EU Immigration Crisis Megathread

[Eddie Teach]

I can say that at the time I took great pride in my ability to take on and beat up to five other dudes at the same time)

Hey, Bruce Lee, you should realize boasts like this made on the internet are much more likely to make people question your credibility than respect your fighting prowess.

[Martim Silva]

I can say that at the time I took great pride in my ability to take on and beat up to five other dudes at the same time)

Hey, Bruce Lee, you should realize boasts like this made on the internet are much more likely to make people question your credibility than respect your fighting prowess.

Don't give a rat's ass about what you think. And if that is what you focused while reading, you have a mental disorder - never mind me, focus of the bigger issue on hand. I even removed that bit, if that makes you feel less threatened.

[Eddie Teach]

Don't give a rat's ass about what you think. And if that is what you focused while reading, you have a mental disorder - never mind me, focus of the bigger issue on hand. I even removed that bit, if that makes you feel less threatened.

I have nothing to say about your police blotter reports of immigrants committing rape. Considering the numbers involved, it didn't seem all that remarkable. If you had something showing how the statistics have changed, that might be worth perusing.

And honestly, what's the fucking point of bragging if you don't care if people believe you? 

[Zanza]

Stuttgart Struggles to House the Migrants It Embraces
By MICHAEL KIMMELMANOCT. 6, 2015



STUTTGART, Germany — With arson attacks on refugee camps and resistance from Chancellor Angela Merkel's own political partners, it's not hard to find doomsayers predicting trouble for German cities absorbing asylum seekers. But in this peaceful and pragmatic city, synonymous with German know-how and corporate giants like Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes, it is possible to glimpse something else: a rosier future.

Here, migration has long been an engine of growth, and integration the bedrock of civic pride. The problems Stuttgart faces are ones that prosperous cities around the globe now share, American ones included: a dearth of affordable housing and the kind of apartments that suit the evolving demographics of the people who occupy them.

The message from Stuttgart is that migrants are needed, even welcome. The challenge is building a city they can live in.

"Boomtowns are integration cities," said Gari Pavkovic, the son of a Croatian guest worker who arrived here decades ago. Mr. Pavkovic now manages immigration for the city government.


A temporary structure where migrants live in Stuttgart. Immigrants account for one of every three start-ups in the city.

He ticked off numbers. Forty percent of Stuttgart's 600,000 residents (or 60 percent of people under the age of 18) come from abroad, twice the national average. After World War II, foreign laborers rebuilt local industry: first Italians, then Greeks, Spaniards, Yugoslavians, Turks. And they're still coming. Some 20,000 newcomers arrive annually, not counting the current wave of Syrians and others. Immigrants account for one of every three start-ups.

The other day, Levent Gunes, who works for the city planning office, provided a tour of a disused tank engine factory, an industrial relic being converted into an arts complex. The man who bought it was born in Turkey and owns a bakery across the street, Mr. Gunes said, next to a big Turkish supermarket and mosque.

"The percentage of entrepreneurs in Stuttgart with migrant backgrounds is the highest in Germany," Mr. Gunes, who teaches at Stuttgart University and is the son of Turkish migrants himself, elaborated over börek and yogurt at the bakery.

"We're talking I.T. people, engineers, architects, artists," he said. "You only see the greengrocer and the butcher at street level, not all the doctors and lawyers upstairs."


A family outside a bakery in Feuerbach, an industrial area of Stuttgart that has many Turkish businesses.

Stuttgart's big move was to avoid pushing migrants into poor, isolated suburbs as in Rome or Paris, he emphasized.

"The layout of the city has reinforced integration," he said.

One can see what he means by what's not here. Stuttgart doesn't have ethnic enclaves. After World War II, Mercedes and Bosch erected hostels for guest workers. But by the 1970s, when Manfred Rommel [son of the field marshal by the way] became mayor, political and business leaders adopted a different tack, integrating migrants into existing communities in the city center. Stuttgart embraced a melting pot urbanism.

