Europe-Middle East-Africa Refugee Crisis General Thread

[Tender Branson]

Update:

30.000 migrants are expected here for this weekend alone.

14.000 came yesterday, 10.000 today until afternoon and 6.000 more are expected in the evening.

[politicus]

Update:

30.000 migrants are expected here for this weekend alone.

14.000 came yesterday, 10.000 today until afternoon and 6.000 more are expected in the evening.

Still via Hungary? How many are left in Hungary now?

[Tender Branson]

Update:

30.000 migrants are expected here for this weekend alone.

14.000 came yesterday, 10.000 today until afternoon and 6.000 more are expected in the evening.

Still via Hungary? How many are left in Hungary now?

Well, the migrants cannot enter Hungary via the South anymore. They are now all moving to Croatia instead. Croatia has seen an influx of 30.000 in the past few days and first called it "doable", but after they saw that 30.000 came in - they closed their borders too and bused most migrants to Hungary. Hungary didn't f**k around long, put all of them into buses as well and bused them to the Austrian border and now we have them here again.

Of the 30.000 expected this weekend, about 27.000 came via the Hungarian border and 3.000 are now also coming via the Slovenia border in the South.

To your 2nd question: Hungary is basically empty right now. All are either kept out by the Southern fence or being bused to Austria immediately. The Croatian bus drivers who bused the migrants to Hungary have been arrested there for being people smugglers ...

[politicus]

Update:

30.000 migrants are expected here for this weekend alone.

14.000 came yesterday, 10.000 today until afternoon and 6.000 more are expected in the evening.

Still via Hungary? How many are left in Hungary now?

Well, the migrants cannot enter Hungary via the South anymore. They are now all moving to Croatia instead. Croatia has seen an influx of 30.000 in the past few days and first called it "doable", but after they saw that 30.000 came in - they closed their borders too and bused most migrants to Hungary. Hungary didn't f**k around long, put all of them into buses as well and bused them to the Austrian border and now we have them here again.

Of the 30.000 expected this weekend, about 27.000 came via the Hungarian border and 3.000 are now also coming via the Slovenia border in the South.

To your 2nd question: Hungary is basically empty right now. All are either kept out by the Southern fence or being bused to Austria immediately. The Croatian bus drivers who bused the migrants to Hungary have been arrested there for being people smugglers ...

Yeah, I know about the situation in Croatia (see several of the posts above). 30,000 was just more than I thought were still in Hungary. What do you think the Slovenian government will do now?

[Tender Branson]

Update:

30.000 migrants are expected here for this weekend alone.

14.000 came yesterday, 10.000 today until afternoon and 6.000 more are expected in the evening.

Still via Hungary? How many are left in Hungary now?

Well, the migrants cannot enter Hungary via the South anymore. They are now all moving to Croatia instead. Croatia has seen an influx of 30.000 in the past few days and first called it "doable", but after they saw that 30.000 came in - they closed their borders too and bused most migrants to Hungary. Hungary didn't f**k around long, put all of them into buses as well and bused them to the Austrian border and now we have them here again.

Of the 30.000 expected this weekend, about 27.000 came via the Hungarian border and 3.000 are now also coming via the Slovenia border in the South.

To your 2nd question: Hungary is basically empty right now. All are either kept out by the Southern fence or being bused to Austria immediately. The Croatian bus drivers who bused the migrants to Hungary have been arrested there for being people smugglers ...

Yeah, I know about he situation in Croatia (see several posts above). 30,000 was just more than I thought were still in Hungary. What do you think the Slovenian government will do now?

Slovenia has said it "intends to let 10.000 stay".

But they only have 1 asylum seeker camp in the whole country for 200 people ... (and no refugee would like to stay in beautiful Slovenia anyway, because welfare there is too low and Germany is the promised land after all).

So, they will most likely let all of them pass into Austria.

[politicus]

Update:

30.000 migrants are expected here for this weekend alone.

14.000 came yesterday, 10.000 today until afternoon and 6.000 more are expected in the evening.

Still via Hungary? How many are left in Hungary now?

