How many Syrian refugees should Australia take?

[pietillidie]

More reliable facts from Cologne are finally emerging. We now have a police report confirming the specifics of reported attacks - this Reddit translates a few of the crimes so you can get the gist:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/40mesg/detailed_police_report_about_nye_in_cologne/

This is an official police statement you can translate in your browser:
http://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/12415/3220633

This is the original full police report enumerating the reports (hard to translate as it's a PDF):
http://www.mik.nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Redakteure/Dokumente/Themen_und_Aufgaben/Schutz_und_Sicherheit/160111ssia/160111berppkoeln.pdf

Two obvious points: WTF on the existence of such a crazed mob at all, and WTF on the lack of policing. Even in my most liberal generosity I don't expect this kind of thing, and I certainly expect it to be harshly policed. So, yes, that's quite disgraceful as it appears.

Some questions remain on the possible conflation of theft and sexual assault; physical mugging and groping could easily overlap in cases, but (a) that would probably only explain a percentage of the reports, and (b) a looting and mugging standover mob would be bad enough in its own right.

So, even as a supporter of immigration and refugee help this scenario is obviously unacceptable. It's a damned shame it wasn't monitored and expected; how the hell can it not be noticed or anticipated by police and the security apparatus is beyond me.

Then again, there was yet another night of redneck violence in Leipzig of the sort I experienced in Dortmund during the World Cup which made me fear for my life, so wild mobs not being anticipated or adequately policed seems nothing new in Germany.

On the sexual element, it signifies community breakdown and incoherence in my understanding, and reveals insufficient immigration management. I expect and tolerate more problems than others as I see them as transitory, but I don't buy a religious interpretation at all. We see this sort of dysfunctional mobbing more in war and breakdown, and plenty of Muslim and strongly patriarchal societies of various persuasions have effective and clear behavioural boundaries. Indiscriminate sexualised acting out is much more likely a sign of cognitive and emotional fracturing; minds in war zones or underclasses.

So, yes, that means the process has been under-managed. That said, in the context of 1M arrivals this was a specific, revelrous drunken night. The fact it brought people together from diverse sub-communities, including illegals, asylum seekers and other minorities, makes it a peculiar sort of gathering, at a time police were stretched during the drunken revelry, thereby enabling such a mob to even form initially.

So, no, "mobs of rapists" were not "roaming the streets", but immigrant communities in some areas of Germany are obviously poorly settled and lack coherence and context. This needs to be rectified quick smart; you would have thought a special policing unit would already be dedicated to the integration task FFS, and be well aware of any such potential gatherings, and where the problem spots are. I would expect people coming from chaos to need very direct, heavy-handed policing for their own benefit; a degree of micromanaged settlement.

On a related but different point, this Spiegel article rightly points out the obvious faux nature of sex crime concern *only* when immigrants are involved, and its use as a cover for racism, something I've been the victim of in Korea where fits of "they're raping 'our' women" have broken out following incidents involving US soldiers or other expats.

http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-1070951.html

So, has this changed my views? Not really, because there is no reason this kind of process can't be managed much better. I assume proper security and integration effort as per that article on Norway above. You can't just dump people in the outer suburbs of Paris or wherever and leave them alone with chaotic, disintegrated notions of the world and others in their heads.

And, importantly, I expect the need to cope with integration and refugees to keep rising. This problem is not going away: Countries which don't adjust and learn how to deal with these things now might look all smart and smug in the short-term, but they're the ones under-learning in a world approaching 10B people. Countries like Australia are much better at it *already* due to experience.

[stui magpie]

^

Fair comments.

[Morrigu]

I have a much better and faster solution

[Pi]

Another dimension to all this is the gender imbalance of immigrants / asylum / seekers:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-11/european-migrant-crisis-triggers-gender-imbalance/7076924

Crime statistics in any given country will always have a larger portion of male offenders (any criminal activity) between the ages of 15 and 30, take a look jail populations. The other cultural factors will only amplify the basic problem of too much wiener especially when they come from societies that favor production of male children.


