The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.
People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.
Couldn't be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than "line goes up". It's clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!
"Curbed immigration" means people from the Middle East and Africa, right? If a lot of Canadians decided to emigrate, something tells me people like you would be much less upset.
If anyone needs proof about what you're saying: just compare the backlash against the EU taking in 1 million Syrian refugees (which lasted for years) vs the backlash against the EU taking in 4 million Ukrainian refugees (of which I've heard virtually no complaints).
So here's an immigrant perspective; as an Eastern European in Western Europe I see that the wealthy are using me as a cudgel to keep the locals down. I'm paying quite high rents in a market where a lot of the locals in different careers can't, and there is a housing crisis. The place I'm renting could be where someone's kid would move out to.
And it's partly German neocolonialism that fucked up Eastern Europe, so thank Merkel I'm here, since it's this or the VW factory.
That said, the people who kept the whole literal city awake honking their horns last midnight while waving Turkish flags, or the Moroccan teenagers accosting everyone near my place, including hurling abuse at my Asian or queer neighbours don't scream peaceful coexistence.
That said, the people who kept the whole literal city awake honking their horns last midnight while waving Turkish flags, or the Moroccan teenagers accosting everyone near my place, including hurling abuse at my Asian or queer neighbours don’t scream peaceful coexistence.
I think the argument to make here is that those people should be dealt with on an individual level rather than demonize an entire group. For every Turk honking their horns in your city at midnight, I am guessing there were exponentially more sleeping or trying to sleep but they couldn't because of the small number of assholes honking horns.
Of course, but if you put those few hundred into jail for the night to cool off, the paper will run that you are putting hundreds of Turks into jail, you racist.
Easier to just put in earplugs to ignore it, and pay for driving lessons so your wife can avoid the metro in the evening, but you ignore it for a decade, and now somehow nazis have the vote, and we are afraid of being caught in the crossfire as we already are, facing workplace discrimination and such.
I know it's not an easy problem with a clear solution, but it's a problem.
Of course there is going to be a preference for those that will integrate easily. Why wouldn't there be?
The Irish didn't go over there and "civilise" anyone so that argument doesn't apply.
Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians and other Europeans have come here in numbers and they've been welcomed because they integrated. Many folks from African nations too.
Syrians.... Not so much integrating.
Edit: To be clear I'm not in the anti immigration camp. I just think a preference for those of similar culture or who will integrate is natural.
You missed my point entirely which was about integration. I'm not afraid of different people - quite the opposite. I believe experiencing other cultures is essential. I'm very well traveled and really enjoy embracing other cultures.
Last year I went to the wedding of the daughter of Sri Lankan friends who have integrated incredibly well. It was a really cool day out, largely because it was different. I loved seeing the differences - the clothes, the intricate henna paintings on hands, the food etc. About 20% of the wedding attendees were Irish born and I felt lucky to be one of them.
I'm friends with a Palestinian lad nearly 20 years now (to be fair, he only moved here about 7 years ago but we had worked together in the middle east a good bit before that). He's a gem. I was so happy when he finally got citizenship. He had never owned a passport in his life and had to get company sponsored "travel documents" from Egypt (iirc) if he wanted to go anywhere outside the UAE where he was living statelessly.
The folks I'm talking about there enhance our country. They're very, very welcome. The issue is integration. Bring your different culture with you. Share it! I'll share mine too. Let's change each other a little through our different perspectives.
I'm not sure your side of the conversation is being had in good faith at this point.
I can't speak for the French. You'd have to ask them. I know there have been integration issues there. The very fast swing towards the hard right is one sign to me that integration has failed badly though. We had no such swing to the right in last month's elections here thankfully though there is a definite increase in the number of vocal hard right lunatics here unfortunately.
I think a fair question is - are some cultures less open to integrating when they move to a new country? Another fair question is - are the people in the country where folks are immigrating to less open to integrating with the new arrivals?
If the answer to either is "yes" then the societal cost of that lack of integration (or ways to mitigate it) has to be looked at lest we end up in a very undesirable situation that we are rapidly moving towards.
Seriously? You take over their country, tell them how much better your civilization and culture are and then expect them to want to stay where they are?
Immigration isn’t the cause of the problems that the people of France have been facing. Reducing or ending immigration would make problems worse.
The problem is that rich, wealthy elites control the country for their own benefit, hoarding all of the resources for themselves. Then they blame immigrants for causing the problem instead.
If resources in france were equally distributed, everyone would have ~300,000 euros.
Your friends have been scammed by the wealthy ruling elite. They’re voting conservative because they’ve been told that will solve the problems they’re experiencing, but it won’t. It will only make them worse.
I’m not trying to get you to vote for any particular party or candidate, effectively every political party is in on the scam anyways. I’m just trying to help you, I have nothing to gain here. The people in charge are exploiting you and your friends, they’re stealing from all of us, and blaming other scapegoats for it. Don’t believe any of their bullshit, and demand a better world to live in.
Problem is that most western democracies rely on those cheap migrants worker to fill most jobs that locals do not want to fill anymore for various reasons (physical difficulty, low wages, bad images).
So yeah, if you want cities filled with garbages, amazon packages that takes weeks to arrive, among other. Go on. Kick them all out.
Problem is that most western democracies rely on those cheap migrants worker to fill most jobs that locals do not want to fill anymore
WRONG.
It's supposed to be a market economy, if someone doesn't want to do the job for an advertised rate you're supposed to increase the rate until it becomes palatable.
Not import people to artificially keep wages and living conditions down for the working class.
So yeah, if you want cities filled with garbages, amazon packages that takes weeks to arrive, among other. Go on. Kick them all out.
If you want living conditions to continue to get worse and wages to spiral downwards until food completely unaffordable, keep importing people to keep the wages down, like you suggest.
It’s supposed to be a market economy, if someone doesn’t want to do the job for an advertised rate you’re supposed to increase the rate until it becomes palatable.
I'm not against the idea, after all that's what the left ask for a long time, but it will increase cost, which will be impacted on everyone cost of living. For a party that make most of its campaign on improving everyone standard of living, their ideas would have the opposite effect.
Not import people to artificially keep wages and living conditions down for the working class.
"Importing" people kinda sound like you consider them as goods, which isn't an appropriate way to call them. They are humans beings, with the same fundamental right as any local. But that's probably not the point you wanted to point, so let's skip that part.
Most of those people went through a perilous journey, which often result in their death. Some are motivated by the better living wages, sure (can we blame them, that'd be like having a country offering millions of € as a base wage for an average European, I doubt most would skip on that), but most are just refugee from war thorn countries that just wish to find a safe place to live.
They are lured by criminal groups that rob them of all of their belongings, some of their dignity (sold as slaves in Libya, things like that), in hope to get a ticket to what seem as a promised land compared to their home countries.
And if they are sent back, it would mean starting over from nothing, with no money nor work (which is some case would result in their death by starvation). For some of them that also mean sentencing them to torture and/or death, just because they are from an unwanted ethnicity, are gay, or anything the local consider as undesirable.
I don't think we can condemn them for trying, considering some of their home countries problem are a direct result of western action (creating countries out of nothing without taking ethnic boundaries into account, among other things), but we have a moral duty to at least give them a fair chance at proving they can integrate into their adoptive countries.
No country can welcome everyone, but putting every bad things on the back of the "migrants" by defining them as a generic bad person that's only there to do bad things is dishonest at best. Most of France problems are the result of years on gifts to the rich in hope that they'd be magnanimous enough to create more work (they never did, or at best did the bare minimum). Migrants are just straw-men used as a stepping stone by those who are more interested in power than in helping others.
I think in the case of France and Europe, the Syrian civil war led to a lot of refugees coming. I’m sure they did find jobs, but it wasn’t the primary reason for their arrival.
Well, sure there have always been some immigrants, so the question is why is it now leading to a right wing backlash? I think what is different is the high volume due to the Syrian civil war.