[flagged]
> we have enough of this
So do i. But what to do about it?
Having a clear, open and hopefully constructive conversation about
> we need to reduce immigration
would take one of two pathes (once we have agreed on that migration is required). Either the problems with migrants are inherent to them or to the society they grew up in. Its the nature vs nurture debate.
Path 1 would be the dehumanising, simple-minded right wing "pill". Path 2 is the complex left stance about wealth distribution leading to better social mobility, more stable families, strengthening institutions, communities and democracies, blablabla.
Which path would you take?
Would it be too much, if id call trump a nazi or could you still politically align yourself with someone who does?
You didnt state "we need to reduce _criminal_ migration."
Trump campaigned against criminal mexicans and is now deporting any hard working migrant, even when they are welcome in the local community and valuable members of society. ... like a racist? Maybe even a nazi?
I am tired of not having clear, open and constructrive conversations about self-critizing topics with people. I think, my previous post described the the political conversation matter pretty good and suprisingly not that inflamatory and all you responded was basically "but look at what the left does!"
I think you cannot imagine how often i got such a reply from right wingers and how increasingly annoying it is.
How do we fix this?
The older leftist path was that taking refugees was the moral thing to do, but taking immigrants to do cheap jobs was not.
In the past the left was saying "the real issue is capital using migration to drive down wages and fragment worker power".
Today nobody is saying that anymore, left or right, because nobody cares about neither refugees nor workers. It's just extremist positions in public discourse. Saying "economic migrant" has become a dog whistle.
We find ourselves in a prisoner's dilemma when it comes to debates around this topic (and many more) in terms of energy expenditure.
I have limited time and energy each day for discourse about these topics. I set off some time because I find it important. However I have been "stabbed" in the back so many times (as described above) that statistically I _have_ to assume the bad-faith arguments as the default. So why engage at all, you might ask. Because other people _need_ to see there's dissent here. Because fundamentally I do disagree with you.
I'll respond more concretely:
You say there are only two paths, once we agree that migration is required. In itself I refuse to accept that argument, because migration being needed is not a universal, indefinite, inalienable truth. It depends on many contextual factors, affecting its quantity, all the way down to 0.
Here's my stance on the primary limiting factors to this: The host nations' economic, societal and cultural health.
Societal health has to do with things like current crime rates, infrastructure like hospitals and schools, and more. It is tied to economic health, but not exclusively.
Cultural health has to do with a society's current ethical and moral foundation; how stable is it? The entire point of taking in immigrants is not to brainwash them, that's not what I think when I write "integrate". But a minimum requirement is that immigrants respect the current culture and agree with more facets of it than they disagree with. To be concrete, if a predominantly _culturally_ Christian culture like Norway -- and we do not have a state religion anymore, but our lingering culture is deeply Christian in how our unwritten moral and ethical codes guide us -- if such a culture takes in too many immigrants of religions with complete counter ethical and moral views (I won't name names, use your imagination), then that erodes the societal health until such differences are reconciled.
Economical health speaks for itself. How are our hospitals doing? Elderly care? School and kindergartens? How many _new people_ can we _actually_ take care of without breaking the current economy and/or public services and infrastructure? What is the unemployment rate? What jobs are available?
These factors impact whether immigration is required. And we _must_ start there. And a country must be (and is, by international law) able to say no for whatever reason.
If you find what I've written so far to be entirely unreasonable then I'll save us both the time and energy by stopping here; they are limited resources, after all. But if you find the conversation interesting I am willing to continue.
What parts of Islam are "complete counter ethical and moral views" to Christianity? As far as I can tell there's no inherent incompatibility, as demonstrated by the many contemporary and historic examples of Muslims and Christians coexisting peacefully. It's attitudes like this that drive vulnerable people to gangs and extremist ideology, causing the issues you see today in some - not all - Western societies.
Surely it will be fine this time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_by...
I am not advocating reprisals by the way and I respect anyone’s religion but I am also not a naïve fool. I know my history, recent and distant.
Before I dive into our disagreement and bisect out your vague, irrational counter arguments, I have to point out the biggest point of agreement between us: Migration is not universally required and zero immigration might be possible and stable, given the right utopic circumstances. If we also agree on the related questions, of how these circumstances could the achieved, then you would now why I think the following about immigration and its necessity. Even if you (1) could magically enforce a spiking birth rate from around 1 to above 2.1 and (2) somehow could ignore the societal upheaval this would immediately cause and (3) somehow guarantee the same social upwards mobility to the new generation (which is not a given in capitalism) to fit into your society as perfect in-place replacement of the previous one. Even if your magic wand could do all this, it would still take at least one generation / 25 years to show any effects. When you consider that most socio-political ambitions take even longer to appear in statistics (consider the periods of the demographic transition), then it is clear, that immigration is needed for certainly 50+ years to support your whatsoever less-magical but (perfectly?) effective effort of societal stabilization. No debate here.
