Europe-Middle East-Africa Refugee Crisis General Thread

[palandio]

In the German city of Tübingen, the Green mayor Boris Palmer, threatens to confiscate [unused] private property to forcefully house asylum seekers and/or illegals ...

FF

No, that's not an FF move. That is a violation of basic property rights, which is at the core of any liberal understanding of liberty.

"Property rights" are among the most unimportant rights there is, and certainly rank waaaay below the fundamental right to housing.

It will certainly cause a major backlash.

Not even sure how it would be possibly for a Mayor to do such a thing. What is the legal basis for this?

There's another perspective on this (unrealistic) measure: Tübingen is a university town, therefore it has a high quota of renters. And since the university has grown fast in the last years, it has become quite difficult to find appartments or rooms to rent. Tübingen will have to accomodate the asylum seekers anyways, so this is not so much about confiscations to help asylum seekers, but about confiscations in a stressed housing market in general.

[palandio]

Having arrrived in Munich...did the women travel separately?

According to a news agency report 190 refugees, among them many women and children, were taken out of the train in Rosenheim. 200 others remained on the trained to Munich.
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/ungarn-laesst-fluechtlinge-in-den-westen-ausreisen-a-1050790.html
(The fact, that the majority of arriving people is men, remains, of course.)

[palandio]

[...] Germany and its pledge to take in 800k refugees. [...]

That pledge at the moment doesn't exist.
The number 800k is a projection on how many asylum requests will have been made in Germany in 2015. Some of these are by people from Kosovo, Albania, etc. Legislation will be changed soon so that appliants from these countries can be sent back immediately.
The "pledge" is a misinterpreted administrative order that says German authorities should not check whether Syrians that arrive in Germany have already been registered as refugees in other EU countries. The original purpose of this was to relieve the responsible authorities. The effect can of course be seen now.

[palandio]

The humanitarian aid organization of the Maltese Order estimates that at the moment ca. 30.000 refugees are arriving in Pireios/Greece every day and that the same number of people is departing from Syria and its neighboring coutries in the direction of Europe every day.

[palandio]

There is a difference between "costing" 11.000€ a year and "getting" 11.000€ a year. You can't compare these numbers directly.

[palandio]

[...] Germans [...] are not willing to help third-generation Turks in the same way, even if "they've paid into the system". [...]

Who said that? That's a strawman. We're not talking here about "guest-workers" that we had invited to come to Germany at some point and who have entered the welfare system on the paying side (like most Turks in Germany). We're neither talking about their descendants that have been born and grown up in Germany.
We're talking about people from the whole world being entitled to go whereever they want whenever they want without having been invited (no borders, no nations) and then being entitled to enter the welfare system on the receiving side.
A European-style welfare system can only remain stable as long as not too many people at the same time enter it on the receiving side. Most Turks, ex-Yugoslavs, Greeks and Italians in Germany were at some point invited here and have consequentially entered the welfare system. There is no relevant political force that wants to push them out of the welfare system.
Most refugees have good reasons to come. Taking a fair share of refugees is a humanitarian duty. Welcoming everyone who wants to come is not.

[palandio]

Where the irony goes far enough though, it's that, in Germany, I don't remember the term to refer to it, but I remember that, from a rather understandable point of view, it's not at all a pejorative term to refer to 'invasion barbares', dunno how you say in English.

The most common word is Völkerwanderung.
Völker- of course means "of peoples".
Wanderung can mean hike, walking-tour, peregrination and also migration.
So intead of barbarian invasions for us it was just a harmless hiking tour like the ones many of us are doing on a regular basis in the Alps or other mountains. But of course with many, many participants, entire peoples you might say...

[palandio]

Also shows how the Kremlin propaganda machine is actively poisoning the political climate in Germany, trying to instrumentalize ex-Soviet Germans and promoting far-right politicians all over Europe.
(The Kremlin's best propaganda tools [unwittingly] of course remain some of the pro-Maidan center-left foreign policy journalists on ARD, ZDF and some of the leading newspapers.)

[palandio]

Schroeder is a shill, but he knows it and everybody else knows.
Journalists on ARD etc. are trying to work against Putin with the best intentions. But many people I know (who would never vote AfD or something of this direction) expressed distrust into ARD reporting on Russia/Ukraine-related themes after watching only the ARD news and reading the Süddeutsche Zeitung. They never consumed anything form the Kremlin propaganda machine and they still have become "Putin-understanders" to a certain degree. And now the memory is too fresh and there are new controversial themes in the public discussion.
That's why I called these journalists the Kremlin's best propaganda tools.

[palandio]

No, in my view parts of the German establishment media took a pro-Maidan stance up to a degree that was counterproductive. Parts of the German public are quite allergic to what they perceive as "campaign journalism" on a variety of issues. For example I think that the media campaigns before the Olympia referendums in Hamburg and Munich were not so well received on the line of "If they have to do a campaign like this for it, it can't be a good thing..." And this is not a Pegida/AfD problem but goes far into the Greens/CDU/SPD/FDP voting middle-of-the-road bourgeoisie.

The Maidan revolution is a lengthy issue and this is not the right thread for it. I know that I brought it up myself and I'm sorry for derailing the thread.

[palandio]

This thread is heading into a direction that I personally find disturbing.

I actually enjoy reading controversial discussions (e.g. David discussing wih Crab), but not certain types of agitation and propaganda by some posters.

Two links on topics that might be interesting:

A hoaxmap documenting debunked rumors about refugees:
http://hoaxmap.org/
(And yes, there are many incidents involving refugees, but many are made-up to inflate the numbers and create an athmosphere of tension.)

For those who can read German a link to an article about German Muslims and how many of them have quite critical or mixed views on the recent refugee wave:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/fluechtlingskrise/warum-deutsche-muslime-abneigung-gegen-fluechtlinge-haben-14059221.html

"Unfiltered immigration", "danger of islamist terror in German cities", "foreign cultures from Syria and North Africa", "let in the specialists and people that fit into Germany, but keep the illiterates out", "Merkel's fault that I can't feel safe anymore", "I'm harrassed by young men that are speaking Arabic loudly and harrassing me", "is ok when they come but they have to adjust", "with the refugees many problems of the world are coming to us", "my fellow Kurds in Turkey don't come to Germany, they're fleeing within Turkey, it's possible, you see "when you need to worry about your wife and kids, you can't be relaxed", "Syrians are ok, but most that come are fake Syrians", "they come here and have more rights and advantages than us, we have been here and working hard for decades", "the problem is the young North Africans", "I'm a Moroccan myself, but all is lost from the beginning for most arriving Moroccans and Algerians", "integration of uneducated refugees will fail".

Sounds familiar? Yes, and it's German Muslims saying it. Of course this is only a part of all German Muslims, but as you see Muslims are not a monolithic bloc.

[palandio]

Thats why i wrote Ultra Muslims, meaning they live just by their religion and someone who does that should not be allowed to reside in Germany, as Sharia and Democracy don't go well together.


No need to explain this to me, I live in a country which is 50% Muslim and have rarely had any problems, but it's a very different kind of Islam to what your countries are letting pour through, and noone is at fault except the voters.


The problem is not which religion is in question, the problem is to which extent is that religion followed. If Europe was still very religious then Gay's wouldn't have any basic rights.


A big part of this wave of migrants is uneducated and have no regard for Democratic/Westen laws or values, for some only law is Sharia and the Quran.

And if you missed my last video, a docummentary done by a Left-wing TV station ZDF about how "well" some Muslims are integrated then here you go, and please if you have the time watch it, at least the first 10 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVWAIKoatWM

At least if you don't believe me, believe your Left-wing bretherin.

I'll tell you something. I think that Merkel asking everybody to come to Germany was wrong, that most of German immigration politics since September was a failure (though also caused by the miopic politics in the years before that) and I support stricter immigration politics (closing the Balkan route, no "wild" immigration; temporary distribution of war refugees mostly to neighboring countries [Germany and other European countries should take a certain share]; consequent deportation of rejected asylum seekers). I also don't like how many of our media are equating "besorgte Bürger" ("worried citizens") and right-wing extremists. How every step away from uncontrolled immigration is confounded with infringing on the right to political asylum. How we are seeing masses of underqualified North African and Afghan young men and reading of the engineer from Aleppo and his wife and children.

But at the same time I don't like the apocalyptic hyperbole of the far-right, the constant whining ("ooh, someone called me ... for saying what I think"), the daily African-eats-child stories, the believe in a geno-suicide conspiracy, calling the CDU leftist as if immigration was the only issue on the political spectrum.

I don't like the tone of many of your posts. I like it more when you are explaining what you mean and arguing instead of just posting links ("hey, I found another video that proves my point" "and another one" "and another one") and shadow boxing with immaginary adversaries ("you naive lefties are saying that..." etc.)

[palandio]

Syrian asylum seeker sets building on fire. Paints a swastika to make someone think it's the Right-wing extremists.

He later complained about the constricted room he lives in and his lack of future perspectives. He told the police that he set the building on fire to call attention to the situation.

So after all it's our own fault, because we didn't give him the money, the house, the job and the family that we owe to him. The only solution to this is to let in even more people that feel entitled to the benefits.

Setting an inhabited building on fire injuring six people is of course a legitimate act of desperate protest that we forced him into. He remains an innocent, misunderstood victim, the Germans are to blame.

[palandio]

Whose fault is this shipwreck? Is inviting people to come to Europe/Germany leading to more or less people climbing into unsafe boats?

[palandio]

Plus, doesn't Germany have a moderate number of Vietnamese, many who came over in refugee-like situations. Of course, many of them were apparently deported because the poitical powers that be have no interest in aiding non-Muslims, but the ones that were able to stay seemed to have integrated into German society very well. It's almost as if the problem was with Muslim migrants, not German/Danish/Swedish/etc. society.

There are several groups of people of Vietnamese origin in Germany:
- Contingent refugees from the post-Vietnam War period (about 33.000 by the end of the 80s). They were granted asylum when still in South-East Asia and contrarily to what you allege, none of them have been deported after having been admitted to Germany.
- Contract workers in Eastern Germany (60.000 in 1990). After German reunification the German government tried to "repatriate" Eastern German Vietnamese contract workers, which resulted in some of them returning to Vietnam and many being displaced to other countries like the Czech Republic. At the same time former contract workers from other Eastern European countries arrived.
- Recent immigration, both legal and illegal.

Many Vietnamese contingent refugees are ridiculously affirmative of the German society, quite hard to themselves and very supportive of their children's education. Their children are under most aspects Germans with Asian faces. At the same time Germany treated them from the begin on under the assumption that they would remain in Germany forever and did everything to integrate them.
Many contract workers on the other hand had a hard time both before and after the fall of the Wall. Many faced impoverishment, discrimination and the "older" generations often still have problems with the language, but at the same time the cliché about ambitious Asian parents and succesful Asian children still holds.