Life in the EU is amazing for me, and probably for you too, as well as many others enjoying it here. However, we can't overlook the struggles of those who are turning to radical populist parties.
I don't think the far-right is fueled by economic stagnation, but I do think that, were we living in an economic golden age, people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of foreigners on "their" streets.
If their kids could afford to buy houses nearby, they'd probably be a bit more OK with it. But when their own kids are priced out and told they don't have the relevant skills (thanks to education provided by the government unequally) for the new jobs, it's easy to point fingers at the new people in town.
And those people don't have to be foreign or a different race: just see the anti-tech waves that have rolled through the Bay Area in the past, directed more based on attire and mode of transport than race. And a lot of people here would agree those new workers are to blame for a lot of Bay Area problems, but it's easier to dismiss others as bigoted than wrestle with the reality of winners and losers behind each statistic.
> I do think that, were we living in an economic golden age, people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of foreigners on "their" streets.
I don't fully know what's going on in Europe, but in the US we have several TV news networks dedicated to making you upset about the increased prevalence of foreigners. And they've been doing it for 30+ years, so it's working, no matter how good the age is or isn't.
In Europe the terrorist attacks and crime is real though, that doesn't happen much in the US but in Europe it happens quite a lot since the immigrants are different. So there is no need for any propaganda to get people to turn against unlimited immigration, what they see on every news station paints the same picture.
The news in western EU never cover the bad parts of illegal immigration, only the rosy part, so the people turning against immigration aren't doing it due to what they see on the news but mostly due to what they, rightfully or wrongly, perceive themselves .
Not sure about the EU, but in the UK the support for the far-right is highest in areas with the fewest numbers of immigrants. It's not about peoples personal perceptions, as the areas with relatively high numbers of immigrants are invariably also the areas where there's low support for the far right.
We need to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Plenty of legal immigrants also vote right wing because they hate illegal immigrants which is the core issues.
Except the places in the UK where illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, tend to congregate (cities) are the places with the lowest support for Farage etc.
I.e. people voting for Farage are not the ones living next door to asylum seekers.
Maybe it's different in the EU and US.
People see problems (mainly caused by the cost of housing) and hear people like Farage blaming it on the "small boats", and people on the other end of the spectrum blaming it on millionaire landlords.
The reality is it's not caused by the 3 asylum seekers per 10,000 people increasing demand, but instead by essential legal immigration (to perform jobs as the native workforce reduces in number) and crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone.
This thus pushes up price thanks to the age old supply/demand curve. How else would we ration housing? Nepotism? Sexual favours? Lottery?
>crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone
Sure, but if you have an inability to produce more housing, how is importing more foreigners helping with the situation of the locals who are already struggling with the housing market?
I'm not defending Farage or his voters, but don't people have a right to be pissed about this situation?
But people aren't actually pissed at the cause of the problem. They will go out and march against a new housing development in their local area before turning around and sending a letter to the paper complaining about a lack of housing. They'll moan about a lack of staff in their local hospital but then support the immigration rules which prevent people from working for the NHS. They'll complain about low wages in the public sector but then fight against the growth in the economy which would allow those wages to increase. They'll complain about millionaires and then whine that it's unfair millionaires are taxed "so much".
The last terror attacks in my country were part of an organised campaign to try and burn down mosques explicitly because of unhinged propaganda on TV and online. The fact that these attacks were not called "terrorist attacks" on any single news station tells you all you need to know about propaganda here.
I don't need any TV channel nor statistics for my girlfriend to come home shocked because a friend of her got his apple watch and bag stolen that day, to witness a Japanese girl at an event having her bag stolen during the night, to be aggressed verbally in the station, to have a friend shot in a terror attack (Bataclan), to have an islamic attack at the Christmas market in my town, etc. all the common point here are immigrants or their descendants from non white and non Asian countries.
> I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
Go touch grass ffs! Your reply is infuriating to any victim of terrorism. A single death or wounded from islamic terrorism (the only that really exist) is too much already. If that's not enough for you, please line up with your family and friends and sign to be the next victims and we'll see if "not even 100 deaths" is a good thing or not.
I have lived in Europe all my life. I cannot name a single person I know, nor anyone that they know, that has ever been remotely affected by Islamic terrorism.
I can however name a hundred other things that affect most of their lives daily like inflation, racism, corruption of both the media and political organs by corporate interests, degrading of public infrastructure and institutions that are not aimed at churning out a profit, declining quality of the education system to systemic stress imposed on teachers, etc.
Should we extend that "zero tolerance" principle for, say, traffic deaths? Even 1 death is too much right? Yet over a hundred people die on European roads every day. Surely we should tackle this many times more seriously than we tackle the comparatively minor issue of Islamic terrorism?