Your other reasons against immigration are a conflation of misconceptions and plain biases and thankfully you summarized them in your introduction:
> The host nations' economic, societal and cultural health
> Economy
Economies are no zero-sum games. (I could argue against this myself but lets not bloat the topic too much. This is scientific consensus and my counter argument is merely philosophical.)
When you say "How many _new people_ can we _actually_ take care of without breaking the current economy and/or public services and infrastructure?" You should immediately be prepared for my counter question: How many more people could be served with even more immigration?
That's the point of a positive-sum game, immigrants don't just take away, they contribute too, that's why you need them in the first place. Sure, there are institutional capacities that don't instantly scale with immigration but ... did you notice? The topic just changed! It went from yes/no to immigration, to how much immigration is manageable per time. Taken optimistically, this counter argument is just an administrative one. There is no hard upper bound on food or electricity or all the services you named like hospitals/elderly care/school/kindergarten because all of this scales with your economy too including immigrants.
There is also no debate about the positive effects of immigration on economies. Trust me, not even the tiniest debate.
> Society
I have never heard about a "societal health", is this is a scientific term? Scratch that. I smelled some pseudo-scientific bias here but lets just ignore all that and reach for the meat instead.
> Societal health has to do with things like current crime rates
Are you ready for my counter question? Sitting stable and upright? Sorry for rhetorics, but is immigration tightly coupled to crime rate or are these two independent topics? Meaning, you could have immigration but no crime or crime without immigration? Maybe I still have enough trust of yours to convince you, that there is also no debate to have about the significantly lower crime rates of first generation immigrants compared to natives, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it from the perspective of a migrant. When you leave behind everything and everyone you know for maybe a better future, you have already proven your willingness to sacrifice for that goal and you are grateful for any chance you get, so why risk it.
The followup generations with a migration history adapt to the natives crime rate, which tells you that crime arises from within (from poverty, no debate here too) and the discrepancy between first and followup generations shows that these two topics are not directly related, which means you can solve crime independently from immigration. Your societal health argument appears to be valid and related, but its just not.
> Culture
> Christian in how our unwritten moral and ethical codes guide us
> immigrants of religions with complete counter ethical and moral views
My internal bullshit-meter peaked here. First, whatever "unwritten moral or ethical codes" guide you, I hope then don't pretend to be, or actively try to be, above the law. Any vague identity politics based counter argument is weak, because the law is the only code that matters.
Second, the cultural reference frame you life in and regard as "holy" is not static and not the ultimate source of truth and well being as you position it to be. Let me give you some (weird) examples of how cultures merge as a sample for cultural melting pots.
Catholicism had influence on south (afro) american voodoo, and vice versa. Today, there are voodoo elements in christian masses and even though the catholic church was not pleased, they accepted it eventually. Can you imagine, the catholic church, open for change. Such a beautifully small miracle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter
German "Gastarbeiter" are immigrant workers form all over europe, mostly the south like turkey, that were actively attracted to rebuild germany after WW2. Today, their well established offspring is as assimilated and as germany as one can be. Even though, most of them still speak turkish and consider themselves soft muslims, they drink alcohol, some reject immigration and some of them are even candidates for the far right AfD. How utterly ridiculous.
The point here is, you, like many other right wingers don't see the time scales at play here, which is why I said that your cultural frame of reference is not static. You probably only see some "otherness" and your negative bias kicks in, which leads me to:
Third, muslims with "counter ethical and moral views" still have to abide by the law. Like I said, that's the only code that matters. If you'd think, eg. celebrating christmas is an indispensable pillar of civilization, you'd directly prove my point of identity political bias blurring your mind.
So what contradiction are you talking about?! Here comes the bullshit part. Whatever muslim morals/ethics being incompatible with christianity is irrelevant if your only basis of morale and ethics is the law, which should be agnostic to any religion. So many religiots conflate their believe as the only source of morale/ethics, which is just dumb, an exceptional insult when you give it a second thought and a perfect excuse for violence, if you have exclusive morale and any other has by definition not.
> If you find what I've written so far to be entirely unreasonable then I'll save us both the time and energy by stopping here
You are so certain huh? So absolutely sure that no one could ever debunk your solid world view. Yet, I just did take my 3 hours of time to address it piece by piece. So tell me, how do you feel right now? Could you pin point my arguments weaknesses the moment your read them or is your mind still searching? Maybe in cognitive dissonance?
Do we have a debate or was this yet another monologue, I had so many of in the past?
To end and summarize this on a constructive note: Social mobility is a key element for social cohesion (and integration), which is independent from ethnicity. The problems you see are real but other, lesser fortunate people are not the ones who build this global system and are not the only reason your national problems emerged or increase, if anything, the opposite is true. I am not saying that migration is easy to manage or tolerating other cultures plesant, but don't reduce it to only that, be open.