Wilfried Porth, a member of the Daimler board and director of the company's labor relations, recalls Stuttgart as a dour place years ago.

"Then Italians and Spaniards and Turks brought cafe life to the streets," he said. "Physically, tangibly, this became a much friendlier, more open city."

According to Mr. Porth, Daimler is now underwriting language training, job apprenticeships, and access to sports and other clubs so critical to the social fabric in Germany — helping a wider effort to speed up the process of integration for new migrants. The hope is to avoid the mistake that West German and other European cities have made, enabling a kind of parallel culture of alienated guest workers to occupy isolated pockets of cities.

"We need, as quickly as possible, to integrate refugees into neighborhoods and provide them with skills and the capability to afford housing here," Mr. Porth said.

That said, Daimler is not in the housing business, and Stuttgart, like Berlin, New York, London and Paris, faces a housing shortage.


Suthan Shanmugarajah, 25, center, works as a line manager at the gearbox assembly of Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart. His parents came to the country from Sri Lanka in 1979 and 1981.

City leaders want to fight sprawl, but sky-high construction costs, Europe-wide environmental regulations that discourage tall buildings, an inviolable green belt around the city center and little land in public hands all make building new apartments here a struggle.

Maybe the biggest long-term hurdle, though, is that Stuttgart needs new thinking about the shape and mix of its apartments.

A disproportionate amount of new housing across the country is built for nuclear families, but according to the German Federal Institute of Demography, more than half of German city dwellers live alone. In "Living Complex," Niklas Maak, an author and architecture critic for The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, points out that nuclear families today account for only 14 percent to 20 percent of households in big German cities like Berlin and Munich — "almost a marginal group," he notes, and yet "this social development is hardly reflected in housing policies."

"The forms of housing offered to the residents of a city have less and less to do with the life that takes place in them," Mr. Maak concludes. The influx of Muslim migrants who will want housing for extended families tips the scales even further out of whack.

Christine Tritschler is a young urban planner in Stuttgart. "It's a crisis the refugees don't create but make more acute," she said. "There hasn't been nearly enough thinking about new housing types. More and more people want to live in the city center — workers, students, families, older people — in ways that current housing strategies don't address."

The issue isn't unique to Stuttgart. After reunification, Berlin's housing glut made that city a magnet for young people. A bounty of big, cheap apartments propelled Berlin's culture scene, but this accelerated gentrification. City officials failed to notice when the housing surplus became a deficit. Now Berlin's leaders are scrambling to provide 6,000 or more new affordable units a year. But what kind?

A couple of recent housing projects by young architects there rethink the economics and configurations of apartment buildings. The designers — Ifau and Jesko Fezer, Heide & Von Beckerath — recently completed a six-story block called R50, with timber facade and wraparound balconies: a low-cost communal development that stressed shared spaces and flexible units. At the moment, Syrian refugees are occupying some of those shared spaces.

The other project, called Spreefeld, is the work of a team of firms, Carpaneto, Fatkoehl and BAR. It mixes communal living with commercial and nonprofit offices, public green space and ground-floor common rooms. Refugees have found a haven in Spreefeld, too. The goal of the developer, Christian Schöning, is an affordable, adaptable, collaborative housing model, built in consultation with the neighborhood. It costs less per square foot to construct than what Berlin officials say is the city's least expensive new public housing. Just as important, the flexible, communal housing provides a potential model for a growing population of Muslim migrants with extended families who don't fit the nuclear model.

"We have to start thinking ahead 10 to 20 years," Mr. Schöning said. "We can't only focus on the immediate crisis, because the population is changing the way we live, and this is a long-term issue."

In Stuttgart, Isabel Fezer, a deputy mayor, echoed the thought: "Social and urban challenges go together," she said. "In this city, we have lots of practice integrating people and have had few migrant-specific troubles as a result, but if we can't house everybody, then we will have social problems. Housing is the No. 1 issue."

"The migrants are a challenge and an opportunity," she added. "At this point, they're both. But they are here to stay.

"So we must make sure this becomes an opportunity, because it is our future."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/europe/stuttgart-embraces-migrants-and-the-challenge-of-housing-them.html?_r=0

The NYT had a piece on the city I live in. I work together with people from Argentina, Turkey, Russia, France, Italy, Korea, India, Poland, Bosnia, Serbia, Khazakstan, etc. My doctor is Italian, the guy who cuts my hair Macedonian, the cashiers at the grocery store come from many places, the ladies at the dry cleaners are Polish, the tailor is from Africa. The building I live in has people from various nations and of course a Kebab place in the ground floor.

[Monoriu]

It's just wierd that they would use a little girl's pic for that message.  Yeah, "provocative" as in "making you look like a total ass".

What's next, a pic of a starving African child with the message 'when I grow up, I want to deal drugs and rape white women'?

A little girl is probably seen as the most "pure and good" of all demographics.  If a little girl wants to take advantage of the others, imagine what the boys and adults think. 

[Capetan Mihali]

so any analogies are bound to be grossly inaccurate.

I'm catching up on this thread, and it is tremendously sad and troubling for many reasons, but there is at least the occasionally moment of levity.

[dps]

I have nothing to say about your police blotter reports of immigrants committing rape. Considering the numbers involved, it didn't seem all that remarkable. If you had something showing how the statistics have changed, that might be worth perusing.

Yeah, without any context, those anecdotal reports are pretty meaningless.

[Savonarola]

Just out of curiosity, why do the Europeans refer to these people as "Migrants"?  (In the US press, as far as I can tell, they're called "Refugees.")  When I hear "Migrant" I think of the Joad family; does the term have a different connotation in British English? 

[schaksen]

Just out of curiosity, why do the Europeans refer to these people as "Migrants"?  (In the US press, as far as I can tell, they're called "Refugees.")  When I hear "Migrant" I think of the Joad family; does the term have a different connotation in British English? 

Simple, to try to taint them as people seeking "a fortune" rather than as people who try to get to safety in a civilized society.

[Syt]

The AfD party has filed criminal charges against Merkel for suspicion of human trafficking.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) started as party critical of the Euro currency and in favor of a more libertarian approach to economics but has successively drifted ever further to the right.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Just out of curiosity, why do the Europeans refer to these people as "Migrants"?  (In the US press, as far as I can tell, they're called "Refugees.")  When I hear "Migrant" I think of the Joad family; does the term have a different connotation in British English? 

I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of the Syrians would be correctly described as refugees. Most of the people from the Balkans however I would describe as migrants. It is the motivation that is key.

[Valmy]

The AfD party has filed criminal charges against Merkel for suspicion of human trafficking.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) started as party critical of the Euro currency and in favor of a more libertarian approach to economics but has successively drifted ever further to the right.

That is how those Libertarian Parties tend to go.

[Zanza]

The AfD party has filed criminal charges against Merkel for suspicion of human trafficking.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) started as party critical of the Euro currency and in favor of a more libertarian approach to economics but has successively drifted ever further to the right.

[Savonarola]

Just out of curiosity, why do the Europeans refer to these people as "Migrants"?  (In the US press, as far as I can tell, they're called "Refugees.")  When I hear "Migrant" I think of the Joad family; does the term have a different connotation in British English? 

I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of the Syrians would be correctly described as refugees. Most of the people from the Balkans however I would describe as migrants. It is the motivation that is key.

I had meant the people fleeing Syria, specifically; sorry for not being clearer.  I think we would describe the people from the Balkans as "Immigrants" which has a more neutral connotation for us (positively "America is a land of immigrants," negatively "Illegal immigrant.")  "Migrant," I think, is a little more negative ("Migrant worker.")

[The Brain]

Just out of curiosity, why do the Europeans refer to these people as "Migrants"?  (In the US press, as far as I can tell, they're called "Refugees.")  When I hear "Migrant" I think of the Joad family; does the term have a different connotation in British English? 

Some of them are refugees, some are not. Many don't seek asylum in the country they happen to be in so then they're just people who travel around.