Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

> 102 villagers, 750 refugees, one grand experiment

> Grit Richter, sitting in her modest mayoral office in Amt Neuhaus, gets a phone call from the interior ministry in Hanover. An administrator explains to her that Sumte will receive 1,000 asylum seekers starting at the end of the month, to be housed in the Apontas office complex. Richter isn’t sure she’s heard correctly. Yes, the administrator says, they know that Sumte is small. They also know that the complex is empty and disused. But the village has something that no other town in the area can boast: 21,000 square feet of dry shelter. Her options, she’s told, are to say “yes” or “yes”.

> Once the NPD activists are gone, Richter distributes cold facts: the EU is taking on 5,000 new migrants every day, and is expected to have received at least 3 million by the end of 2017. Germany will have 800,000 new migrants by the end of this year, and it appears that most will be allowed to stay. There are tough decisions to be made in every town in Germany and this much has been settled for them: the building complex in Sumte will be leased for one year to the Workers’ Samaritan Federation (ASB), a private charity that specialises in disaster relief.

Wait, what?

Migrants, or refugees?

Tough decisions, or her options are "yes" or "yes"?

> Dirk Hammer, the bicycle-maker, has told me they’re unhappy that they’ve been portrayed as racists, when the truth, he says, “is that we’re simply concerned”.

I think I have a lot more sympathy for the Germans than the migrants after reading this article. What's the point of democracy if your idea of your home, and your opinions on it, are totally overruled by some external force that wants to run some experiments? The villagers don't get a say in what happens to their home and then they are harangued for having an opinion on it.

> [...] are totally overruled by some external force that wants to run some experiments?

That would imply there is some kind of larger plan, but there is not. This situation is a result of the government's unwillingness to protect our borders. The journalist Robin Alexander recently wrote a book about the events of fall 2015. Fact is, the government had a plan prepared to close the borders to immigrants. But Merkel was unable to find a fall guy, and she did not want to take personal responsibility for pictures of armed forces turning people away at the border, so she just let it happen. This is not an experiment, this is simply the result of an utter lack of leadership.

What is leadership if not taking a bold decision knowing that whatever the decision will have significant implications and will be difficult to reverse?

Robin Alexander's perspective is one of several of her decision. Other sources (e.g as shared in Die Zeit in a large report) claim it was indeed very much a decision of personal consciousness

well said, bravo

"did not want to take personal responsibility for pictures of armed forces turning people away at the border"

Doing so does not make the refugees go away. They just end up piling up against the border instead, in inadequate camps. Or dying, like the small boy who briefly made refugees popular in Europe when the picture of him face down dead on the beach was circulated.

> What's the point of democracy if your idea of your home, and your opinions on it, are totally overruled by some external force

That's that whole capitalism thing at work. Somebody owns that complex. That somebody had been convinced to lease it out. The town has little influence on it. (I don't think it's a good idea they weren't consulted, but it's not random decisions by the state, either. Somebody wanted to make money.)

Democracy is still fully working. This is what happens when things aren't communal property.

> that wants to run some experiments Nobody wanted to run an experiment. Even if the article title implies that. The concern was "we have a bunch of people, we need to house them, this housing is available". That's the long and the short of it.

NGOs are making bank off this situation for sure

Your evidence for that is...?

> What's the point of democracy if your idea of your home, and your opinions on it, are totally overruled by some external force that wants to run some experiments?

This kind of thing happens in capitalist planning battles all the time: people don't want a new Tesco/nuclear plant/wind farm/meat factory/Donald Trump golf course in their neighbourhood, organise against it, and get overruled.

Also, very few countries let your neighbours veto who moves into their neighbourhood. You may not like who your new neighbours are, but on the other hand do you really want to be unable to move house without winning a popularity contest?

Also, there is a war on. It's not "our" war, nor one we started, but the West does not have the luxury of pretending it does not exist.

I think there's enough residual shame over the Holocaust in Germany that the idea of ignoring mass murder simply because it's happening to Sunni Arab muslims isn't really acceptable.

