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And I'm actually legitimately afraid to actually voice that opinion in-person. I can vent here anonymously. But in the circles I'm in in San Francisco, I wouldn't dare suggest that certain migrants may not be compatible. There could personal, social, career impacts. You're automatically branded a xenophobe of some kind.
I don't know about San Francisco, but across Europe there's a fairly wide recognition that acceptance of liberal values is and should be an "entrance requirement" for migrants. This includes people on the left. There this myth of "people on the left refuse to acknowledge this", but broadly speaking that's just not the case, and hasn't been since at least the 90s.
There's all sorts of points of disagreements about immigration, but this really isn't one of them.
In my native country, people did not like Gypsies (that was quite a long time ago, now it's no longer the case). This is because of the quantity of negative experiences with them, not because they are of a certain race or religion. The situation changed a lot when the number of negative incidents decreased, which confirms that the criminality is the factor, not something else.
Basically we decided to grandfather in ideas that don't really have a place in a modern liberal society.
With that said, I have no issues with reformed muslims that keep the community/"civilized" cultural aspects of Islam, but yes, of course i'm suspicious of anyone who thinks that they are ordered by god to something (and that's true to all religions)
And freedom of religion does not impact the freedom of opinion, so one can criticize any religion without affecting the freedom of religion.
1. Can't question religious values, the religions themselves.
2. Have to welcome people with extreme religious ideas that put religion over the ideas of a liberal democracy.
For example, would you be suspicious of a person who belongs to a cult?
The other half is that any religion - and therefore most of its adherents - are conservative and static. They would like things to stay the way they are. Obviously this is at extreme odds with emigrating from one place into another. People not only bring their culture with them but also some of their luggage. But the locals would do well to realize that they too are usually not exactly paragons of virtue and that there are plenty of things where they would feel personally offended if an outsider pointed out to them that they were maybe not all that level headed about something.
For instance: in NL we have this crazy confrontation about St. Nicholas, which arguably is a racist display in the guise of a childrens festival. Or maybe it really is just a childrens festival. Everybody has an opinion and it is always either the one or the other but never anything with some nuance. So fights break out and everybody feels like they are the ones in the right.
That's what identity will do for you.
If you want to question religious values and religions themselves then you're going to have to start by planning something that will take decades. It took some small parts of 'the West' about 100 years to go from majority strongly Catholic or other Christian denominations to being more accepting of atheists and that in turn led to those places eventually losing a lot of religion. And that's with a religion that went through the enlightenment, which isn't the case for most religions practiced outside of Europe, and only then because the main centers for religion in Europe all were subject to this (and to the horrors that came before).
So in a way all this feels like a step back. But fixing it will take at least 100 years and probably more. Without an actual solution in the form of education, massive funding and housing and healthcare improved at a scale that no country in the West could afford based on their present day budget it may well never be solved at all.
As for whether or not I'd be suspicious of a person who belongs to a cult, my grandmother belonged to the cult of Catholicism, and we didn't see eye to eye on a great many subjects. But I didn't have a problem with it, she was my grandmother. Neighbors are practicing Muslims, I don't have any problem with that, it's their heads and their houses.
And then we come to your 2.
If you move to a country I think your first and foremost pledge should be that you are not going to put your past to work to recreate the place that you fled from in the place that you've arrived at. But people are hardly aware that this is what they are doing, they are so immersed in this that it is invisible to them. And that's a serious problem that I think will only be solved in many generations, and possibly never.
You can probably sense that I don't have a high regard for religion, not because I don't think people should not be able to believe whatever they want to believe but because it brings so much misery. I've seen plenty of this up close to know that most of the people that do this do it from the conviction that they - and not you or I - are in the right. And that's a very difficult thing to repair because then we're back at identity again.
Exactly why we need to start that process now.
I'm not saying we should treat all immigrants as terrorists or anything, I'm just saying that we should recognize that a large influx of people who don't share Western values is a danger to western society and we need to think how to handle it instead of just saying "be inclusive" and hoping that nothing bad happens.
And if we want a (silly) tech analogy, this isn't that different from tech companies who grow too quickly and lose their "culture" on the way. You have to have a hiring strategy if you don't want that to happen.
And then there is the little problem that Western values and society are still so young that they haven't fully formed yet. And to an American it means something completely different than to a Canadian, a Briton, a West European and an Eastern European. And then there is the Nordics, the Baltics and so on. It will have to be a real work of art to make that workable.
Not saying it's straightforward or anything, just that we probably need to put more effort into carving out an immigration policy as well as refining the "onboarding" process of immigrants.
It's interesting though how racism establishes itself by being anything but itself. And then, afterwards everybody wonders how it could have happened again.
