What's happening here is the following phenomenon. Suppose the establishment lies to you about something. But that something keeps growing, and eventually you see through the lie. Now someone comes along and actually tells you you've been lied to, and reveals this truth to you.
The general reaction to this situation is to trust this newcomer more than the establishment, since he had the guts to reveal the big lie. (This is a logical fallacy, but emotionally it's awesome.)
The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Witness the attempts by various politicians to sweep Cologne under the rug, for example, or removing ethnicity from crime statistics in Sweden. It's hard to keep a problem like this completely under wraps; eventually something like Cologne will hit the internets and eventually the media won't be able to ignore it.
If you want a left wing solution to the problem of Muslim immigrants failing to assimilate, robbing and raping people, the left will actually need to acknowledge the problem and propose a solution. If the left continues ignoring the issue, then folks will naturally turn to the racist right wing folks who seem to be proposing solutions rather than lying about the problem.
(Note: don't interpret my criticism of the European left as support for the racist right. And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Obviously not from Sweden...)
I think both the left wing and the right wing are generally wrong. Left wing for downplaying the effect culture and rightwing for overplaying it.
However I agree the biggest problem right now in Europe is the left wing not actually recognizing the problem expect in a few countries (Denmark being one of them)
Only then will it be possible to look at the problem and come up with alternatives to what the far right is proposing (which is basically we are just going to send them all home)
> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems.
Could you quantify how severe you see those problems as being, how they're lied about, and what sort of solution you think might be possible?
My impression (as a leftish European, so discount it as you please) is that no one denies that some Muslim immigrants commit crimes, nor indeed that some Muslim immigrants are terrorists, but that the usual lefty view is:
1. This, in itself, no more calls for action against Muslim immigrants (or against Muslim immigration) than the fact that some people with beards commit crimes calls for action against people with beards.
2. Overreaction to fear of Muslim immigrants is a bigger problem than crime committed by Muslim immigrants. (E.g., crimes with Muslim victims are commoner than crimes with Muslim perpetrators, and this sort of fear is one reason why.)
3. Accordingly, asking "what can we do to stop unassimilated Muslim immigrants killing and raping and robbing?" is a bad question in the following senses: (a) if it's the main question you're asking about relations between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, that probably means you have an unbalanced view of what's going on, and (b) asking it loudly and publicly is liable to do more harm by encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry than it does good by promoting measures that reduce crime by Muslim immigrants, and (c) actually taking the measures one might come up with when answering the questions is also liable to do more harm by making Muslims' lives harder than it does good by reducing crime.
A few notes. First: I don't know whether the parenthesis in #2 is actually correct. My impression is that it is, but I don't have all the statistics that would be needed to check. Regardless, I would guess that most of the lefty types you have in mind share my impression that it's correct. Second: something can be a bad question as in #3 but still be a question it would be good, in principle and all else being equal, to know a good answer to.
Third: appreciating the European-lefty mindset on this may be easier if you try replacing "what can we do about violent crime by Muslim immigrants?" with "what can we do about financial malfeasance by The One Percent?" or "what can we do about computer crime committed by evil hackers?". In all these cases, there are some actual crimes (and not-actually-criminal wrongdoings) that we'd be better without. In all these cases, people unsympathetic to the group being targetted are liable to overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat, and there are unscrupulous journalists and politicians stirring up fear to further their own agendas. In all these cases, trying to prevent those crimes and other wrongdoings runs the risk of messing with people's civil liberties. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that these cases are parallel in every respect.)
How large is the issue? I don't know. There don't seem to be much in the way of good crime stats. A quick google search suggests rape has risen 15x in Sweden since they started letting in large numbers of immigrants. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-o...
The issue is being lied about because rather than giving out stats to answer the question of how much of that 15x is due to immigrants, the Swedish authorities decided to stop tracking ethnicity of perpetrators instead. Similarly, witness the attempts by the mayor of Cologne to blame the victims and avoid disclosing the identity of the attackers. (A quick google search suggests similar incidents happened in a Stockholm music festival and other places.)
The fact is that left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down. They also make claims like "overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat" - but if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it?
