Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

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I did read the study.

The problem is that those statistics are doing something sensible. There are uncomfortable statistics related to immigrants, and your point #4, the thing about integration not being properly done creating parallel societies is a real problem that can and should be addressed properly.

But that's not what the person I replied to was doing - "all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs"

No, the study says that a foreign-born person is "2.5x" more likely to be a "crime suspect". That can mean a lot of things (e.g.: how many of them were actually convicted). Also, they are minority. Presuming all of them are convicted, it's still a minority that has about double the odds of being criminals. The logical consequence is that a lot of Swedish people are criminals if there's an explosion of gang violence.

Maybe the problem is the Swedish approach to guns? I live in a country that has a shitton of immigrants and is not seeing this surge of gun violence.

You see, we can discuss this properly without engaging in ethnonationalist bullshit.

We can, but there is always a large amount of people who struggle to articulate their emotions and would prefer to label and condemn- true of basically every “side” on any topic from what I can tell.

This has been especially true in Sweden, and I’ve seen it, the way people talk about migration is: if you talk about it, you are a nazi.

This seems to have taken the sting out of supporting actual Nazi parties (SD)…

So while you and I can debate the facts, the larger trend in society is not due to us as individuals, its how much society permits this dialogue to happen at all before trying to shut it down with bad faith and unreasoned statements.

That's the curse of democracy, and I don't say this as a way to tarnish it. I prefer living in a democracy anyway.

We can't expect everyone to be informed and educated. I perceive most people as being guided by basic emotions - Mostly their fears.

> if you talk about it, you are a nazi.

Part of the problem I perceive on the left was unwillingness, for a long time, to engage with it at all. For a long time in the past decade, and in many ways to this day, the whole immigration discussion was dominated by people that were just annoyed that there's too many brown people walking around nowadays.

And that's how you poison the well of discussion. If you accept immigrants, you should expect people to behave in a certain way. In many ways a visa is a privilege, not a right. But how can you even start this conversation when a mouth breather will come out of his hole branding about claims about all crimes being tied to immigrants?

Honestly, this sort of sucks.

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