Let me take a stab at this in a way that it is somewhat balanced: I've grown up in Amsterdam, born in a time when there were hardly any immigrants and then wave after wave of them came by. What keeps me grounded is that I've been an immigrant myself. First to Poland, then to Canada, then to Romania and with long stretches in other countries in between. But I'm not brown and I'm not religious so I don't come across as strange or off-putting. I dress like everybody else does, I try to speak the language and adapt to whatever culture I join because I don't want to stand out and I'd rather be treated like a native.
But a person-of-colour immigrating into a country that is nominally 'white' doesn't really have that option. From a mile away the 'locals' can tell that person is different in some way. And if they are religious in a different way that counts much heavier against them than my atheism ever will simply because they're not aware of it (assuming they are religious themselves).
Depending on how the person responds to it this can have all kinds of effects, but the main response is the one the locals have to the non-white, possibly religious in a different way than they are foreigner. They are not going to openly tell this person they're not welcome and that they are afraid of them and don't trust them (see your question above). But what they will do is:
- disadvantage that person and their children
- talk about them in a negative way behind their backs
- blame them for everything that is wrong with their society (housing, welfare, whatever)
- harass them, but only when nobody is looking
And so mutual resentment builds. The kids find that they and their parents are not being treated fair, still want to live the good life and before you know it you have another criminal. Or not, but then there is someone who feels that the whole of society is out to get them.
This is why the West and immigration have not worked out well so far: equal chances don't exist and the locals tend to believe that immigrants are there to do the dirty work and be kept in their place. Amazingly one of the right-wing parties in NL now has a woman and an immigrant (Turkish/Kurdish) as the party leader. To the great abhorrence of many former VVD voters, who are now likely going to move to the PVV, the even more rightwing anti-immigrant party. NL may well have its Trump moment soon.
Even being a skilled high earning immigrant, the ones that are sought after, you will get some weird interactions. It's weird being called "one of the good ones" by a guy at a bar who was ranting about immigrants, but even interacting with nice intending people can get uncomfortable, like a native waiter telling me that once I learn the language, I will be able to get a nice paying job.
So far, things are still fine for me, I'm isolated about most of the problems, and I still find what I was looking for (a more quiet society, a less car centric infrastructure, different culture); but if the far right keeps rising, I will certainly think twice about staying. Those people will act on their prejudices, won't be able to asses if I really cause problems or not.
That said, culture is strong and it's even stronger in the internet era, especially for large groups of individuals. It's extremely hard to bend or break it.
To that point, there is a great book, Armies of Sand, that talks about a concept called the culturally regular individual.
And the book makes a decent point that the culturally regular person from a specific culture is probably a distant match to Western ideals. And that distant culture has quite bad results in many areas we would consider important for modern society: education, research, industrial output.
I'll let you research more on this topic.
> In this chapter I am going to demonstrate that Arab education, in all its various forms, teaches the values of the dominant Arab culture. Education in the Arab world, both formal and informal, constantly seeks to mold the actions and thinking of the individual along the lines of the culturally regular patterns of behavior described in Chapter 17.
> <<<Arab families and schools teach conformity, deference to authority, loyalty to the group, etc>>>. It isn’t found in the formal curriculum. You won’t find a class in any Arab school called “Conformism 101.” Instead, you will find it in the teaching method itself: in how students are taught to think, to learn, and to behave.
Page 417.
Read the book. Stop projecting.
It's a complex matter and for some stuff people REALLY love to put their heads in the sand. Some problems need to be tackled head on, as Denmark is doing at the moment.
I am getting from this that you aren't keen on schooling based on conformism and that you believe Arab schools teach conformism. Leaving aside the question of whether that position has merit, what would you do with that information?
Would you ban immigration by Arabs? From Arabic countries? By people educated in Arabic schools, who may not be Arabs and may not come from Arabic countries? What about ethnic minorities in Arabic countries like the Kurds in Iraq, who maintain a parallel school system? What about individuals schooled in conformance-centric religious schools in the US, or in non-Arab conformist cultures like Japan?
Spell out what you're trying to do.
Dock points for countries with different alphabets, bad educational systems, bad research & development, etc, give extra points if they can prove "extra curriculars" that align with the local values, for example volunteering, civic action, etc. Oh, give extra points if the countries have strong ties to the EU, economic and otherwise. For example trade agreements, cultural exchange programs, etc.
Send back every illegal economic migrant. Saw a comment recently about a Guinean that was in Tunisia (safe country), Algeria (safe), Switzerland (safe), France (safe), but they absolutely, positively, HAD to be in Luxembourg.
What does this have to do with conformity?
> Oh, give extra points if the countries have strong ties to the EU
Norway does not use a standard English alphabet. Are you for or against Norwegian immigrants?