I'm not proposing any solutions. I'm not even claiming to have a solid grasp of the statistics (unlike, say, a similar discussion of US crime). If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate, by all means post stats proving me wrong. I'm only saying that it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us.
Under such circumstances, people turning to the racist right is a pretty natural thing to do. At least these guys aren't liars, and see our problems, right?
(Again, that last sentence is not my view. A quick search of my comment history will suggest that I'm pluralistic to a degree that only an extreme capitalist can be.)
If the Daily Mail published an article saying that snow is white, I would check the next winter in case I've been wrong all these years.
In the present case, even if it weren't an issue perfectly calibrated to suit the Daily Mail's preferred varieties of shit-stirring, that 15x figure should cause doubt. Those immigrants would have to be impossibly rapey, or else the previous inhabitants (even though some of them were presumably immigrants) would have to be startlingly un-rapey.
A more likely hypothesis is that something else changed; perhaps the Swedish authorities changed where they draw the boundaries between rape and other sexual assaults? Or perhaps some procedural change has made Swedes more willing to make accusations of rape? I can think of several other hypotheses, all of them more likely than that immigration made the rate of rapes go up by 15x.
So, let's look a bit further. First of all: this comparison is between 1975 and 2014. Forty years is a long time, and many things have happened in Sweden (and everywhere else) since 1975. Why blame it on immigration? Well, because someone wants to blame it on immigration, so far as I can tell.
Well. Did Sweden change its definition of rape, or its treatment of people who report rape, or its thoroughness in collecting statistics, or anything of the sort, since 1975? Yes, apparently they did. For instance, near the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden you will find this: "Sweden reformed its sex crime legislation and made the legal definition of rape much wider in 2005, which largely explains a significant increase in the number of reported rapes in the ten-year period of 2004-2013."
And, a little further down, this: "Sweden also applies a system of expansive offence counts. Other countries may employ more restrictive methods of counting. The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified. For example, if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a year, the Swedish police may record more than 300 cases of rape."
I know you've got a data-science background. Put on your analyst's hat for a moment and think about that claim of a 15x increase. Do you really find it credible? At all?
There may indeed be lies being told about immigrants and crime. I would not advise you to assume that they're all coming from the same side.
There are many hypothesis. Too bad the data which could allow us to evaluate them (namely the # of crimes broken down by ethnicity) is deliberately hidden. That's why I'm suspicious of the establishment's claims, and why I expect many Europeans are as well.
I don't find a surge in crime relating to changing demographics implausible. In the US we have widely varying (read: 8-10x) crime rates between ethnic groups, so if our ethnic composition changed we could get significantly more crime as a result. Perhaps Sweden has similar effects. Or perhaps not; but if the data proved otherwise, why would the establishment hide it?
Even if those nasty scary brown-skinned immigrants have 10x the crime rate of the rest of the population and make up 20% of the population, that couldn't do more than about double the crime rate.
(Muslim immigrants do not in fact make up 20% of the population of Sweden.)
> left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down.
In the same sense as left-wing and right-wing politicians everywhere control access to crime data and are locking it down.
> if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it?
Let me describe for you a hypothetical world. I don't know how closely it resembles the real one. In this hypothetical world, Muslim immigrants are 2x more likely than other people to commit violent attacks such as rape, make up a small fraction of the population, and are widely hated and feared; violent attacks on Muslim immigrants are 3x more common than violent attacks by Muslim immigrants; the fear many people feel of violence from Muslim immigrants is -- if, e.g., you calibrate it against other kinds of violence they fear -- far out of proportion to their actual risk of being attacked by Muslim immigrants. So, in particular, if the public knew and understood and internalized that 2x figure, they should actually be reassured by it because the risk they face is very small; but, just as in the real world, the public in our hypothetical world don't always respond with perfect rationality.
Now imagine you are a politician (of the left or the right, I don't care), you're aware of these numbers (or have guessed at them), and you are trying to decide whether published crime statistics should break out Muslim immigrants as a separate category of offender.