What about pollution? Kills thousands upon thousands of people too! Why are we wasting our time and attention with 24/7 news reports about terrorism every time some nutter stabs someone in the street, when we could be directing our efforts towards eradicating coal, diesel engines, etc?
I didn't mean to belittle anyone impacted by terrorism personally. I just am saying it is so rare that it doesn't register as relevant for me. I worry more about speeding cars.
As a society we must focus our attention to those things which really matter. Terrorism is just trying to get our attention.
I also live in a town of 4m which was impacted in the last 10 years by a single terror attack. Should it affect my life? Should I be suspicious of every member of the ethnic group from which the terrorist comes? I couldn't even identify them.
>In Europe the terrorist attacks and crime is real though, that doesn't happen much in the US but in Europe it happens quite a lot since the immigrants are different.
The actual "far right" is much smaller than they'd have you believe. It is very small. It's just that the term is abused to create fear.
I don't think that the economy in general is key, though high immigration does dampen wages and that is mostly felt at the lower end of incomes. I think what we're seeing are the social and cultural consequences of very high immigration from countries of completely alien cultures and whose people do not assimilate in Europe. This has been going on for decades now but completely ignored by successive governments and that only hardens people's reaction against it. This is compounded by the apparent powerlessness to act "because whatever treaty/law" that we seem to have shackled ourselves with...
That is just because of inequality those populists feed on, while at the same time being rich. However, being unconvential, having a sound media strategy, and no doubt being helped by (foreign?) disinformation - they quickly gain a foothold in an era of unlimited social media.
However, I often think about that drawing where three people are at a table. A blue-collar worker (mine worker or construction worker), a black sad looking black person (immigrant), and a rich guy in suit.
The blue collar worker has a single cookie on his plate, the immigrant no cookies at all, and the rich guy a plate full of cookies. The rich guy with his plate full of cookies, looking at the worker, points to the immigrant. “He wants your cookie”.
People prefer jobs, not handouts, but handouts is what your scenario implies--wealth distribution from the rich to the workers. This is where the academy has led liberal/left parties astray. Yes, inequality is at the root of discontent, but the academy over stresses inequality of outcomes rather than of opportunity; and while inequality of outcomes matters, people gauge their success by looking to their neighbors and social circles, not to groups far removed from their physical and social geography. Likewise, modern economic theory says that tax + redistribute is the most economically efficient solution to addressing inequality, but it falls short for the same reasons.
It's a very difficult sociopolitical problem, and it has as much to do with psychology as it does headline statistics. Contemporary media dynamics has much to do with the psychological aspect, but it's also corrupting the way people think about these issues across the ideological spectrum.
Yeah maybe if you abide by a god given ideology where you cannot question the distribution of resources with respect to one's relation to the productive organs of an economy on a microscopic level and instead only focus on re-distributive tax policies or reorganization of the political super-structure on a macroscopic level, without interrogating the underlying mechanisms.
> People prefer jobs, not handouts, but handouts is what your scenario implies--wealth distribution from the rich to the workers
Labour's share of wealth produced (vs capital's share) has been declining in the developed world since the 1970s, and is now well past Gilded Age levels and still getting worse.
So yes, it's both about better jobs and about distributing away from the rich and towards the working class: these are the same thing.
I just think the current emphasis on inequality of outcomes and headline numbers like income share leads us down the wrong path. Those are effects, not causes or even the effects that directly drive discontent; yet by emphasizing those aspects we spend an inordinate amount of time on measures that attempt to address those symptoms specifically rather than the causes. But also...
1) Income share is complicated: https://equitablegrowth.org/labors-share-lost/ There are structural issues, like automation and immigration, underlying those trends. Immigration isn't, per se, irrelevant, especially when you consider dynamics like volatility and displacement. (But, again, it's complicated.)
2) Throughout history vilifying the rich has not worked out well for the poor and working classes, neither in absolute nor relative terms. Where sustainable improvements have been seen, they're the result of a flattening of the social hierarchy (not necessarily in monetary terms!), but in a way that shifts norms to the type of long-term, group management that you see in the upper middle classes, not the winner-take-all, rat race rules of the poor (at least, that they see as governing inter-class conflict, not necessarily among themselves). The cookie metaphor, both in the model it presents and the devious motivations it insinuates, is rat race rules, and rat race rules favor the rich much more than cooperative, inclusive norms. What you want is for the wealthier to identify with the poorer, but that can only happen (if at all) to the extent the poorer identify with the wealthier. If some wealthy person perceives themselves as having been wholly self-made, despite what's obvious to everybody below him, good! That implies he at least values agency and work ethic, norms that in the United States can be and are shared with people below him on the ladder, and therefore a way to sell political concessions as being in his self-interest (psychologically).
