My problem is the deflection tactic of blaming immigrants unfairly using the worst of the lot as a fair assessment for why some voters have switched conservative. When doing that has less to do with immigration and more to do with judging people from a different country unfairly based on preconceived notions and confirmation bias(oh look lot of arabs there and not a woman in sight, savages!).
Yeah, and labels in political and media discourse are not helping. They're often fueling the big blurry mess of confusing ethnicity, religion, some form of ascendancy and immigration. "Immigrants" is really just an often inaccurate shorthand for "Others".
Hardly anybody would mind proper immigrants. That's not what people are worried/ pissed off about and it's not what's causing the current problems. Nobody would mind taking in actual war refugees, either - after all, war refugees have to leave once their country is safe again, and they usually want to return ASAP anyway. Hell, we took in many more refugees during the war in Yugoslavia and hardly anybody complained. But the current situation is a lot more complicated and a complete fucking mess. We're not talking about guest students from Saudi Arabia or engineers from Iraq here, we're talking about illegal immigrants from god knows where who claim to be Sryian refugees. Some of them certainly are (though that doesn't change the fact they're illegal immigrants), but a lot of them are not. And those are the guys causing trouble and giving Arab immigrants a bad rep, even though a large part of them aren't even Arabs.
EDIT: Obviously talking about Europe and the current refugee crisis here.
It certainly seems so though. Some Central Europeans countries earlier refused to take in any refugee out of the few thousands they agreed to. AFAIK most UE countries are not in a hurry to help support the weight on Greece and Italy shoulders (not to speak of non-EU countries and the issue at large).
European culture towards immigrants is surprisingly hostile though, even though not on its face.
Since I think I started this bout of "immigration-talk" in the other thread, just let me be clear that my point wasn't really about a dick-waving contest with the US. There's, apparently, a difference in how the US and France approach assimilation/integration and I think both has had success and shortcomings.
Really the debate to me is really about two things :
- Are states entitled to control their borders and immigration and thus define what is legal and legitimate migration (within the confines of acceptable minimum decency) ? Is there really, as often heard currently, some sort of upper limit to the number of migrants you can welcome ? And has it been reached ? I am really skeptical about the latter point, to be fair. At the very least, the EU response to the migration peak crisis has been lackluster and the burden could be better managed.
- What the model for a diverse/multicultural society is (and does it work, since obviously a lot more people seems to vote that they don't believe so) and is there really an issue with the integration of Islam in a European society, especially with regards to secularism ? If so, is the issue at a macro-scale (tenets of Islam theology at odds with secularism) or micro (specific subset of orthodox / fundamentalists groups).
Considering migration crisis are a potential regular occurence in the future and the continued demographic crisis of the population aging without external flux, Europe better get on the ball fast.
