EU Immigration Crisis Megathread

[Martinus]

More proof Poles are stupid: this article making rounds in the internet as evidence that Sweden is a sharia hellhole:

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

Yes, I am sure there are more rapes reported in Sweden than in the Emirates or Serbia because Sweden is a rape country. Jesus Christ. How did these people graduate from college.

[Josquius]

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country

....wha...?

[Valmy]

Hey weren't you the guy justifying austerity and other conservative economic policies by the fact Germany was a shrinking country whose economy was doomed to contract?

I do advocate reducing our state debt due to the forecasted demographic decline and I also think aging society explains why German consumers have such a high savings rate. Not sure I support conservative economics as I am not sure what that is. And I have no idea how any of this is relevant.

If we wanted to counter the economic effects of demographic decline with immigration, we should hand out passports at university graduation ceremonies in foreign countries.

Taking in traumatised victims of civil wars without qualifications seems at best to be a very long term way to counter it and certainly not the one with the most obvious positive economic impact.

I find using a pseudo economic argument to justify a good deed disingenuous and unnecessary.

Yup, it never helps to justify your policies (however well-meaning) with lies - because when the lie is disproven, the entire policy is tainted.

What is the lie? I am not justifying any good deeds. Is the fact I might actually believe that immigration is good too mind blowing that you all assume I have some secret agenda hidden behind lies?

I think the motivations of the people involved are sometimes more important than the fact they are all college grads. Besides college grads need more than just a passport to move, they need lucrative employment waiting for them, that is more difficult.

[The Brain]

To me it makes sense to keep these two issues separate.

1. How can we enrich ourselves?

2. How can we help others who are in desperate need?

It seems unlikely to me that treating them as the same issue is good for any of them.

To elaborate: my impression is that taking in large numbers of refugee immigrants from the ME carries huge opportunity costs from the perspective of both points 1 and 2.

[crazy canuck]

I don't understand the argument that immigration in nations that have flat or negative birth rates is bad for the economy.

Europe has high unemployment as it is, so lack of workforce is not an issue except for some specialists, which are unlikely to be found among the refugees. The negative birth rate is not the cause of Europe's current economic malaise. At most you could say it stifles long term investment. As it happens underinvestment is an issue, but higher state consumption to feed refugees won't change that and will not spur relevant private investment and the minor value-add is negligible. So asylum is not bad for the economy, it does not add anything either so and will distribute the available wealth among more people.

It is very likely skilled workers are coming in this wave.  That is certainly the experience Canada had when we brought in large numbers of Asian refugees when Uganda threw them out.  These are not economic migrants, they are people who probably would have wished to stay in Syria but for the terror they now face.

[Martim Silva]

I don't understand the argument that immigration in nations that have flat or negative birth rates is bad for the economy.

Europe has high unemployment as it is, so lack of workforce is not an issue except for some specialists, which are unlikely to be found among the refugees. The negative birth rate is not the cause of Europe's current economic malaise. At most you could say it stifles long term investment. As it happens underinvestment is an issue, but higher state consumption to feed refugees won't change that and will not spur relevant private investment and the minor value-add is negligible. So asylum is not bad for the economy, it does not add anything either so and will distribute the available wealth among more people.

It is very likely skilled workers are coming in this wave.  That is certainly the experience Canada had when we brought in large numbers of Asian refugees when Uganda threw them out.  These are not economic migrants, they are people who probably would have wished to stay in Syria but for the terror they now face.

And that is the time when other European countries have to start telling the Germans to stop the shit they are doing.

Germany has wrecked the economies of Southern Europe with its demands of austerity; we went along, for the sake of the greater European ideal.

As a result, we have massive unemployment. Especially youth unemployment. In Portugal it's 35%, Greece over 50%, Spain 51%; far higher that the rates in African countries.

We were told that, in the wake of European integration, the young can find work in the better economies, like Germany. And so they did: many of our young (and even not so young) skilled workers took German classes and went (or are going) to search for a better future in Germany.

In large numbers, too. Since 2010, 485.000 Portuguese (about 5% of the population), mostly young and talented people, left the country due to lack of job opportunities, caused in large part by the severe Austerity demanded.

And NOW the Germans say, "screw YOU, young Europeans, we are taking Arabs instead. AND we are giving them free housing, so they can work for smaller wages than YOU, since you have to pay for your lodgings".

Is THAT what Germany is saying? For millions of young europeans that they have no future in Europe? That we reduced our economies to a size where they cannot take in all our workers for nothing? That the young people of southern (and eastern) Europe can't find a future inside Europe, because the almighty Germans decided they are going to take in ungodly numbers of Muslims instead? (1,000,000 this year and 500,000+ every year, according to the vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel)

AND we have to take in thousands of Mulsims into our unemployed-filled economy to boot? AND pay for them, when we cannot even pay the medicine to give to our old?

ARE YOU MOCKING US?

Because if you are, it's in VERY BAD TASTE.