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/europe-refugees-migrant-crisis-men-213500

[stui magpie]

[David]

Well said, PTID, and thanks for posting that research.

[Morrigu]

^ the victims and all those victims of sexual assault and rape not just on this night and not just in Germany but in Sweden, in Denmark, in Norway, in Austria etc etc etc also thank you for your research!

Tell me how many sexual assaults and rapes is an acceptable number whilst you and your feel good lefty brigade attempt to educate these disease ridden illegal migrants with nethrandal attitudes towards females who arrived in massive numbers????

I actually wasn't advocating killing them FWIW - round them up and jail them and then deport them!!!

Except the Moroccans of course because there is a raging war in that country!

[David]

Tell me how many people you're willing to let rot and/or die of disease or starvation or military attacks in a refugee camp, to prevent any risk of westerners getting attacked by a small minority of migrants. Or are we only allowed to be concerned about the well-being of Europeans?

[Morrigu]

Tell me how many Algerians and Morrocans are dying of disease, starvation or subject to military attacks or in refugee camps?????

[Mugwump]

^ Well said, Morrigu. The job of our leaders is to accept our taxes to uphold and improve our way of life, not to tell us how we can live and impose their humanitarian impulses upon us. this is almost a case study on how the EU has gone so badly wrong. As Brecht wrote : "The government notes with grave disappointment the results of the recent election, and it has decided to dissolve the people and elect a new one."

Germany should have exercised their humanitarian impulse through a better policy - such as providing well-supported and maintained refugee facilities and a militarily-guaranteed safe place near to Syria for those genuinely fleeing war. Instead it has chosen to compromise German social cohesion, encourage people- smuggling, enhance the standing of the far-right across Europe, and then tried to foist the problems arising from its unilateralism onto the rest of Europe.

As I've said before, the refugees overall behave as well as could be expected (perhaps better than a bunch of young men from Australia would in similar circs) , with the usual quantity of bad apples you'd expect from the cultural and economic and civilly-torn background. They are not bad people. They're just not Germans and they do not have the right to be so. A government that will not defend its borders is not defending its country, and there is no more fundamental duty of government than that.

[pietillidie]

^A few disjointed thoughts for you, Morrigu.

It's always hard to argue against that. It's the equivalent of me reminding people child abuse rises under financial stress, so every service and benefit they cut which stresses suburban households is a choice to increase child abuse.

The point itself is valid if there are better alternatives.

I would say the better alternative is to get the policing and integration programs right; on the former, I'm pretty sure I read some police bigwig fell on his sword over this. Anticipate and respond to the first few complaints early in the night and this whole thing doesn't happen.

Then, why not make it simple and just keep the so-and-sos out to begin with? Because it still leaves us with both moral and practical calculations.

Okay, let's shut the refugees out. Then what? Terrorism and geo-instability rise. A culture of violent chaos becomes entrenched, armed and organised, with no direction forward. Agglomerations of dislodged peoples become criminal and terrorist breeding camps, which then impose costs such as terrorism and the national security needed to police terrorism, as well as the financial costs of regional market instability.

Border incursions keep happening. Terrorist attacks keep happening. The brutal rape and murder of women, girls and boys keeps happening. (And to connect it all the way home, local service budgets keep being cut to pay for the security apparatus needed to deal with terrorism, refugees and instability; and, to return full circle, local child abuse rises under local budget stress, and so on.).

That's the only alternative on the table here. More radical and visionary plans have been put forward, but no one is of a mind to even consider them; personally, I would've thought drastic measures for drastic times. But nope, just the same old camps-asylum and remote bombing process.

The other alternative is that we get the refugee transition right at home and abroad. At home, get the policing right, creating a base of stability for communities which in turn become cultural bridges, like the Italian, Vietnamese and Former Yugoslavian communities in Australia during homeland instability.