I hope sometime you realize the irony here.
First of all, I never claimed 0 immigration was my desired target. What I meant was that the ebb and flow of immigration changes with the other factors I mentioned, possibly all the way down to 0.
This is the first major point of contentment I have with most arguments that are for immigration: They are trying to find a permanent rule for an impermanent, changing dependence and requirement.
What I'm talking about is a _responsive_ and continuous analysis of a nation's capacity for immigration. You do understand this is precisely why legal immigration has all the rigorous steps involved, even here in Norway, right? You have to have a certain amount of money to sustain yourself. You have to get a job. You can't bring your entire family until they can also support themselves. You have to renew your work and residence permit in Norway every 1-2 years (depending on factors) manually, by applying for it and meeting criterial, until you've been here for _at least_ 5 years consecutively before we even allow you to apply for permanent residency. I have many friends who have gone through this process. It is there for very good reasons.
The problem is that we also lump asylum seekers, refugees, and illegal migrants into the "basket" category of immigrants. But that's a separate concern really to this topic.
You also mention birth rates, and then:
> (1) could magically enforce a spiking birth rate from around 1 to above 2.1 and (2) somehow could ignore the societal upheaval this would immediately cause and (3) somehow guarantee the same social upwards mobility to the new generation (which is not a given in capitalism) to fit into your society as perfect in-place replacement of the previous one
Why do you assume immigrants are no less of a challenge to point 2 and 3? Why do you think children born from the existing people of a country and culture are as much of a strain as entirely foreign ones?
> That's the point of a positive-sum game, immigrants don't just take away, they contribute too, that's why you need them in the first place.
This is true in many cases. Post-WW2, Europe overall was in dire need of an immigrant workforce because we'd lost so many of our working age men.
Let's look at Norway's statistics for employment rates of immigrant-background residents. This is the state statistical bureau, so assume no shenanigans: https://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/sysselsetting/statistik...
There's quite a lot of unemployed immigrants. There can be any number of reasons why but given Norway's history and how well we treat immigrants of any kind, I don't think you can claim xenophobia or racism.
And for the topic at hand, what it shows is that immigration does contribute, but it also takes away.
> There is also no debate about the positive effects of immigration on economies. Trust me, not even the tiniest debate.
The positives are the talking point of the EU and mainstream media. But we are also all aware of them. Post-WW2 most of Europe had massive need for immigrant workers. Most of those workers returned to their origin countries after a while, some stayed.
To be very clear, I have nothing against legal immigration. But even that has its limits, which changes with time and many other factors, including how many illegal, refugees and asylum seekers we're also dealing with. On top of the other factors.
> My internal bullshit-meter peaked here. First, whatever "unwritten moral or ethical codes" guide you, I hope then don't pretend to be, or actively try to be, above the law. Any vague identity politics based counter argument is weak, because the law is the only code that matters.
Any society is built on unwritten moral or ethical principles, I really hope you're not truly this naïve that you don't understand that. There are so many things you can't explicitly write into law unless you want to make the most authoritarian brutal dictatorship on the planet.
There are no laws against speaking loudly on the phone while riding a bus or train, but it is looked down upon by society to do so.
There are no laws that demand you greet strangers or help your neighbors paint their house, or allow the neighborhood to take part in raising and reprimanding your kids when they play in common areas. These are the most basic examples but they are not values shared by everyone that comes here, sadly enough. But they are the results of unwritten cultural norms based on morals and ethics.
> Second, the cultural reference frame you life in and regard as "holy" is not static
I never said it were. Culture will always change and adapt. But the rate is everything. If it changes too fast there's no common cultural fabric that keeps a people function as a collective good.
> German "Gastarbeiter" are immigrant workers form all over europe [...]
I am fully aware. I already mentioned I have friends and family in Germany, why would you think I am not familiar with its history?
> The point here is, you, like many other right wingers don't see the time scales at play here
First off I don't identify as right-wing. I did vote right wing this year, but I don't vote out of alignment, I vote on matters. They happened the be covered by a right-wing party this year. But I am generally not very well politically aligned, and tend to land somewhere near the center whenever I take any political alignment tests. But it's not really important, because I no longer see being called right-wing as a negative.
I see the timescales at play though. And that's why I'm against our lax policies. Because I'm thinking ahead 20-30 years.
> Third, muslims with "counter ethical and moral views" still have to abide by the law. Like I said, that's the only code that matters.
It is not. Because we don't want to outlaw people's internal beliefs and thoughts. Law can only police actions, but not a slow degradation of societal norms.
I do not want Norway to become a muslim-majority state, for example. There are already enough such places in the world anyway, let them have that there. I am not against having muslims in Norway. I just don't want Islam to be any meaningful part of our cultural fabric. It is incompatible with my culture. Has nothing to do with race or ethnicity.