Well, the migrants cannot enter Hungary via the South anymore. They are now all moving to Croatia instead. Croatia has seen an influx of 30.000 in the past few days and first called it "doable", but after they saw that 30.000 came in - they closed their borders too and bused most migrants to Hungary. Hungary didn't f**k around long, put all of them into buses as well and bused them to the Austrian border and now we have them here again.

Of the 30.000 expected this weekend, about 27.000 came via the Hungarian border and 3.000 are now also coming via the Slovenia border in the South.

To your 2nd question: Hungary is basically empty right now. All are either kept out by the Southern fence or being bused to Austria immediately. The Croatian bus drivers who bused the migrants to Hungary have been arrested there for being people smugglers ...

Yeah, I know about he situation in Croatia (see several posts above). 30,000 was just more than I thought were still in Hungary. What do you think the Slovenian government will do now?

Slovenia has said it "intends to let 10.000 stay".

But they only have 1 asylum seeker camp in the whole country for 200 people ... (and no refugee would like to stay in beautiful Slovenia anyway, because welfare there is too low and Germany is the promised land after all).

So, they will most likely let all of them pass into Austria.

So basically the flow into Austria continues to HDZ wins in January/February, or until the Croatian government gets nervous about a likely defeat and close the border (well, not easy, might take about a month to make it somewhat efficient). That is a lot of pressure on Slovenia. Any chance either Slovenia or Austria make a move before January IYO?

[Tender Branson]

Worth reading:

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https://mises.org/library/governments-give-migrants-disastrous-mix-social-welfare-and-bureaucracy

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

[Hydera]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

I can't tell if your being serious....

Anyways I hope Kerry just mis-spoke and meant to say 10,000. None at all would of been better.

[Tender Branson]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

Doesn't matter. It's way too low in relation to the mess the US created in the Middle-East in the last decades.

The US should take in 1 million refugees each year, not 100.000 - and do their fair share.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

I can't tell if your being serious....

Anyways I hope Kerry just mis-spoke and meant to say 10,000. None at all would of been better.

I'm being very serious. Accepting more is a very good thing.

Doesn't matter. It's way too low in relation to the mess the US created in the Middle-East in the last decades.

The US should take in 1 million refugees each year, not 100.000 - and do their fair share.

So if we're doing this "proportionately", why stop at the last few decades? Let's go back over the past 150 years to see how much Europe has f-ed up the Middle East and world at large

[politicus]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

I can't tell if your being serious....

Anyways I hope Kerry just mis-spoke and meant to say 10,000. None at all would of been better.

I'm being very serious. Accepting more is a very good thing.

Doesn't matter. It's way too low in relation to the mess the US created in the Middle-East in the last decades.

The US should take in 1 million refugees each year, not 100.000 - and do their fair share.

So if we're doing this "proportionately", why stop at the last few decades? Let's go back over the past 150 years to see how much Europe has f-ed up the Middle East and world at large

Let's not. There is a big difference between direct responsibility caused by recent intervention and the indirect effect of actions taken a hundred years ago. Among other things Americans alive today voted for the politicians responsible for these actions. Whereas modern Europeans can hardly be responsible for what the ancestors of some of us did (you are making the classical "Europe is a country" fallacy here).

In addition the two European countries with the major responsibility in this - Britain and France - are not the ones taking most of the refugees and neither of them had universal suffrage when they committed the worst mistakes.

Besides the idea that the world would be so much better without European imperialism is questionable. In addition to the damage it also stabilized and organized many areas, promoted trade, brought Western medicine and infrastructure, eradicated Arabic slavery in Africa etc. It is a complex calculus whether things would have been better for the average person in Africa and Asia without it and varies a lot by region. Other cultures build equally cruel or crueler empires and destroyed each others civilization with great vindictiveness.

The current Middle Eastern borders were a huge mistake, but it would have been hard and conflictual to adjust clan based Arab societies to modernity anyway. And it is not as if countries like Ethiopia or Thailand has been without problems despite not being colonized (well, at least only for a short while for Ethiopia).

[Hydera]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

I can't tell if your being serious....

Anyways I hope Kerry just mis-spoke and meant to say 10,000. None at all would of been better.

I'm being very serious. Accepting more is a very good thing.