If Germany continues this stupidity, it will have to face a LOT more than some Greeks against austerity. The German government is proving itself to be extremely unstable and unreasonable in its constant demands. It is hell bent to follow a sure path to make Germans the most hated people in Europe, and it risks alienating most European countries from the european ideal. Britain is already ever more closer to a Brexit, and this way you can expect a lot more countries to follow.

So I advise you to stop with your Gutmensch loony ideals and start thinking HARD about the choices you are making for the whole of Europe, because you CANNOT joke with the lives of tens of millions of europeans just because you think that turning yourselves into New Arabia will somehow "redeem" Germany from whatever happened in the first half of the past century. Because it won't. It will make you MORE hated instead.

[garbon]

Well that was weird. Even for MSil.

[lustindarkness]

Well that was weird. Even for MSil.

Pretty good rant in my opinion.

[Martinus]

I like it when people write random words in all caps in their rants. Very manifest-esque.

[Admiral Yi]

Germany has wrecked the economies of Southern Europe with its demands of austerity; we went along, for the sake of the greater European ideal.

This whole time I thought it was for the sake of the cheap loans.

[11B4V]

If Germany continues this stupidity, it will have to face a LOT more than some Greeks against austerity. The German government is proving itself to be extremely unstable and unreasonable in its constant demands.

[crazy canuck]

Well that was weird. Even for MSil.

Pretty good rant in my opinion.

I agree.  We should have a rant of the month award.  That one was brilliant.

[Liep]

So apparently we had another terrorist attack. I guess this is the thread for it since it was an asylum seeker that stabbed a police officer while shouting allahu akbar.

[Valmy]

So apparently we had another terrorist attack. I guess this is the thread for it since it was an asylum seeker that stabbed a police officer while shouting allahu akbar.

Huh. I bet the other asylum seekers are thrilled.

[Syt]

http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/09/scientist-revokes-software-license-protest-immigration-friendly-policies?&utm_source=scienceInsider&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=racist_scientist-109_2015-09-30

Scientist says researchers in immigrant-friendly nations can't use his software

A German scientist is revoking the license to his bioinformatics software for researchers working in eight European countries because those countries allow too many immigrants to cross their borders. From 1 October, scientists in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Denmark—"the countries that together host most of the non-European immigrants"—won't be allowed to use a program called Treefinder, informatician Gangolf Jobb wrote in a statement he posted on his website.

Treefinder has been used in hundreds of scientific papers to build phylogenetic trees, diagrams showing the most likely evolutionary relationship of various species, from sequence data. Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable, several scientists tell ScienceInsider. Treefinder had not been updated for several years and it was mostly used by researchers who had grown used to it, they say. Some pointed to a list of possible alternatives online.

"Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy," Jobb's statement reads. "Immigration unnecessarily defers the collapse of capitalism, its final crisis," the statement also reads.

Jobb had already excluded researchers in the United States from using the software in February. "I want to stress that this license change is not against my colleagues in the USA," he wrote at the time, "but against a small rich elite there that misuses the country's power to rule the world. The USA is our worst enemy." In another part of the website, Jobb writes that "the scientific system is being misused to promote" the goals of a "small elite" and that "evil old men rule the world."

The 2004 paper describing Treefinder was written by Jobb and Korbinian Strimmer, a bioinformatician at Imperial College London who says he hasn't seen Jobb in 10 years. Jobb sent "grotesque emails with racist slogans" to professors in Germany in the past, Strimmer says. "His new diatribe against refugees is unbelievable."

Strimmer says Jobb started a Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, under Arndt von Haeseler, now at the Center for Integrative Bioinformatics Vienna, who is also a co-author on the 2004 paper. Jobb later broke off his Ph.D., however, and joined Strimmer's group for a year. "During that time I managed to persuade him to write the publication on Treefinder," Strimmer says. It is not clear whether Jobb still has a job. (His website says that he "cannot work as a scientist, because my traditional views and values conflict with that elite's doctrine.") Jobb declined to answer questions via email, referring to his website.

"I'd say not being able to use Treefinder would be no great loss to anyone," says Sandra Baldauf, a biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. A paper co-authored by Baldauf last year in Current Biology used Treefinder primarily because a colleague had long worked with it, she says; now that that researcher has left, Baldauf uses "the underlying software (Consel), which is the real analytical power behind Treefinder anyway," she wrote in an email. And after reading Jobb's statement, "I would stop using [Treefinder] just on general principle, even if we had to resort to using pencil and paper."

Another researcher, biologist Maria Nilsson-Janke at the LOEWE Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, Germany, says her team has been using the software and only became aware of the change in the license—and Jobb's worldview—after an email from ScienceInsider. She and her team "started to look for replacements, and have already found suitable programs,"Nilsson-Janke says. "We will also reanalyze data sets that are in the pipeline to be published."

The affair shows that it is important for scientists to be knowledgeable about licensing issues when using software, says Antoine Branca, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, who co-authored a Nature Communications paper last year that also relied on Treefinder. Because Jobb owns the licence, he can restrict it as he sees fit; licenses like the GNU General Public License, on the other hand, grant users rights to use, study, share, and even modify the software freely. "Maybe people will be more aware of this now," Branca says.