Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtquad | Hacker News Reader

Being from Denmark I have always been puzzled by how US/UK media portray us as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of MENA immigration than our neighbors. Meanwhile Switzerland has been doing what almost amounts to white-only immigration to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from Albanaia and Serbia.

Neutrality is good for PR.

View on HN

> to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from France and Italy

Depending on the canton, it is virtually impossible to become a Swiss citizen, even if you are married to a Swiss national and have been resident for ten years.

IME the Swiss national football team has more Albanian and Serbian last names than Italian, and that's usually a pretty good proxy. They clearly managed to get residency. Easier for the kids of the foreign parents?

That's not true. If you are married to a Swiss, it's easy: https://www.eda.admin.ch/countries/china/en/home/services/ci...

Also, otherwise, it's easy but not automated. Lots of foreigners get a Swiss passport every year.

The US media doesn't portray Denmark this way. The only European countries whose immigration policies I've even heard of are Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and even those were only a couple of times (e.g. I vaguely remember something about Brexit).

> almost amounts to white-only immigration

This is wrong.

> In 2023, 30,223 people applied for asylum in Switzerland, an increase of over 20% compared to 2022. The main countries of origin were Afghanistan, Türkiye, Eritrea, Algeria and Morocco.

https://ecre.org/aida-country-report-on-switzerland-2023-upd...

Compared to only 2,122 asylum applications from refugees in Denmark in 2023 overall.

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/denmark/asylum.php

Being from the US, I would say that US media does not portray Denmark at all. Except once every few years as Greenland hodlers.

Pretty much everything I know about Denmark is from watching Danish language TV on Netflix.

> Except once every few years as Greenland hodlers

Only definition of Hodler seems to be: a true believer in cryptocurrency

Is there some secret project going on in Greenland? :-)

In this sense I meant hodl as in “hold”, “refuse to sell”. Completely unrelated to the lost Atlantean technology hidden under the ice, which can compute hashes 100x faster.

Sorry but I'll respectfully disagree. I've lived in Copenhagen, Zurich and the US anf traveled allt hose countries extensively. Danes are not portrayed as hitlers nor is CH doing "almost white-only immigration." Check out at least the french parts of Switzerland as a counter example. But I am sorry for any country that doesn't enforce their laws. Immigration only works if the rule of law works and when that's the case, it doesn't matter where people come from.

I'm also from Denmark, Our immigration policy is no better.

Half of the US media portrays half of the country as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of immigration than their neighbors. We generally have one of the most open borders, relatively straightforward legal immigration paths and more than twice as many Green Card holders than Denmark has people. We also, at least for the moment, still have unrestricted birthright citizenship, a policy pretty much no countries in Europe have.

So, don’t feel so alone.

You have the added problem of 1% of them actually being neo-nazis.

Sure. Racism never died. The problem is when you lump a bunch of people who don’t deserve it in with the actual Neo-Nazis and paint them with an extremely broad brush as all of the same kind. If you look for Nazis, you can find them, but if you simply see Nazis everywhere, you don’t even have to look.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com