Doesn't matter. It's way too low in relation to the mess the US created in the Middle-East in the last decades.

The US should take in 1 million refugees each year, not 100.000 - and do their fair share.

So if we're doing this "proportionately", why stop at the last few decades? Let's go back over the past 150 years to see how much Europe has f-ed up the Middle East and world at large

Let's not. There is a big difference between direct responsibility caused by recent intervention and the indirect effect of actions taken a hundred years ago. Among other things Americans alive today voted for the politicians responsible for these actions. Whereas modern Europeans can hardly be responsible for what the ancestors of some of us did (you are making the classical "Europe is a country" fallacy here).

In addition the two European countries with the major responsibility in this - Britain and France - are not the ones taking most of the refugees and neither of them had universal suffrage when they committed the worst mistakes.

Besides the idea that the world would be so much better without European imperialism is questionable. In addition to the damage it also stabilized and organized many areas, promoted trade, brought Western medicine and infrastructure, eradicated Arabic slavery in Africa etc. It is a complex calculus whether things would have been better for the average person in Africa and Asia without it and varies a lot by region. Other cultures build equally cruel or crueler empires and destroyed each others civilization with great vindictiveness.

The current Middle Eastern borders were a huge mistake, but it would have been hard and conflictual to adjust clan based Arab societies to modernity anyway. It is not as if countries like Ethiopia or Thailand has been without problems despite not being colonized (well, at least only for a short while for Ethiopia).

Imperialism

Imperialism with it was a holy  up, introduced Western medicine and resulted in the overpopulation problem in 3rd world countries.

And created aribtary borders between hostile ethnic groups.

But neither of that was done by the US.

And most of the Syrian "rebels" and islamist groups are funded not by the US but by the Gulf arab states. Their involvement in Syria is much much more than what the US did. A lot of funding+weapons given to islamist groups in syria like Al-Nusra and Sham front and ETC was from the Gulf arab states.

Perhaps the gulf arab states accept all of the syrians.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Let's not. There is a big difference between direct responsibility caused by recent intervention and the indirect effect of actions taken a hundred years ago.

Okay, then tell your friend Tender that. He's the one proposing this be proportional in some way

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God you are just so wrong on this its unbelievable.

So Americans are responsible because some of us alive voted for politicians who made poor foreign policy decisions, but Europeans aren't? Europe's various governments just sat back during the Cold War and twiddled their thumbs while the big bad USA did all the mucking around? It wasn't just the UK and France that screwed around in the Middle East and Africa during recent decades. And it's not even the Cold War. Just 6 years ago most European countries were happy to have brutal dictators in places like Libya because they could get great deals on oil and gas, and sell them lots of weapons and other goods to support domestic industry. And as we've seen in recent news reports, Russia is also a major player here.

On top of this, tens of millions of Americans are immigrants or their descendents. Then you've got black people, who have systematically been disenfranchised for the past 50 years despite the VRA.

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...Okay? No one really brought that up, but whatever to keep up with your "Europe is so superior to everyone" spiel to make yourselves feel better about imperialism, and whitewashing everything "modern" as European.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't know what the hell kind of point you and Tender are trying to make about who is more responsible for these refugees based on some ridiculous and arbitrary standard based on foreign policy and enfranchisement.

The point is that immigration is pretty much a good part of the solution to Europe's economic problems, both current and future. I pointed out that we're taking a huge number ourselves, which will continue to benefit us for decades, as immigration/accepting refugees has for all of our history.

If you guys want to have a back-and-forth about who's responsibility it is and how imperialism was so great, I'm not interested.

[politicus]

Let's not. There is a big difference between direct responsibility caused by recent intervention and the indirect effect of actions taken a hundred years ago.

Okay, then tell your friend Tender that. He's the one proposing this be proportional in some way

Tender is not my friend. Cut that out.

[politicus]

Among other things Americans alive today voted for the politicians responsible for these actions. Whereas modern Europeans can hardly be responsible for what the ancestors of some of us did (you are making the classical "Europe is a country" fallacy here).

In addition the two European countries with the major responsibility in this - Britain and France - are not the ones taking most of the refugees and neither of them had universal suffrage when they committed the worst mistakes.

God you are just so wrong on this its unbelievable.

