"people will be migrating away"
If just 5 per cent of contemporary Middle Eastern population moves to the EU, liberalism here is going to be toast. Together with the welfare states that Americans so admire.
If just 5 per cent of contemporary Middle Eastern population moves to the EU, liberalism here is going to be toast. Together with the welfare states that Americans so admire.
My roommate at uni was an Iranian girl studying law and she was very smart and nice and very western; one day she went away visited her family in Iran and after a while the landlord called where the rent was. Never heard of her again... there is that...
For Germany, absorbing 1000 random people yearly is an easy task. A million that came in 2015 was already quite a challenge. Ten million coming in a year would overwhelm even Germany.
(But that is a theoretical scenario; in practice, they wouldn't get there, because Germany is pretty far from the Middle East and the border countries like Greece, Turkey and Italy would sink into complete chaos if tens of millions really came.)
The majority does not to die in a ditch (let's assume) so the chosen gov is supposed to prevent that. I do not know of other ways, currently in the EU, than work per hour and that needs people and our workforce is declining without immigration.
We can only try and see what happens but direct people voting in referenda has a strong immediate feedback response which does not take into account anything that is actually happening as most people only hear what they read only on their favorite channels online (which can be 100% fake). It is a snapshot of the now: as has been shown after that many Brits would have not voted brexit if they were fully aware of all the (mis)information.
This has nothing to do with calling people stupid or ignorant; it has to do with some powers that be being very clever getting information out people act on and the EU rulers, so far as incredibly bad at this. They seem to be incapable of explaining long term benefits or what is happening at all to all the populous. This is a big problem. But even if it would be solved; the channels to reach are vast and diversified so if you just ask people to respond immediately, they will and you will get a very skewed look.
And yes, agreed, there is a lot wrong but a lot of it is also miscommunication or actually no communication from the German and Brussels towers. That is wrong but asking 'Joe on the street' about immigration, I can predict their answers based on who you ask, even if this is not in their best interest.
I cannot see how this will win anything; it will surely break up the EU, which could be good in some universe, but yeah, it was not great before the EU (to say it mildly) for many member states, so what data do we have things would improve? People have never experienced this prosperity: I cannot see, unless directly asked in a moment of angry 'took ma jubbbbs', how anyone besides Germany or France would benefit from leaving and they do not want to.
The misinformation was abundant on both sides; I kept reading on and on about how poor Brexit will make the UK, how tech will collapse in London and tons of jobs will move away. It has been blown out of proportion. Politicians and technocrats on both sides lie or exaggerate to get what they want.
“Don’t worry simple villagers, me and my intellectual friends in the city went to University. We learned that multiculturalism is always better and anything else is ignorant racism. We know what is best for you.”
Edit: cute that this is being downvoted. This comment must hit a little too close for some of you, eh?
You do not have the right to destroy their culture and way of life because you “know what is best”.
This is a local issue. If you’re so certain your political party is “doing the right thing”, then allow those migrants to live where they are accepted and by people who want them.
You are not special, smarter, or more morally superior than your rural countrymen because you parrot party indoctrination about forced multiculturalism. Put your money where YOUR mouth is, not mine. Stop forcing others to pay for your virtue signaling.
Kind of, but only to a limited degree. We vote for administrations that should deal "in our interest", but there's e.g. no legal mandate for them to decide to give up democracy and choose a King. Many EU-states recognized that and went for referendums on large items, e.g. on the European Constitution.
A large-scale change of the nation is certainly not within the mandate given to them in any normal election.
I understand the hesitance regarding direct democracy, because it's inconvenient. You have to actually convince people, and not broker a deal behind closed doors where you bribe people and they say yes "on behalf of everyone who voted for them". It works great in Switzerland though, they're peaceful and happy and free, and have been doing it successfully for quite a substantial amount of time.
It's a little thing called democracy and the population having their say in decisions that affect them.
It's not very popular these days, because experts with private interests and corporate agendas know better.
Two wolfs and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, you mean.
Way better than 10 rich wolves and their 200 expert advisor pet-wolfs deciding for 350 million sheep, which is the "solution" to the "big problem" of majority rule.
No, we don't. This is a mantra that keeps being repeated without much substance.
Housing affordability, job quality, public finance sustainability won't get any better with immigration. Maybe salaries keep being depressed, consumer demand increases, and that's good for profits. But I can't think of much more!
Pensions are very high in Europe, salaries stagnant, the elderly are property owners while the young are not.
Enough of cheap fallacies!
In Japan 40% of population is over 65. It's extreme case of aging.
Yet they are doing perfectly fine with virtually zero immigration.
They've been in a recession for 30 years.
That increases the problem and puts more load on the systems that are strained to begin with. That would look totally different if it was a different group of immigrants, but we have to look at reality, not a theoretical ideal.
Amazing.
That's right up there - identical premise - with the ever popular HN refrain: but who will pick the strawberries if not for the immigrants. Inevitably stated in most every thread on immigration.
Philosophically it's perfectly aligned with the big business types that also want cheap labor for exactly the same reasons: more people to take advantage of, more people to cast into cheap labor roles of servitude to the aging/dying/lazy/entitled affluent classes.
But how will we prop up our collapsing entitlement systems, which were poorly managed and poorly funded and poorly thought out, if we don't import massive volumes of labor to pay taxes so the entitled classes can pretend their system isn't failing and so those immigrants themselves can get screwed later on when the entitlement systems they're brought in to prop up are bled dry.
In my experience people making that argument are more often than not the type that think manual labor is "beneath" them. The type that would rather collect unemployment for months at a time than take a job they don't like. It says much more about them than they think it does.
Any source for that? Is that what this is all about - cos I'm sure we can pay more for caregivers and more people will want these jobs. The problem is it doesn't pay well.
Don't you think this is the real problem that needs to be addressed? If your society cannot sustain itself, it will be replaced.
Edit: My assumption was that you’re talking about US, if that’s not the case then I could be wrong.
Who is this "we"?
First, your argument makes no sense even if we make the most grossly uncharitable assumptions about the sentiments of middle eastern immigrants. 5% of the middle east is only about 12 million people, and presumably not even 100% of those people are going to end up Europe. Even if every single one of those people had illiberal sentiments, they wouldn't make a dent on the electorate (and, as immigrants new to the region and therefore without strong historical/institutional inertia, would have a hard-to-impossible time effectuating change via extra-legal avenues).
Second, Immigrants aren't selected uniformly from the underlying population; they largely self-select. At least in the USA, the average Iranian immigrant is far more friendly to democracy, the rule of law, and secular government than the average white conservative. The greatest threat to liberalism in Germany is AfD, etc.
This cannot be generalized to the entire Middle East, though. Environmental or military disasters result in very different migration patterns than political oppression in an otherwise stable country.
"those that manage immigration well"
The keyword is well. For contemporary Western societies, highly educated, secular migrants cause the least friction. So Hong Kong inhabitants fleeing China are likely to be welcome everywhere. That does not apply as much to inhabitants of Mirpur, Pakistan.