3) Wealth (as opposed to income) doesn't work as implied in the cookie metaphor. Elon Musk is a trillionaire, but there's no bank vault with a trillion in gold bullion that he can go to at will. At any point in time--hour by hour, even--his nominal wealth is primarily a function of the future expectations of others, including expectations of social contentment and economic growth. You can't take half of Musk's cookies and redistribute to everyone; it's entirely non-sensical to think that way. Our intuition breaks down at scale; certainly from a process perspective (as opposed to a static context). Just like running a $30 trillion national economy isn't the same as running a small business (for one thing, nobody runs it), the cookie metaphor leads to horribly misguided ideas about the nature of our problems and the viability of remedies.
Yes, inequality of outcomes matters (at least at the margins), it just doesn't provide much if any insight into causes and solutions. Imbibing in zero sum cookie narratives is counterproductive. Like other forms of social injustice, e.g. racism, it's paradoxical--how can you fix something without identifying the effects with an intention to address them; yet, such a fixation has a tendency to solidify (reify?) the divisions undergirding them. If you look at critical theory, especially critical race theory, you can see an admission of this paradox at the core of the literature. People like Frantz Fanon and Derrick Bell came to the conclusion that it's impossible to completely overcome racism--systemic and otherwise. Their perspective is understandable given the seeming intractability of these sorts of problem, I just don't share the fundamental pessimism at the heart of how these issues are framed by contemporary social justice thinking. And it's that framing that I saw in the cookie metaphor. I don't have the right answers, but history has shown us the wrong answers.
The metaphor is not zero sum, and not about handouts.
It's about deliberate diversion of attention, obfuscating the source of inequality to those that experience it. This is something that absolutely happens, both overtly (by endlessly misrepresenting causes of poverty) and covertly (by cultural suppression of socialist ideas).
@wahern. Nah you can just have a strongly progressive tax system that is used for large investments that create steady supply of jobs and innovation. Thats actually what the states so as well, via darpa and the like. It works very well.
No, it's just an inspid rant. Let's pick a spot at random:
But at the same time the state somehow has money to house feed and medically care of millions of illegal immigrants
Do you honestly think the government is literally simply "housing" all the authorized immigrants? As in, literally writing checks to their landlords? And literally paying their grocery bills, each and every week? Do you actually think that's what's happening?
Remember, the rant wasn't referring simply to new arrivals, but literally to all the "millions" who have been here for decades. With the tacit approval of US society at large, for the simple reason that (authorized or not) the vast majority form an indispensible part of its workforce, doing the hard work that most Americans refuse to do.
I'm not saying the migrant crisis isn't a huge, costly mess. But for whatever is happening, I just don't get these weird, distorted and emotionally manipulative narratives.
You're commenting from a US perspective but the person you're responding to was commenting from a European perspective.
In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
I don't know what the solution is, as an immigrant to the UK myself I find it difficult to judge or comment, but you need to keep in mind that Europe has a welfare model quite different from your US. We typically pay more taxes and have a higher expectation of public services. When those services are deteriorating, people look for someone to blame.
Immigrants are an easy target.
In reality, it is much more to do with the aging population and fewer in the workforce, but that doesn't mean that we're also not paying a lot of money for asylum seekers.
The UK costs are due to the previous government not processing asylum seekers and other irregular immigrants in a timely manner and also the fact all the processing, care etc is outsourced to profit making private companies
We’re generally only talking about 50,000 people a year coming in via these routes
Of course Brexit didn’t help with the policing of it all either
> In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
That number sounds big, but for some perspective my city (Seattle) is spending more than that to build light rail tracks to one particular (not that very dense!) neighborhood.
0.42% of the UK budget is spent on helping people who have had everything in their lives ripped away. People who have watched family members get shot, had their houses destroyed by bombs, and for some, their entire homeland turned into rubble.
The UK populace spent decades electing corrupt leaders who purposefully destroyed civic institutions. Of course things are falling apart. Immigrants don't have much to do with that...
It depends on the country. I know that in the UK this actually tends to be the case last I checked. I was reading this from a UK perspective (western) not a US . I don’t know how much housing the US provides
Actual estimates for the total number if illegal migrants (including children) in the UK top out at around 800,000. Yet the commenter above said that your government was paying to house and feed "millions" of them. Last we checked, "milions" means >= 2,000,000.
Do you still think that what the commenter is saying "actually tends to be the case" in the UK?
Previously you said authorized (legal). Now you’re changing your argument to illegal.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house vs getting emotional and changing the goalposts. I suspect the number is not millions, but this does not include medical care or other humanitarian care.