So Americans are responsible because some of us alive voted for politicians who made poor foreign policy decisions, but Europeans aren't? Europe's various governments just sat back during the Cold War and twiddled their thumbs while the big bad USA did all the mucking around? It wasn't just the UK and France that screwed around in the Middle East and Africa during recent decades. And it's not even the Cold War. Just 6 years ago most European countries were happy to have brutal dictators in places like Libya because they could get great deals on oil and gas, and sell them lots of weapons and other goods to support domestic industry. And as we've seen in recent news reports, Russia is also a major player here.

On top of this, tens of millions of Americans are immigrants or their descendants. Then you've got black people, who have systematically been disenfranchised for the past 50 years despite the VRA.

1) Be specific if you want countries other than Britain, France, Soviet Union/Russia (and Portugal pre-1975) to have a direct responsibility for meddling in the Middle East or modern Africa. The development aid given by other countries or the uneven trade patterns hardly make you morally responsible on the level direct military intervention does. Most countries do not actively try to topple dictators and they trade with them. That goes for all of Asia (see Burma) and is not something you can really blame European governments in particular. It is a global responsibility. Besides trying to topple dictators is extremely risky and almost invariably creates new refugee streams as a side effect.

2) Not all Americans are guilty of the mistakes done by your country, but those that reelected Bush in 2004 at least bear a direct responsibility in a way that no Europeans do. This is still a huge difference - and you went back a 150 years, which is absurd - no one are responsible for what their ancestors did.
No European country has had the capacity to play a major role on the world stage post-60s (unless you consider the Soviet Union European), even if France tries once in a while. So a US/EU comparison is pointless. The US simply operates on another level and meddles in far more countries and therefore has far greater responsibility.

Generally you are too vague and all over the place: Are we talking high imperialism, Cold War, post 9/11? What countries are you talking about? (there was no coordinated EU policies, so all this "Europeans did this and that" is rubbish.

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...Okay? No one really brought that up, but whatever to keep up with your "Europe is so superior to everyone" spiel to make yourselves feel better about imperialism, and whitewashing everything "modern" as European.

3) I never claimed Europe is superior. But that Europeans have a right to determine their own future and whom they want to share it with.

4) Everything modern is not European, but Europe and European settler societies obviously are the places where modern technology, organizational structures and most ideology developed, which means Europe had a profound effect on the way the rest of the world developed.

The point is that immigration is pretty much a good part of the solution to Europe's economic problems, both current and future. I pointed out that we're taking a huge number ourselves, which will continue to benefit us for decades, as immigration/accepting refugees has for all of our history.

If you guys want to have a back-and-forth about who's responsibility it is and how imperialism was so great, I'm not interested.

5) I did not read Tenders posts, so there is no "you guys". Two separate debates. You started the imperialism theme yourself by going back 150 years and claiming Europe was responsible for messing up the Middle East, which I logically assumed was a reference to Sykes-Picot et al.

6) Europen countries - like most Asian - exist to form the home for a specific national culture. Economic concerns are secondary to that.

Besides our general experience with Middle Eastern and Muslim East African immigrants is that they are a rather huge net loss. Immigrants are not just immigrants. Cultural compatibility matters a lot, and that is virtually nonexistent when we are talking about Northern Europeans and Arabs. If we were to pick countries we wanted immigrants from the Middle East, Northern Africa, the Sahel region and Eritrea/Somalia/Sudan would be at the bottom together with Afghanistan/Pakistan. You Americans mostly get Hispanics and East Asians, that are far less at odds with Western norms. Forced immigration is not the solution to economic problems + Americans generally overlook that the current skewed demographic distribution is a temporary phenomenon, which will be far less in a generation when big generations die off and we can stabilize on a lower population level. Most of Europe is densely populated and getting a lower population will be a blessing in many ways.

[DavidB.]

Let's not pretend there is a fixed amount of migrants. By taking in people, a country only creates more migrants/"refugees", because hey, everyone wants to live in Northern Europe or the US.

My position: the US shouldn't take in non-Christian/non-Yazidi/non-other-religious-minority migrants, and neither should Europe. We should definitely help them and we should surely pay for that, but they shouldn't be able to live here and get a passport. And the Netherlands should immediately implement these policies unilaterally.