You want to preach from your high horse. It's not just about conformity. There are a lot of misaligned axes. Again, read the book.
Cultures can be more similar and more different. On many axes it doesn't matter, on some it matters a great deal.
> Norway does not use a standard English alphabet. Are you for or against Norwegian immigrants?
This is just obtuse, and we both know it.
Toodaloo!
Why? Should it be obvious to me why you would oppose Arab immigration but not, say, Swedish immigration? In a thread about Swedish gang violence?
You claim I'm preaching but I've made no claims. If you're tired of avoiding questions about yours I guess I don't feel sad about that so far.
A very large part of those people or their parents/grandparents came to Berlin during the Lebanese Civil war, or due to the Intifada in the time between 1975 and 1990. They‘d travel to Eastern Berlin and then take the S-Bahn to the West - that was easy, there were no border controls. Because having border controls on the West Berlin Side would mean acknowledging the border, and thus the GDR, and that was politically undesirable. And once on the western side, they‘d apply for asylum. Since they were fleeing a war zone, and not be classified as politically prosecuted, they‘d not get full asylum, but deportation into a war zone was prohibited by the Geneva refugee convention (Duldung, in german legal speak)
Now, they‘d have a grey zone status - no asylum means no social security, no work permit, no legal status. The only ways to earn some bits of money were illegal jobs. They were deliberately marginalized and kept at the fringes of society. There were no offers that would help them integrate into the German society, no language classes, schools and childcare would try hard to keep the kids out - which was legal, because their status implied that school wasn’t mandatory for those children. This changed in 1990, when school became mandatory. But instead of placing these kids in schools where they‘d receive suitable education, the Berlin Senate kept the schools underfunded and after the reunion staffed them mainly with teachers from East Berlin (those were public officials and could be ordered to teach wherever the senate wanted). Unsurprisingly, teachers with GDR education in an underfunded school in a school system that was new to the teachers were not well suited to deal with the task at hand. The entirely predictable result: Many pupils left without a proper education that would give them a chance on the labor market.
To make matter worse, the CDU (conservative) senate in the 1980ies primarily funded religious conservative groups in the Lebanese/Palestine expat communities - with the intention that they‘d strengthen the bond between the expats and their home culture and countries. Instead of rather funding the liberal non-religious groups.
Fast forward to now: We now have people in their sixties and seventies that came as young adults, never had a legal permit to work, their kids with no real chance at even basic eduction, all grown up in poverty, the third generation kids, grown up in a dysfunctional implementation of a school system, all of them deliberately marginalized, and at the same time being influenced by religious conservative groups supported by the government.
It is objectively true that we have a problem there. But it‘s been a long time coming and it stems to a very large extend from not acknowledging that these people exist, that they need to be given a chance to integrate because that would, as a first step, require acknowledging the fact that they are here to stay.
This is the Berlin example, but if you look at how the entire debate around the Turkish „Gastarbeiter“ went in the 1980/1990ies, the same pattern is visible.
See https://taz.de/Debatte-um-Berliner-Sonnenallee/!5965454/ (German), plus the documentary linked in the comments to the article and further reading mentioned in the article.
> specific type of immigrants that are against western liberal values
Not that different from hiring, diversity is great but as long as you can agree on set of common values.
There are certainly immigrants with non-western values and also immigrants who are criminals but why are you mixing these two demographics together? If anything the ones dealing drugs are likely to be the most westernized.
I suppose you brought up Muhammed on the basis that his venerated status in Islam enables us to significantly extrapolate Muslim culture from his own personal culture. I will therefore state that the evidence of Quran/Hadiths yield evidence of great brutality in the person of Muhammed, which therefore may inspire brutality and violence in any devout followers of his, or in the broader Islamic culture. This is certainly conducive "creating criminal gangs".
[0] https://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Suppo...
There are migrants from the same countries that integrated well. The problem is mostly with the "asylum seekers" who never wanted to integrate.
These two facts make those people feel "safe" to commit high crimes.
It is both in this article and many others, it's not like this is a secret.
Oh, now you've done it. That's the bit you're not supposed to say out loud. You can make them simply disappear.
Geert Wilders here in NL, quite possibly our next prime minister (god forbid) has said exactly that: "fewer Moroccans". But he stopped just short of saying how he would like to accomplish that because that would be putting his cards on the table. Hopefully enough Dutch people remember some of their history classes in the coming week.
If you interpret that as being a codeword for Muslims, either you're projecting, or (too many) Muslims actually are that kind of immigrant.
The US has this problem, too. Quite a lot of "that kind of immigrant" to the US are not Muslims.
Given how the people from the host country tend to ostracize them even if they try to integrate: what else should they do?