> Whatever muslim morals/ethics being incompatible with christianity is irrelevant if your only basis of morale and ethics is the law, which should be agnostic to any religion.
Woefully naïve mindset that is precisely what is being exploited in many parts of the west. Because all you have to do is to slowly increase the population of muslims until you get enough support to implement Islamic law as part of a country's law.
> Social mobility is a key element for social cohesion (and integration), which is independent from ethnicity. The problems you see are real but other, lesser fortunate people are not the ones who build this global system and are not the only reason your national problems emerged or increase, if anything, the opposite is true. I am not saying that migration is easy to manage or tolerating other cultures plesant, but don't reduce it to only that, be open
I agree. But the cold, hard reality is that we can't help everyone without it costing us everything we have. And then we eventually end up not being able to help anyone. It's a balancing act. It's not "nice", but it has to be done.
I’ll start to briefly correct the most glaring and important statements first. Let’s see how long I can last.
> And for the topic at hand, what it shows is that immigration does contribute, but it also takes away.
>> There is also no debate about the positive effects of immigration on economies. Trust me, not even the tiniest debate.
> The positives are the talking point of the EU and mainstream media.
No, this is not just some media/political narrative, its scientific consensus across continents. This is my strongest argument. I said, there is no debate to have here and framing it as a biased narrative is, what right wingers in their crusade against reality do. Sorry, but that’s how it is.
https://www.mdpi.com/search?q=immigration+economic+impact
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=immigration+economic+co...
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7099/13/8/213
Pick any source. It’s hard to not see it.
> Any society is built on unwritten moral or ethical principles, I really hope you're not truly this naïve that you don't understand that. There are so many things you can't explicitly write into law unless you want to make the most authoritarian brutal dictatorship on the planet.
This makes no sense. Some potentially wildly different interpreted unwritten code should never be the basis for any law or social sanctions. This sounds like you don’t understand the core principles of constitutionality and you didn’t consider, that not some vague codex is the basis of any society but the fulfillment of basic needs – that’s the true core of it, anything else is secondary.
The sociological term you are locking for here is social norm (broad, uncodified definition of how to behave), but if you really want to be able to enforce some norm, you turn it into law, otherwise you better keep it unenforcable unless you might “want to make the most authoritarian brutal dictatorship on the planet” where supreme commander trump judges based on his norms.
I should have set up the cultural part the other way around: Not focusing on your argument around differences but on commonalities instead, because any human has many-many more commonalities with any other individual then differences. Tribalistic reasoning makes you focus on those few differences and construct sweeping arguments against “them”. Let me demonstrate and induce maybe a little cognitive dissonance along the way. This is a pieced together statement from two others of yours, which you didn’t state that directly/openly yourself.
> I do not want Norway to become a muslim-majority state, because I don’t want the unwritten moral law of not speaking loudly on the phone while riding a bus being violated.
Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Because “you” are tying plain antisocial behavior to an ethnicity/religion while ignoring that there no strict causal relationship.
This is how your entire cultural stuff sounds to me.
> There's quite a lot of unemployed immigrants. [...], I don't think you can claim xenophobia or racism.
Yes you can. If you would swing your magic wand to make all racism disappear in all human minds, you would still have racism. Sounds oxymoronic but it’s true. It’s called systemic racism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism ) and comes from the fact, that we are no more discriminating directly by racial traits but indirectly through other discriminators like vocabulary, grades, household income, social milieu, etc., which was negatively impacted by racial discrimination in the past. You can see it pretty good in the USA, where there is much less active racism against black people and they are formally equal to whites but there is still discrimination that effects them more then others. And ofc white racist pointing at statistics, thinking they have found the hard proof, with crime rates and prison inhabitants. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. You need to be careful with statistics about outliers and mono causal explanations.
Ok, I’ll stop here. Let me recap and end on a positive note.
> Why do you assume immigrants are no less of a challenge [… that native] born [...] are as much of a strain as entirely foreign ones?
I didn’t say that immigration is frictionless but that it has to be addressed wisely, long term and proactively and to achieve that, we need to have a different conversation about that topic and we are so-so far away from anything like it.
When you see it from a distance, migrants don’t take away from you, they are not forcing their inferiour culture onto you and they are not prepositioned to cause harm. The problems you see are real but not exclusive to them.
Remember how this conversation started. I said something like “left and right” can’t really talk together and now I have difficulties to end this on a positive note, because I feel like this went nowhere.
> all you have to do is to slowly increase the population of muslims until you get enough support to implement Islamic law as part of a country's law.
Even if there where immigration quotas, strong integration guidance from institutions and the most important part, good living perspectives (social mobility) for migrants and natives alike? When you look at it from a distance, you can actually see it.