I suggest that you are likely to think as follows: "If we do this, every right-wing anti-Muslim anti-immigrant group in the country is going to seize on that 2x figure and make hay with it. It will widely be taken as confirming fears that Muslim immigrants are a terrible threat to public safety. Violent attacks on Muslims will go through the roof. Lots more people will be hurt and killed, and any sort of integration will become more difficult. Which will probably lead to more crime by Muslim immigrants in the future, too. Even if by some magical process releasing those numbers made rape by Muslim immigrants completely go away, it would still lead to a lot more harm than good."
I'm not saying you'd be right to think that. Maybe actually "better more data than less data" is a universal principle that trumps everything else. Maybe releasing the numbers wouldn't really have such bad effects. Maybe it actually would somehow lead to a big decrease in crimes committed by immigrants. I don't know. But the point is that I just sketched a perfectly plausible process by which politicians might decide it's better not to publish potentially inflammatory numbers, even if those numbers indicate that anti-immigrant politicians and journalists exaggerate the actual magnitude of the threat.
> If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate
I doubt that. I bet Muslim immigrants to Europe are, e.g., systematically somewhat poorer than the population as a whole, which would probably mean more violent crime and (e.g.) less embezzlement even if there were no cultural differences at all. I bet they drink less alcohol, which would probably mean less of some kinds of violent crime and e.g. far less DUI. Etc. I'd be astonished if there weren't all kinds of differences in the rates at which Muslim immigrants and (say) Christian multigeneration natives commit all sorts of crimes.
> it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us.
Suppose someone has a theory that financial misconduct like fraud and embezzlement and insider trading are much more widespread among the rich than in the general population. If they point out -- correctly, so far as I know -- that official crime statistics don't break out the richest 1% of the population when reporting rates of these crimes, are they justified in saying that "there is a real problem and it's being hidden from us"?
> And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this.
Sure. Only recently, the German BKA released numbers [1] on crimes committed by immigrants. As you can see, until September last year, the number of immigrants (the red line in the first graph) increased faster than the number of crimes committed by immigrants (the green line in the same graph). Generally, immigrant criminality is dominated by petty offenses (shoplifting, fare evasion) and immigration-related offenses (such as forged passports). As far as nationality is concerned, immigrants from Balkan countries dominate the lists of suspects (on a per capita basis), while crime among Iraqis and (especially) Syrians appears to be disproportionately low.
Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents. Low socio-economic status alone means a higher propensity to commit crimes (and poorly integrated, low-income immigrants have been a concern since forever, whether that was Turkish guest workers [2] or the Russian-German immigrants of the 1990s [3]). But there is no evidence that Muslim immigrants are more likely to commit crime, either. In fact, technically the (predominantly Christian [4]) Balkan countries seem to be far more likely to turn out criminal immigrants.
Note further that most of the suspects in Cologne seem to belong to or be affiliated with pre-existing crime groups [5] from Morocco [6] and Algeria, people who were either there illegally or were using the refugee crisis as a cover. While these should be deported, this is difficult, because their countries refuse to take them back.
In general, traditional criminogenic factors seem to be plenty sufficient to explain immigrant crime, and that's really not all that surprising. Whereas ethnic and religious factors seem to be either sourced from anecdotes or the result of incidental correlation.
Completely separate from that is the challenge of integrating such a huge number of immigrants into German society. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that had been botched twice before; there is the language barrier, widespread skill gaps, and the difficulty of cultural acclimatization to deal with.
> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems.
If that hypothesis of yours were correct, then in Germany, this would not just be the establishment left, but also plenty of establishment conservatives. While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened). While not exactly pogroms, far right violence has also been a persistent concern and many people still remember Solingen [7] and Rostock-Lichtenhagen [8].
I don't see anybody lying or otherwise dissembling about the problems related to integration; it is no secret that previous immigration waves were far from successful in this regard (as noted above), and nobody expects this to be a cakewalk.
[6] Morocco in particular encourages emigration to Europe; it reduces unemployment and results in more cash transfers to Morocco. However, because Morocco is far from a free country, asylum requests still have to be taken seriously.
I unfortunately do not read German. I guess the core questions are:
1) What is the crime rate committed by Muslim immigrants, as compared to natives? (You suggest it's higher. How much higher?)
2) What's the crime rate for Muslim immigrants of low socio-economic status, compared to Germans of low socio-economic status?