The GBP/EURO/USD spent is in the billions and the cost was the premise, not necessarily the number of people. If OP exaggerated, correct it and move on to the substance of the argument. It doesn’t make their entire post insipid (your words)
Previously you said authorized (legal). Now you’re changing your argument to illegal.
I meant "unauthorized". It was just a typo, honest.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house
It was the conflation of "refugees" with "illegal immigrants" in the commenter's post that I took issue with. The two categories might sound the same but are entirely different.
In particular the latter category definitely do not receive subsidized subsidized housing or benefits the way actual legally recognized asylum seekers, aka "refugees" do.
This exact attitude is what gets the right wing growing.
> As in, literally writing checks to their landlords?
In some EU countries (where I'm from), yes. A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
But thank you for your valuable contribution to this conversation.
A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
And are they there ... illegally? Or legally?
Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
I know you said "illegal immigrants and refugees", so I misquoted you slghtly. But the bigger point is -- why conflate the two, when the numbers and overall situations are obviously entirely different? (In particular - while legally recognized asylum seekers might be eligible to obtain housing subsidies, illegal migrants quite definitely cannot).
To be charitable, one can assume there was no manipulative intent, and you were just being careless. But if so, then you'll have to acknowledge that that's why your missive appeared, at first glance, to be well, a rant.
The solution is to listen to their worries and take action to fix them instead of ignoring them and calling them stupid
It isn't the concerns of the voters, but the relentless cognitive distortions we keep hearing about push-button topics such as this one (generally promoted by ideologues and pundits, rather than the voters themselves) that are, for want of a better term, stupid.
(And on the subject of stupid, my initial response contained a horrible typo -- should have said "unauthorized", rather than "authorized").
This is part of the illusion that it is as if our politicians let anybody in. Not a single politician would welcome even one more asylum seeker.
The immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe. It is the failure of our societies to help the countries like Syria, Afghanistan, etc to be liveable. We are paying the price for this failure.
> Not a single politician would welcome even one more asylum seeker
There were absolutely pro-migration politicians, e.g. Merkel.
> immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe
Europe continues to have generous refugee obligations, protections and benefits. There also isn’t a robust deportation regime, in part because there isn’t anywhere to legally deport them to. That’s probably what these voters take offence to. (I unfortunately don’t see any non-radical solutions.)
In Portugal, illegal immigrants have lots of rights. For example rights now the government is struggling with having enough medics and ambulance drivers to meet demand. To the point several people died waiting for ambulance because no driver was available.
Yet, the government gave 100% free treatment to 48k immigrants that had no information. Many of then pregnant women from Asian countries with complicated situations that coat lots of money. Some illegal immigrants even got right to have treatments with medicines that cost millions.
> Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
There is North of 700 000 illegal residents in France alone. So yes, millions in the UE. Here, they have free health care (CMU) costing more than a billion euros per year while the government wanted reduced refunds on medical acts and medicine for people paying for it. How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off? It's exactly why people as voting for the so-called "far"-right party, with are still quite leftist in comparison to the ruling parties of countries like Japan, Thailand, etc.
That's why I stressed the "being housed" part, which the commenter to whom I responded asserted was being provided for all illegals residents (or at least multiple millions of them anyway). And in France would cost (at the very inside) some 4.2 billion euros per year, by some napkin math. That is, at least 4x the cost of health care.
So that was my concern -- what purpose is served by promoting a grossly exaggerated characterization of the actual cost of having these people around?
How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off?
If it were up to me, I'd stick it incrementally to you-know-who have you also getting a Solidarité reduction. But that's obviously not kind thing the voting public wants to hear these days.
I think you misread me there. It wasn't a denial at all.
It was simply saying: whatever the state of the mess -- weird, distorted narratives about the mess don't help us out of the mess. And in fact are a huge part of the mess.
This is one of those moments I wish people had a way (I guess you could just add it in the notes) to mark their HN account with a region. Are you in the UK, maybe?
The immigration issue sounds very different in the EU vs US, even if many of the sound bites rhyme.
'Scare quotes' is not the only use of the double quote.
In this case it seems that the author is pointing out that the incumbents do not in fact have any inferred or conferred ownership of these public spaces.
I think that is the most likely interpretation, but it doesn't seem like a reasonable interpretation of what was said literally in context. From a local v. foreigner perspective the roads are literally their roads. Locals do have an inferred and conferred ownership of public spaces in their capacity as the public. The foreigners don't own the streets, the streets are commons property to the locals.
I decided to treat it as a minor typo and read it as 'people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of "foreigners" on their streets' instead. Ie, the foreigners aren't really foreigners, just citizens of non-aboriginal ethnicity.
The public spaces of a state belong collectively to the citizens of that state. The state government only administers them. That's essentially what statehood means.
By putting the word their in quotes the poster is implying the unstated assumption that states aren't legitimate.
