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Comment by iaseiadit | Hacker News Reader

> As for integration, I don't see why people who are judgmental.

People are judgmental because mass migration from high-crime countries transformed Sweden from one of the world's safest countries to having the highest rate of gun violence in the EU, and Sweden has been increasingly transparent about the situation.

Because of the political climate in most Western countries today, we can't have a rational discussion about negative effects of mass migration, or consider scenarios where the negative impact might outweigh the benefits. It's just a conversation we can't have without shallow knee-jerk accusations of racism and fascism and Nazism and so on.

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> shallow knee-jerk accusations of racism and fascism and Nazism and so on

It's important to understand that, particularly in Sweden, it was actually neo-nazis who opposed immigration for a long time.

This probably isn't the case anymore, but it's hard to convince people who remember and were there that it isn't the case. It doesn't help when people don't bring numbers to the table (or the numbers that matter). Some incredibly stupid people feel compelled to bring race or ethnicity to the conversation and that can be very tainting. There doesn't need to be a lot of them, just a few can discredit.

I heard that some years ago a Swedish professorin who published some crime statistics got in trouble because the statistics showed that some subgroups are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime; however, some did not like this getting published because it show how bad some subgroups are within society --probably the same group would not have the same reaction if the statistics showed some other subgroup was being disproportionately reactionary.

The problem with such data is that it can be used to draw incorrect and incredibly racist conclusions.

The obvious conclusion is that those subgroups are particularly disenfranchised. Meaning they're more likely to be impoverished, earn less on average on a household basis, are more likely to be discriminated against, are more likely to live in high-crime areas, etc.

But if you don't include those statistics alongside the one you have, then you give the impression that some subgroup is just "magically" pre-disposed to crime. uh oh. Now you'll have people saying darker skin colored people are more animalistic in nature, their blood tainted. And now we've gone to Eugenics and before you know it, we're in Nazi land.

So you do have to be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. And, if those conclusions COULD be drawn, you have to nip it in the bud. The absolute last thing neo-nazis need is fuel.

I'm not sure that this approach works. I think on some level trying to "hide" the data or whatever you want to call this process kind of validates a lot of neo-nazi beliefs

It's complicated and hard to tell. One should, at the very least, include other relevant data. That could very well be better than hiding. The problem is statistics can, and are, cherry picked constantly.

I think there's an opportunity here for some neo-nazi belief systems to get credibility from large organizations.

I think the bigger problem was how revelatory it was. You certainly could compare people at similar socioeconomic levels one native and the other immigrant and then make some conclusions. It's not a surprise that if you bring in people who are unproductive in your society that they will be problematic. It seems the establishment does not want to admit this is so and want to hide it to minimize the pushback. It's not that different from instead of low skilled immigrants you decide to release native criminal offenders early and then try to hide any recidivism figures. It's dishonest and does not allow the population to make a democratic decision for themselves.

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