Presumably tough decisions were made at the government level, and the mayor was just told what's going to happen. It's not a contradiction.

Migrants coming into EU, some refugees assigned to Sumte. Refugees are a subset of migrants. What's not clear?

What's not clear is why decision process is backwards and dictatorial. Instead of gathering data on how many migrants municipalities are prepared to accommodate and then importing them accordingly, the process is to import migrants first and then distribute to whenever.

To rephrase: what is unclear is who profiting by importing migrants, by how much and for how long will it last.

The decisions were made by elected representatives and/or government workers that answer to the elected representatives. Entirely democratic, unless the only democracy you accept is direct?

And I'm not sure why you talk about people as if they are goods.

It's not a democracy if a party can import voters.

Are we to understand that 'dangerous Islamist refugees' are going to vote for liberal and progressive political parties once they arrive in the West?

Or perhaps the charge is that illegal immigrants are going to be swinging elections they can't vote in?

> Are we to understand that 'dangerous Islamist refugees' are going to vote for liberal and progressive political parties once they arrive in the West?

As the political parties are currently configured, yes. Dangerous Islamist refugees will vote for them for two reasons:

1. "Liberal and progressive" parties are generally the parties of directly giving out money to "the poor", which gets them votes from the demographics receiving the money.

2. "Liberal and progressive" parties in the West are currently overtly pro-Islamic as a contrast to their hated rivals who are "Islamophobic".

What people often fail to consider (in my experience) is that as the liberal and progressive parties draw more of their votes from this kind of group, their party platform will change. Here is a highly stylized thought process that I'd like to argue against, as applied to the USA:

1. Mexicans, when they do bother to vote, vote Democratic by healthy margins.

2. Therefore, more Mexicans over time means a larger vote share to the Democrats over time.

3. Therefore, more Mexicans in the US means Democrats will win more elections and more Democratic priorities will come to pass.

(2), and therefore also (3), are false. The structure of the US political system is that each party gets 50% of the votes. If demographics shift, it can never happen that the parties stabilize at 60% vote share to the Democrats, 40% to the Republicans -- the party platforms will change until each party has 50% of the votes. Packing the electorate with Mexicans will tip the scales toward more wealth redistribution, a current Democratic priority. But it will tip the scales away from environmentalism, also a current Democratic priority. Environmentalism is not a priority for Mexicans in the US.

All of which is to say that "dangerous Islamist refugees" will definitely vote for the parties that are currently the "liberal and progressive" parties, but those parties will become less liberal and progressive in the process.

Great point I've never thought about that. I think if you backrest that against the republicans and democrats over the last 50 years you see a feasible trend.

What is it about the US political system that forces things back towards a evenly split equilibrium?

I don't agree with the typical "vendors on a beach" (move towards the center until you each grab the half that's closer to you) metaphor since it seems to discount the possibility of being so far away from people that they're alienated to the point of non-participation. I could see it being cyclic though between that and periods of recapturing alienated demographics.

I'm not sure I follow your thinking here. Someone alienated to the point of non-participation, by definition, doesn't vote. They can't be relevant to measuring vote share.

The mere fact that parties are able to change their positions ensures that they will. They want to live. Policy positions form an infinite-dimensional space, unlike a conceptual one-dimensional beach; it will always be possible to divide voters in half by some combination (actually, many different combinations) of positions.

To clarify I mean cases where someone who didn't vote in one election may change their mind in the next if the right candidate shows up.

If you're slicing a higher-dimensional space and can only slice so far from a point you start slicing from, then the problem gets even more interesting.

You'd only allow second generation immigrants to vote? And that line of reasoning is pretty weak anyway, how about we limit voting rights to first child so that parties can't 'spawn more voters'?

bingo, same thing has been happening in the US for years.

Of course, basic knowledge of German law would help here - you can't vote unless you're a citizen. No, not even on the municipal level.

There's a lot of propaganda around changing that (mostly paid for by Russia), but little willingness. And the idea that that would conflict with existing law.

Are you sure that the asylum seekers in this case are even allowed to vote?

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