But, that still leaves us with the broader geopolitical problem, and that's why at the same time we need more comprehensive solutions, such as dismantling dysfunctional oil economies and replacing them with indigenous economic opportunities for people who have been reduced to dysfunctional mobs, groveling for survival.

I will save discussion of radical alternatives for another time, but consider the clash between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and their proxies, allies, and short-term alliances, and the whole thing really does look much darker, and much bigger than current local concerns with refugees.

To me, the only valid talk of violent apocalypse and civilizational doom is what is actually happening *to that region* already. A million refugees is a small price to pay because we really do have the capabilities to get the transition for them right.

But it's also just recognition of our own greedy and unproductive intervention going back decades in that region. We can't begin to even comprehend the amount of murder, torture, rape and suffering our arbitrary, detached, sociopathic dabblings in that region have instigated.

If we manage some influxes of refugees properly, treating refugees as *traumatised humans from fractured contexts*, we can begin taking responsibility for our interconnected planet more productively.

We have gotten so used to an "us and Asia" scenario, and fooled ourselves into thinking the work of development is done, even as a huge region from North Africa to Russia, and another from Mexico to Brazil, is breaking down.

The GFC was a transitional moment in many ways. The nexus of Asian savings and Western spending no longer cuts it, as China's woes show. But there is also a much bigger undeveloped world out there than our focus on China implies, with India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa being the other four of the much famed BRICS group - and they are actually looking extremely vulnerable right now.

So, it looks to me like we're stuck between Phases 3 and 4 of a much bigger world development project which started with Germany and Japan, moved on to the Asian Tigers, then onto the BRICS, but is now faultering.

My view is that we need to unlock the next phase of development, the old oil economies, to give the process a new momentum, and rid ourselves of the anti-development force of fossil fuels.

That's the scale of the background to the challenges Germany has courageously taken on, in my view.

In the present, that doesn't make Cologne in any way tolerable. But it does tell you why the solution is not shutting borders and pretending everything goes away, at less cost to us or the world as a whole. The cost of getting our interface with the world wrong is in fact enormous.

Instead of incurring that greater cost, have sufficient police on the task, briefed in advance, and it doesn't happen. It ought to have been dealt with at the first complaint early in the evening. This grim incident was a mechanical policing and refugee management failure, and ought to be treated as such.

[David]

It's certainly a bitter pill to swallow for those on the left who promote an open border policy (or something like it). But there at least as many refugee advocates who support and have always supported processing, infrastructure & funding and some form of border control. That doesn't mean that we need a quota, necessarily � for many countries, it's simply a luxury that they can't afford � but if we can learn anything from the Cologne disaster, it's that a refugee policy with few regulatory mechanisms in place is a serious problem.

[pietillidie]

^It's a circular problem; the hysterical opposition to taking any responsibility on the one hand, and the brainless emotivism on the other, ends up setting the all-or-nothing parameters of the discussion, dominating decision making and resulting in a haphazard outcome.

Opportunists of all sorts get on board, including media agencies, crowding out the sane who have an actual plan and process in mind.

If anyone thinks running away from this problem is a solution, they're gravely mistaken. Merkel is still one of the very few sane and responsible voices in the process. She makes sensible macro decisions, but shows a willingness to adjust at ground level. She is one of the least ideologically afflicted and least reactionary politicians on this problem going around.

When do you think people will start realising the demographics and global economics make isolationism a utopian denialism? Or that tyrannical, anti-market oil economics is the most obvious and controllable force underwriting what by now equates to decades of dysfunction without the commensurate political and economic development Asia underwent?

It takes a refusal to be distracted and a commitment to the basics to see these things and act on them. Forget the game of ping pong between the fools trapped in the childish left-right Cultural Cold War.

Such undisciplined mindsets facilitate an Iraq or GFC of things in the quest for immediate Facebook gratification, when the problems at hand are enormous, comprehensive and longstanding.