3) How many additional robberies/rapes/murders/etc will result from allowing in 1000 extra immigrants? (Compute by projecting from existing crime data.)
And how much public acknowledgement of these facts can we expect from the establishment?
While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened).
Perhaps. But when the racist right points out this "botched response" (designed to hide the truth), surely you can understand why this gets them extra credibility with voters? And similarly, does anyone besides the racists have a plan to prevent another Cologne?
Let me again emphasize that my criticism of the lying left is not intended as support for the racist right. It's just my explanation as to why people are taking the racist right seriously.
> 1) What is the crime rate committed by Muslim immigrants, as compared to natives? (You suggest it's higher. How much higher?)
No, I don't suggest it's higher. I suggest that there is no obvious correlation between religion and crime rate. The lowest crime rate (by far, as in a factor of three or so below the average) is among Syrians (a predominantly Muslim country), then Iraqis (another predominantly Muslim country), then a mix of other countries (predominantly Balkan countries with a Christian majority, but also Afghanistan). Most criminals per capita come from Serbia, by a huge margin (and still make up a relatively small fraction of Serbian immigrants). The natural conclusion is that crime rate is correlated with other factors, not religion.
> 2) What's the crime rate for Muslim immigrants of low socio-economic status, compared to Germans of low socio-economic status?
Nobody has dug that deeply into the data yet. Partly because religion isn't something that's accurately known (even in Germany, only a minority of Muslims self-identified as Muslims in the most recent census, for whatever reasons; whether the rest acted out of privacy concerns or because they have been secularized, I do not know). I do know that one study (a couple of decades ago, mind you) that tried to adjust for social-economic factors between Turkish immigrants (predominantly Muslim, though you have to distinguish between Sunnis and Alevites) and Germans did not find any real measurable difference after that.
> 3) How many additional robberies/rapes/murders/etc will result from allowing in 1000 extra immigrants? (Compute by projecting from existing crime data.)
You cannot extrapolate, because so far the projection is not linear in the number of refugees. This probably has a number of reasons: for starters, violent crime appears to be concentrated within refugee reception centers as the result of people living close together with little room for privacy and under less than ideal conditions; but as the number of refugees grows, the number of refugees within reception centers doesn't. For another, other serious crime appears to be concentrated within criminal organizations that do not grow at the same rate as the number of refugees.
Most importantly, it's not like there's an actual policy option for allowing or not allowing them in. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the refugees are coming to Europe now because other countries are overflowing and can't take any more. Unlike America, Europe isn't surrounded by oceans to keep refugees out. Any credible attempt at controlling the influx of refugees has to begin with the border between Greece and Turkey, which is difficult for a number of reasons (starting with the quasi-cold war between Greece and Turkey and the fact that you cannot just let refugees drown). Even if the border could be controlled, there is no guarantee that refugees would not find a way through, say, Russia (which is already happening, after all, and it's not like Putin wouldn't have an incentive to show them the way). Any policy that assumes that you can make a major dent into the refugee influx is pure fantasy, IMO.
> Perhaps. But when the racist right points out this "botched response" (designed to hide the truth), surely you can understand why this gets them extra credibility with voters? And similarly, does anyone besides the racists have a plan to prevent another Cologne?
The racists don't have a plan to prevent another Cologne. Not a credible one, anyway. They live in a fantasyland where you can just push a button and immigration stops.
In the end, what happened in Cologne is like a mass shooting in the US: individually, a horrific event, but one for which there is no quick and easy public policy response, and in the end, does not pose a much bigger statistical risk than being hit by lightning. The best public policy response to Cologne is probably to recognize that the suspects primarily belong to existing organized crime groups and therefore to deal with these gangs. That, unfortunately, does not have an easy solution, but comes down to pretty traditional police work. The biggest problem in this area is that budget cuts have hit law enforcement pretty hard; Germany could definitely use quite a few more police officers.
In any event, the biggest public policy challenges lie in the civil sector right now: for example, teaching refugees the language and teaching them skills that make them employable is one of the biggest concerns, but there's a shortage of teachers.
No, I don't suggest it's higher. I suggest that there is no obvious correlation between religion and crime rate...
