Greens now to the right Merkel on this. I’m making the Green-voting libs among my friends and family uncomfortable by pointing this out. The Greens have dropped every issue they ever pretended to care about. Main reason I hear for why people still want to vote for them is lesser-evil-ism or because they feel protective of them against far-right rhetoric. No matter that the Greens are also a nationalist, neoliberal, racist, imperialist, militarist, green-washed ghouls. Main difference between them and straight up conservatives is in rhetoric: the Greens will cry and moan about “having to do” this stuff, and how that’s actually good for you. Except with the imperialism, they did the crying and moaning already during Kosovo, now they’re on a straight up mission to spread freedom and democracy to the backwards people like they’re channeling George W. Bush.
You’re going to see more and more of this all over Europe. Nearly half a billion people have seen their quality of life drop in the last decade or so from the post 2008 austerity to the current post Covid inflation with governments seeming powerless to make anything better anymore, seeing their government then allow tons of new people in who need assistance, whether you understand their plight or not, rubs people the wrong way.
I know theres the argument that there’s plenty of money in the system to help all these people if it wasn’t being horded at the top bymillionaires and billionaires, but how we access that money is very complex and abstract and requires global cooperation that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
With countries pulling back on climate policies meaning climate change will continue to pick up leading to mass migration from no longer habitable equatorial areas, I fully expect to see guns on the beaches of the Mediterranean in my life time to push boats back.
I know it’s a horrible view of the future, but I don’t see anyone trying to find other solutions.
And there is a housing crisis in all these European countries these refugees want to go to. In my country refugees who have received their official refugee status get first priority in getting social housing. While the waiting lists grows larger by the year, because of the crisis. It’s no wonder that people have changed their tunes when it comes to the refugees.
The real problem is of course our short sighted governments who are only thinking of the next election. They are treating every refugee crisis like it is the last one. And only implement measures to deal with the current influx and not trying to make the entire system better for the future. Thus when a new wave of refugees arrives the government is overwhelmed by the refugees and is always scrambling to find shelter for them.
The ad-hoc country of arrival system that has existed up to now isn’t going to work much longer. With climate change headlines the way they have been the last few months how much longer before we start seeing millions of people moving from areas which are no longer inhabitable.
The present system is for someone to wait until they require asylum, then pay criminals to smuggle them to the wealthiest country they can afford to get to. It’s senseless.
I recommend everyone check out the “immigration gumballs” video on YouTube or elsewhere. It is old and has been updated a few times. The fact is that mass migration to wealthy/developed countries is not a strategy to defeat global poverty (or many other problems). We are all better served to improve the countries of origin through technology, diplomacy, trade and economic development.
I feel like a lot of the tension now is due to a failure of the system post arrival. Germany and Europe were good to open their doors to these refugees but they then failed to integrate them. There wasn’t enough support around cultural assimilation, language training, etc - they weren’t blended into our communities so much as allowed to set up parallel ones without any positive interaction. And the wound has just festered now.
Is it possible to successfully integrate that amount of refugees from such different cultural background in such short time? Regarding language training - I’m not sure about Germany, but at least in Austria, where the symptoms of “failed integration” are also present (and also with right wing on the rise), you can get free A1+A2 courses and even B1 if you explain it right. When my wife was attending free A1 courses she learned that there were quite a few people who were attending same A1 courses year after year. You can bring the horse to water but you can’t make it drink. So it’s not right to blame the government only. There also needs to be a cultural shift, and things like that happen on scale of years, tens of.
Can’t expect Germany to take on all of the asylum seekers. Gotta spread them out, concentrating any population of struggling people in one area always leads to problems.
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