I just rue the fact there's no Keating in the world to explain a manageable context and way forward to people. And to think, it's Rudd not Keating is trying to get the top UN job, and the man who set Australian politics back two decades with a single decision, Kim Beazley, who has been US Ambassador, with hapless moron, Joe Hockey, waiting in the wings

[Mugwump]

[pietillidie]

Those are misunderstandings. Just to explain them to you:

The immediate point explained

My main point is that ills are often nested:

==less visible==

-- socioeconomic instability and its costs
---- tyranny and social breakdown and its costs
------ people movement and its costs

==more visible==

-------- refugees and chaotic arrivals and their costs

==most visible===

---------- ongoing social transitioning and its costs
------------ Cologne incident and its costs

Now, we can focus solely on the cost of the final two or three entities there, and in the context of this conversation, the very last one in particular. We can then think that simply by trimming off the last three sets of costs in the hierarchy we are dealing with the problem in one fell swoop.

This might seem attractive, but it's an accounting illusion because there are clearly other sets of costs involved in the calculation.

In fact, the first three sets of costs are truly massive, from terrorism itself, to terrorism security costs, to price instability and supply instability, to the risk of war itself dragging in other nations and spilling over into a much larger conflagration, to the very real, very pervasive violent murder, rape, torture, imprisonment, slavery, injury and psychiatric stress on the ground.

Of course, I use a similar argument to that in another context myself when I say that cutting social services (I mean useful services not useless services - you're being silly there), causes a rise in child abuse.

In fact, there are lots of studies showing that increased stresses of various kinds, financial stress being one of them, lift the rate of child abuse - psychological, physical and sexual.

So, in order to be fair to Morrigu, I am conceding it is equally misleading for me to focus on increases in child abuse alone if by doing so my opposition to social service cuts incurs greater and worse costs elsewhere. Of course, I don't focus on that alone because I am trying to create a platform for an imaginary half-decent political party!

In other words, between Morrigu and I, I'm trying to be fair and not hypocritical by criticising an argument type that I also use elsewhere. So don't miss that.

The illusion here is that every single crime, in its own right, feels the most important thing in the world as you focus on it (and obviously if you experience it), but in fact from the perspective of social-level policy we are forced to do the Devil's work of overriding emotion to do the greatest good for the greatest number.

In other words, I'm cautioning against the use of visible end costs, and conceding I need to be just as mindful of that in other contexts.

But, I then say that a focus on near costs is justified if there are ways of dealing with near costs, and other costs, at the same time.

I am saying that getting the policing right, and the transitioning right, as countries like Australia, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, and so on, have a track record of doing, is a way of achieving that. I then set about explaining the hierarchy of costs involved in my own thinking.

The Norway effort posted earlier in the thread being is an optimistic case in point of a country trying to engage the highly-interlinked, but less visible problems of the world, and deal with the near costs at the same time.

And this learning process is quite clearly one the world needs to master going forward, contra France just dumping arrivals in isolated outer suburbs and handling immigration and/or refugee settlement at arm's length.

Okay, so that's a clarification of that aspect of my post.


Other points - one important one that you're not up-to-speed on

As repeated many a time, we can very easily demonstrate the link between financial and health stress, and government policy, and ills of all kinds. I openly *purposely* use child abuse as a startling example, but it could just as easily be elder abuse, spousal abuse, untreated mental illness, juvenile crime, drug abuse, and so on.

No one in medicine or epidemiology doubts different instances of that analysis. Serious work doesn't group countries together because that only confounds the data by mixing local oddities in with universals; instead, it relies on within-country studies, then compares within-country data longitudinally, and within-country studies with each other

I have contributed enough to this thread without going over the entirety of the studies with you, but to my knowledge the basic analysis hasn't changed for years, though it is as you would hope becoming more fine-tuned.

An example of a within-country study according to standard methodology conducted by actual field experts: