal experience isn't very convincing.

What would be convincing would be a reference to a source with numbers/data to back up your claim.

The most recent Europe-wide figures are pretty out-of-date but indicate estimates of between 0.3% and 0.7% of people living in Eureope being irregular/undocumented (http://irregular-migration.net). This is much less than the comparable estimates for the US, for example.

I never claimed there's more illegal immigrants in the EU than in US. I said that there's more immigrants than it is maybe perceived by most, especially tourists. For instance in Austria more than 20% of population are legal immigrants. In Switzerland it's more than 30%. About half of them come from other EU countries, and most of them are concentrated in big cities. [1]

Regarding the illegal immigration situation in EU is very different from US because the laws are different. In EU state helps immigrants so they're incentivized to register, and also it's easier to get permits. According to the official DHS report [2]: "Of the total illegal alien population in 2015, nearly 80 percent had resided within the United States for more than 10 years", which is super uncommon in EU, they'd be legalized by that time.

So just comparing the numbers doesn't tell the true story, but according to the official report from Austria [3]: "Irregular residents account for between 2.9% and 1.1% of the total population.", so 10x more what you suggested. They also note in this report: "As there are strong incentives for immigrants to register in Austria (e.g. certificate of registration as a prerequisite for application for state benefits), the majority of immigrants are on record at the registration offices. In contrast, very little information is available about irregular immigration." And Austria is one of the stricter countries in this regard.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache...

[2] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...

[3] https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats...

Well I know from personal experience that Sweden and Germany have lots of migrants from there, as well as France and Italy of course. They tend to be official refugees in the northern countries, but there are many undocumented, and also from the East. It is also notorious that countries will shuffle undesirables to another country, e.g. sending Africans back to Italy, sending Roma anywhere else.

And how would those be identified by a facial recognition system? I don't see your point here.

Well, it would be technically challenging, but it's where people surveillance is going. There are several versions of the problem:

1- For face f, is f a member of F_known? (From national ID cards etc.) Assume this gives an answer [0.0 - 1.0].

2- Is f a member of F_suspect? Where F_suspect is a database of face imagery associated with potentially illegal activity or refugee migration. Not that these faces could be from video surveillance (from a border region, train station, migrant camp) or scraped from war zone images e.g. jihadi propaganda, YouTube video of regime critics, talking politics on HN, video of protests in other countries, etc.

3- Not matching anything, and hence also requiring investigation.

All of these have errors, which generally go up as more people are added to the training database. Apparently some ethnicities (okay, black people) are often trained for poorly. This will likely result in 'over-servicing' of some ethnicities.

If local police get a hit for someone going through festival security and detain them on the basis of face recognition software, what is the legal basis for that? Police would say that they had 'intelligence' but can they explain the basis for it? Is this not essentially maintaining dossiers on people who have not committed any crime? They have no evidence a crime has been committed but instead they are essentially running a police checkpoint and saying "Papers!". These are the mechanisms of the Stasi.

One can argue that police should be able to detain those with outstanding warrants. I have no problem with that, except that when police take photos of citizens it is hard to know what is done with those photos. Ironclad legislation requiring they not leave the device or be stored on anything except ephemeral storage would be a good start, along with civil and criminal penalties for non compliance and direct individual responsibility and penalties for the chain of command.

Without a rigorous push back, America will become like China and the UK, where your face must be shown, and it will be recorded and tracked 24/7. Of course in America it will probably be via a company, and police forces will have a subscription, which lowers their fees the more faces the capture.

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