Sorry, I misinterpreted this phrase as being a suggestion that it's higher: "Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents."
So what are the numbers, for immigrants and Germans?
The racists don't have a plan to prevent another Cologne. Not a credible one, anyway. They live in a fantasyland where you can just push a button and immigration stops.
Most politics is pure fantasyland. Consider Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders here in the US - both are spouting pure fantasy that appeals to the emotions of their base.
In the end, what happened in Cologne is like a mass shooting in the US: individually, a horrific event, but one for which there is no quick and easy public policy response, and in the end, does not pose a much bigger statistical risk than being hit by lightning.
Eyeballing the numbers, this seems unlikely. As far as I know, tens to hundreds of people were not struck by lightning in Cologne, and similar numbers at the Swedish music festival "We Are Sthlm" every year since 2014.
So on the one hand, we've got left wing types denying reality as you do above. Then we've got right wing types at least acknowledging the problem and proposing to do something about it.
Unless left wing types can compromise on ideology and actually acknowledge reality (Muslims raping women is a vastly larger problem than lighting strikes), people will turn to the racist right for solutions.
> So what are the numbers, for immigrants and Germans?
I don't know of any recent study, as I told you?
> Eyeballing the numbers, this seems unlikely. As far as I know, tens to hundreds of people were not struck by lightning in Cologne
But you need to amortize the numbers over time and the population of the country. The biggest problem in Cologne was that the police got caught flatfooted, something that's unlikely to happen again (German police normally have plenty of experience of dealing with nasty crowds, see the hooligan problem). 9/11 was also a horrible event, too, but there's pretty much zero chance that any terrorist will ever again be able to fly a passenger plane into a building, so the statistical risk of experiencing that when boarding a plane is essentially nil (and was extremely low even beforehand).
> So on the one hand, we've got left wing types denying reality as you do above
First of all, I'd be careful with categorizing me as a "left wing type" (except by US standards, but David Cameron would probably count as a "left wing type" there now). In this area, my stance probably comes close to classical liberalism, which is traditionally considered a centrist position (plus, my overall positive view of law enforcement tends to not win me many friends on the far left). More importantly, I like to base my judgement on facts, not anecdotal media reports.
Second, I'm the one who has cited actual statistics that at least so far seem to disprove your thesis that Muslims seem to be disproportionately prone to crime and to which you haven't offered a counterargument (remember that a single counterexample disproves a universal thesis). Conversely, you seem to base your claims solely on anecdotal evidence (the plural of which, I remind you, is not data).
Note that I haven't disagreed that immigration will likely negatively affect the overall crime rate in a measurable way (if only because of the low SES of these immigrants; other factors may come into play, too, but that would be pure conjecture at this point). I have also pointed out that it is likely to cause social problems in general because of the known difficulties with integrating a large foreign population with limited resources across a language and culture barrier with (often) considerable skill gaps.
> Unless left wing types can compromise on ideology and actually acknowledge reality (Muslims raping women is a vastly larger problem than lighting strikes), people will turn to the racist right for solutions.
I did not make a statistical comparison between Muslims raping women and lightning strikes; I referred specifically to the events in Cologne, which do not appear to have had a religious motivation or cause.
You explicitly disclaimed the idea that you disproved my hypothesis in a previous post: Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents.
I'm glad you've provided stats, I just unfortunately don't read German.
The general reaction to this situation is to trust this newcomer more than the establishment, since he had the guts to reveal the big lie. (This is a logical fallacy, but emotionally it's awesome.)
The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Witness the attempts by various politicians to sweep Cologne under the rug, for example, or removing ethnicity from crime statistics in Sweden. It's hard to keep a problem like this completely under wraps; eventually something like Cologne will hit the internets and eventually the media won't be able to ignore it.
If you want a left wing solution to the problem of Muslim immigrants failing to assimilate, robbing and raping people, the left will actually need to acknowledge the problem and propose a solution. If the left continues ignoring the issue, then folks will naturally turn to the racist right wing folks who seem to be proposing solutions rather than lying about the problem.
(Note: don't interpret my criticism of the European left as support for the racist right. And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Obviously not from Sweden...)