Worth reading:

And this is why I hold Dutch politicians responsible for the mess that's going to be caused by all this. My country clearly seems to be the best option for free money, which is what these people want. Oh, and of course none of these people are going to leave "if war stops".

[Simfan34]

The refugees’ path to Europe marked by new threat: land mines

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It seems like it's a matter of time before someone is killed by one of these. Horrific.

[Tender Branson]

The refugees’ path to Europe marked by new threat: land mines

It's possible, but still the chances for anyone to be killed by landmines in Croatia are small:

Most migrants are travelling near/or on roads and those roads and the spaces nearby have almost 100% been cleared of mines during the road construction process. Many are also travelling by bus or train.

And if 30.000 already made it into Croatia safely, there's no need to think landmines would be a greater threat than say a far-right winger running amok and killing some of them.

[Sol]

The idea that countries should be a specific homeland for a particular group of people is wrong-headed, and when it's used to justify the persecution of those who are suffering mightily, it becomes evil. If European states decide not to take in asylum seekers because they wish to protect their "national identity," then they have literally chosen a way of conceptualizing the state which is abhorrent. If Slovakia says that they can't take in Syrian refugees because they wish to preserve their ethnic homogeneity, than they might as well deport the Hungarians as well-it's the same fundamental principle of ethnocentrism and violence.

[politicus]

The idea that countries should be a specific homeland for a particular group of people is wrong-headed, and when it's used to justify the persecution of those who are suffering mightily, it becomes evil. If European states decide not to take in asylum seekers because they wish to protect their "national identity," then they have literally chosen a way of conceptualizing the state which is abhorrent. If Slovakia says that they can't take in Syrian refugees because they wish to preserve their ethnic homogeneity, than they might as well deport the Hungarians as well-it's the same fundamental principle of ethnocentrism and violence.

They are "wrongheaded" and "abhorrent" according to your norms, but that is just an opinion. It is the basis for most European and many Asian countries. A country being a national homeland does not exclude historical minorities or limited immigration, it just precludes tilting the ethnic balance to the degree that the majority population lose control.

There is nothing evil in saying Slovakia exists to form a home for the Slovaks and it doesn't preclude minority rights or regional autonomy per se. The rights of a people are as fundamental as the rights of individuals. This becomes clearer when you think of small nations like Tongans, Greenlanders etc. Why shouldn't these people be allowed to have a country where their culture is the dominant one despite their small size? European nations are larger, but ethnic balances are fragile and can be distorted if migration is large and persistent. The element of uncertainty in this contributes to this. If it was just for 5 years or so the resistance to it would be negligent, but we know from experience we will likely never get rid of them again so it takes on the character of forced immigration, which is of course perceived as a threat and fundamentally undemocratic, since the people in the host country never got to approve a changed population, or whether they thought that was a good idea.

You want your own norms to be universal, but that is unrealistic. You should respect the basic foundation of other nations. History is filled with people that ended up losing control with the land of their ancestors. It might be difficult to understand if you belong to a large and numerous group, but that is not the case for many peoples in Europe. This always gets trivialized and ridiculed, but say California had been an ethnically defined country in 1965 and experienced the same immigration as IRL making an immigrant group a plurality and the former majority population a minority. With the population growth in the Middle East and Africa that is not an unrealistic development in Europe and therefore many say: we already have large minorities and might as well say no now to prevent the demographic change from getting out of hand.

It is simply not true that a country that refuse to take refugees - or refuse to settle them permanently - persecute them. They refuse to help them in a specific way (but is often willing to help them in other ways and places). That is exactly that, refusing help, the persecutors are the groups in their homeland that drove them to flee, not the people saying "you will have to go elsewhere". No one are obliged to share their country with people they don't want to share it with, just as you are not obliged to share your house with foreigners just because they are homeless. You are doing a good deed if you take them in, but not doing good deeds is not equal to persecution.

[politicus]

The refugees’ path to Europe marked by new threat: land mines

It's possible, but still the chances for anyone to be killed by landmines in Croatia are small:

Most migrants are travelling near/or on roads and those roads and the spaces nearby have almost 100% been cleared of mines during the road construction process. Many are also travelling by bus or train.

And if 30.000 already made it into Croatia safely, there's no need to think landmines would be a greater threat than say a far-right winger running amok and killing some of them.

If they are trying to avoid police/army they will no longer travel along roads. So this will become a problem if a HDZ government shuts the borders down and people try alternative routes.

[Sol]

The idea that countries should be a specific homeland for a particular group of people is wrong-headed, and when it's used to justify the persecution of those who are suffering mightily, it becomes evil. If European states decide not to take in asylum seekers because they wish to protect their "national identity," then they have literally chosen a way of conceptualizing the state which is abhorrent. If Slovakia says that they can't take in Syrian refugees because they wish to preserve their ethnic homogeneity, than they might as well deport the Hungarians as well-it's the same fundamental principle of ethnocentrism and violence.

They are "wrongheaded" and "abhorrent" according to your norms, but that is just an opinion. It is the basis for most European and many Asian countries. A country being a national homeland does not exclude historical minorities or limited immigration, it just precludes tilting the ethnic balance to the degree that the majority population lose control.

There is nothing evil in saying Slovakia exists to form a home for the Slovaks and it doesn't preclude minority rights or regional autonomy per se. The rights of a people are as fundamental as the rights of individuals. This becomes clearer when you think of small nations like Tongans, Greenlanders etc. Why shouldn't these people be allowed to have a country where their culture is the dominant one despite their small size? European nations are larger, but ethnic balances are fragile and can be distorted if migration is large and persistent. The element of uncertainty in this contributes to this. If it was just for 5 years or so the resistance to it would be negligent, but we know from experience we will likely never get rid of them again so it takes on the character of forced immigration, which is of course perceived as a threat and fundamentally undemocratic, since the people in the host country never got to approve a changed population, or whether they thought that was a good idea.

You want your own norms to be universal, but that is unrealistic. You should respect the basic foundation of other nations. History is filled with people that ended up losing control with the land of their ancestors. It might be difficult to understand if you belong to a large and numerous group, but that is not the case for many peoples in Europe. This always gets trivialized and ridiculed, but say California had been an ethnically defined country in 1965 and experienced the same immigration as IRL making an immigrant group a plurality and the former majority population a minority. With the population growth in the Middle East and Africa that is not an unrealistic development in Europe and therefore many say: we already have large minorities and might as well say no now to prevent the demographic change from getting out of hand.

It is simply not true that a country that refuse to take refugees - or refuse to settle them permanently - persecute them. They refuse to help them in a specific way (but is often willing to help them in other ways and places). That is exactly that, refusing help, the persecutors are the groups in their homeland that drove them to flee, not the people saying "you will have to go elsewhere". No one are obliged to share their country with people they don't want to share it with, just as you are not obliged to share your house with foreigners just because they are homeless. You are doing a good deed if you take them in, but not doing good deeds is not equal to persecution.

This idea, that somehow Denmark or Slovakia will become "overrun with Arabs" or whatever is incredible foolishness.

In any case, basing countries off of ethnicity is foolhardy, even setting aside the ethical dimension, because no country is a perfect nation-state, and it creates a dynamic where minorities are considered, or at least feel like, less than full citizens--with Slovakia being an excellent example thanks to the long-running tensions between Magyars and Slovaks in the country.

I'm not necessarily saying that all nationalism is bad. Nations can foster a sense of unity. But that unity needs to be a civic nationalism, as opposed to an ethnic nationalism.

[Beezer]

What makes you think Muslim minorities would embrace a civic nationalism? There's a reason why many European countries are quite specific when it comes to limiting immigration from certain regions...

[Tender Branson]

We had to drive to Salzburg City today and there were no border checks whatsoever at the 2 borders to Germany at Lofer and near Bad Reichenhall at the Walserberg. Not even a single police car. And no refugees at the border either.

Picture of the Lofer border:



Picture of the Wals-Siezenheim border:



It seems they only checked the highway from and into Germany, because the radio guy mentioned a 10 mile traffic jam.

But many people use the Walserberg and the "German corner" to drive from Austria to Germany and vice-versa ...