Europe-Middle East-Africa Refugee Crisis General Thread

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Turkey seems like the ideal place to put these people. A middle group between Europe and their original homelands geographically, economically, and culturally. Additionally, Turkey is far more responsible for stirring up s in Syria than even the US.

Turkey has almost two million Syrian refugees already.

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I agree that it would be lot more honest of the European posters to just state outright that they would prefer a fully militarized border control system like Russia's whose only task is to keep migrants out, however enforced, whatever may happen to them. But the issue is that none of the countries they live in (I mean specifically the wealthy northern nations of the EU) are willing to pay for, say, the Italian Navy to function as a Mediterranean-wide coast guard to return migrants to the point from which they've disembarked (or, to extend the Russia metaphor, to shoot the boats before they land). Any talk of humanitarianism on their part is just obfuscation.

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It is hard for many, after seeing a constant litany of portrayals of them as attackers and terrorists, to simply see Arabs and Middle Easterners in general as victims.

Africans are routinely depicted as impoverished victims in western media, but they still want them out, too.

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The most recent posts in this thread are utter garbage and disgrace this website.

Why hasn't it been locked for topic derailment (at the very least) already?

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Yes, that's right. All this emotional energy spent on analysis of "employment data." What a nonsense.

Nothing posted here recently has to do with "truth" -- it does have everything to do with demagoguery and poisoning the well to make debate on an already emotional issue (for some) impossible. We are obliged to react with moral outrage, along the lines of "Take a look at what the animals are up to now!," with every post. And if Forumnites don't muster up the requisite levels of indignation, then they're PC or sellouts or cowards -- just as I have been called now.

The past few posts were so trashy and of so little news value (they didn't even mention link the site or the article the pictures were stolen from) they would have gotten the relevant posters banned from the likes of FreeRepublic for violating terms of service.

That is FreeRepublic, and this is Atlas Forum. But that still doesn't mean we have to let the site degenerate into becoming a free host for a White Citizens' Council.

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You seem to be under the impression that people have just randomly decided not to like immigrants and so they are using these numbers as justification.

It's the opposite. These numbers are the reason people are hesitant about allowing mass immigration.

If immigrants in general didn't commit so much crime, if they didn't use up so many benefits, people would not mind immigration as much.

No, my assessment was the correct one. People who hold entrenched negative attitudes about foreigners will of course collect any and all images and data (from whatever source, since he admitted that the State doesn't classify criminal activity by the ethnic or national origin of their suspects) that confirm their prejudicial point of view -- a completely dishonest form of discussion. This thread may have started as a thread about the refugee crisis, but has long since degenerated into a nativist's amen corner.

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I was starting to wonder when the "you disagree with me about immigration, you must be a bigot" brigade was coming back, you guys had been so quiet the last few pages.  Welcome back!


(did one of them even accuse the other side of poisoning the well and killing discussion?  The ironing!)

No, it's not that at all, and that was not what I meant at all. I take exception to being characterized like that.

That was the second time I've been caricatured as a PC sell-out because I object to being goaded into hating migrants, when I haven't even given my own position on the topic yet.

But that is beside my main point:

The quality of the posts on this thread objectively don't even reach FreeRepublic standards. Why do the people adamantly against this migration insist upon invective (which is indeed poisoning the well, you can't argue otherwise) on making their point?

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You seem to be under the impression that people have just randomly decided not to like immigrants and so they are using these numbers as justification.

It's the opposite. These numbers are the reason people are hesitant about allowing mass immigration.

If immigrants in general didn't commit so much crime, if they didn't use up so many benefits, people would not mind immigration as much.

The innate criminality of immigrants, along with their innate tendency to vagrancy, has been a standard trope in arguments in favor of immigration restriction since the 19th century.

It would be helpful to read an argument in favor of EU-wide repatriation of migrants to Syria (which has to be distinguished from questions about immigration) that doesn't make claims, substantiated or otherwise, about the moral quality of the migrants themselves.

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You seem to be under the impression that people have just randomly decided not to like immigrants and so they are using these numbers as justification.

It's the opposite. These numbers are the reason people are hesitant about allowing mass immigration.

If immigrants in general didn't commit so much crime, if they didn't use up so many benefits, people would not mind immigration as much.

The innate criminality of immigrants, along with their innate tendency to vagrancy, has been a standard trope in arguments in favor of immigration restriction since the 19th century.

...and?

Immigrants was more criminal on average than the average native in the 19th century (again depending on group), so I should somehow change my opinion on the issue of immigration because in 3 generations they end up at the national average?

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Yes and I have done so, if they stay in EU, they're a economic loss for European countries. That have nothing to do with "moral quality" of the Syrians, that's hard facts. That some of the loss is caused by bahaviour you of low "moral quality" is not a problem with my argument.

That article I linked didn't "prove" that 19th century immigrants committed more crime than natives -- far from the case. It argued that social engineers and political action committees in thrall of the current pseudosciences of eugenics and Social Darwinism made use of (abused) statistics to "confirm" their long-held prejudice against, in the US at least, non Protestants and non Anglo-Saxons. They pressured Congress to act on the basis of scientific misconduct, which Congress did in passing the 1924 Immigration Act. The same arguments those social engineers made in favor of a closed country have been repeated, almost verbatim, in this very thread -- and if their arguments were spurious then [for one, crime rates increased in the US even after 1924, only coming to a crash as a result of the Great Depression], they're spurious now.

And your second contention isn't necessarily true anyway: Immigrants, and even migrants, become "economic drains" on account of state policy (eligible for welfare without being eligible for legal work permits), employer abuse (being paid in cash to avoid payroll taxes), and yes, prejudice (being passed over for legal employment even when qualified), not out of inherent defects of the migrants themselves. As for migrant children and the responsibility of their education, I don't consider education of minors to be a economic drain -- precisely the opposite.

If anything, Middle Eastern migrants these days are much more fit than the migrants of 100 years ago -- they are not physically stunted from childhood malnutrition, they can read, and they don't carry chronic infectious diseases like TB. One could make the argument that they should stay to improve their home countries, but it is a tall order to ask fit people possessing some human capital to die as cannon fodder for terrorists or dictators.