It’s obvious, as soon as the shit goes down the hill people need someone to blame, “foreigners” have always been the easiest to pick on (because they are not well “organized” and can’t defend themselves that easily) and because there are “idiots” in any however-defined group you can easily pick out the bad examples and just point on them.
“Crime commited by immigrants” is the latest buzz here in germany, some right-winged politicians and media are currently going hand in hand down that road, not actually being able to distinct between “immigrants” and “criminals” and not being impressed by other experts who try to analyze statistics properly and come to the conclusion that crime has actually become less (but overall more violent) and the share of crime committed by immigrants has actually lessened over the years.
But they have their horrible singular examples and make a campaign out of it.
But that said I am really on par with BotB here, if people decide to come to a different country and want to live there they should definately try to respect the country and the laws and fit in to a certain degree.
This does not mean giving up their culture or something, but a few examples that cross my mind :
An example on the good side is the (amazingly big) russian community in my hometown, it happens quite often that you meet someone from a russian family here and something that often struck me is this “near-dogma” they have about not speaking russian while being in a public place. I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but several russians told me that they don’t want other people to feel insecure because of a group sitting in a bus chatting in russian and laughing. That (and countless invitations to all kinds of events, including religious ones) makes me feel like they actually “integrate” without loosing anything.
An the other side :
The police lately closed some kind of “sweatshop” in my town where a dozen of vietnamese women were working 12-14 hours per day with next to no pay. The thing is that it was actually not really “illegal” because those women were all somehow related to the owners of the business (wife, daughter, niece, cousin etc.) but it was quite obvious what was going on there and that kind of (women-) slavery is something that simply shouldn’t happen anywhere on the world, apart from the fact that is plainly forbidden here in germany.
Also I do have a problem with this (very small) group of islamic people coming here and having the goal to turn this country into an islamic state or trying to create some kind of islamic paralell-world, including stuff like forced marriage (or generally a horrible way of treating the females in their social group) which leads to problems like female schoolteachers (90% of them are female here) who are confronted with 14-year old immigrant-boys that are actually completely confident that they as “soon-to-be-man” are higher on the social ladder than a grown-up women.
But that is actually a problem Germany made itself, for years they kinda gehtto-ed all immigrants making it actually hard for them to really grow into the country.
And on a larger scale I do have a problem with this very radical part of the islamic world. This has alot to do with the fact that I consider myself being a freethinker and actually oppose religion as such (no matter what form) but although “conversion” is a major goal of christianity aswell it is obvious that there is actually a more violent and agressive force within the islamic world pursuing this goal/concept. “Death to all infidels” or some guy running an arabic country that seems to be willing to use the h-bomb on other countries as soon as he actually has it just give me the chills, apart from alot of other (in my freethinking and humanist view) wrong concepts.
And about the US, a quote from george carlin just came to mind who said something like: “Whenever somethings wrong in the US someone high up has this great idea : “Let’s bomb someone !” In the 60s and 70s we bombed yellow people, now whenever something is wrong we just bomb brown people.”
Made me chuckle.
It’s obvious, as soon as the shit goes down the hill people need someone to blame, “foreigners” have always been the easiest to pick on (because they are not well “organized” and can’t defend themselves that easily) and because there are “idiots” in any however-defined group you can easily pick out the bad examples and just point on them.
“Crime commited by immigrants” is the latest buzz here in germany, some right-winged politicians and media are currently going hand in hand down that road, not actually being able to distinct between “immigrants” and “criminals” and not being impressed by other experts who try to analyze statistics properly and come to the conclusion that crime has actually become less (but overall more violent) and the share of crime committed by immigrants has actually lessened over the years.
But they have their horrible singular examples and make a campaign out of it.
But that said I am really on par with BotB here, if people decide to come to a different country and want to live there they should definately try to respect the country and the laws and fit in to a certain degree.
This does not mean giving up their culture or something, but a few examples that cross my mind :
An example on the good side is the (amazingly big) russian community in my hometown, it happens quite often that you meet someone from a russian family here and something that often struck me is this “near-dogma” they have about not speaking russian while being in a public place. I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but several russians told me that they don’t want other people to feel insecure because of a group sitting in a bus chatting in russian and laughing. That (and countless invitations to all kinds of events, including religious ones) makes me feel like they actually “integrate” without loosing anything.
An the other side :
The police lately closed some kind of “sweatshop” in my town where a dozen of vietnamese women were working 12-14 hours per day with next to no pay. The thing is that it was actually not really “illegal” because those women were all somehow related to the owners of the business (wife, daughter, niece, cousin etc.) but it was quite obvious what was going on there and that kind of (women-) slavery is something that simply shouldn’t happen anywhere on the world, apart from the fact that is plainly forbidden here in germany.
Also I do have a problem with this (very small) group of islamic people coming here and having the goal to turn this country into an islamic state or trying to create some kind of islamic paralell-world, including stuff like forced marriage (or generally a horrible way of treating the females in their social group) which leads to problems like female schoolteachers (90% of them are female here) who are confronted with 14-year old immigrant-boys that are actually completely confident that they as “soon-to-be-man” are higher on the social ladder than a grown-up women.
But that is actually a problem Germany made itself, for years they kinda gehtto-ed all immigrants making it actually hard for them to really grow into the country.
And on a larger scale I do have a problem with this very radical part of the islamic world. This has alot to do with the fact that I consider myself being a freethinker and actually oppose religion as such (no matter what form) but although “conversion” is a major goal of christianity aswell it is obvious that there is actually a more violent and agressive force within the islamic world pursuing this goal/concept. “Death to all infidels” or some guy running an arabic country that seems to be willing to use the h-bomb on other countries as soon as he actually has it just give me the chills, apart from alot of other (in my freethinking and humanist view) wrong concepts.
And about the US, a quote from george carlin just came to mind who said something like: “Whenever somethings wrong in the US someone high up has this great idea : “Let’s bomb someone !” In the 60s and 70s we bombed yellow people, now whenever something is wrong we just bomb brown people.”
Made me chuckle.
