Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

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> Just so we're on the same page, could you give me a definition of what a fake refugee is

The more common term is "fraudulent asylum seeker". It's defined as anyone that fabricates something about their background in order to qualify for refugee status. This could be any number of things, but the most common are:

* lying about persecution. For instance saying the government wants to kill you, when in reality there is no such threat.

* lying about country of origin. Like saying one is fleeing Syria when in reality they are economic migrants from peaceful countries. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/07/the-men-who-pretend-to-...

* lying about age. Some countries have more permissive rules for minors, so adults lie and say they are children. Poland studied this, and found about 40% had lied about their age: https://www.polsatnews.pl/wiadomosc/2019-09-18/niemieccy-eks...

The fact that some governments aren't bothering to try and detect asylum fraud means there's no available data. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. It's like a company that has no sexual harassment reporting mechanism claiming no harassment happens because it has never had any reports of harassment.

Perfect, now we have a common definition.

So let's see:

> Poland studied this, and found about 40% had lied about their age in the refugee wave 2007-2018.

You might not be able to read Polish, so I'll help you understand this article.

It refers to a German investigation (your link is just a Polish news outlet citing the German investigation) done by the University Hospital of Münster.

They found that 234 cases [1] (that's the 40%) in 12 years, of all cases that were reevaluated had lied about their age in order to get better chances at asylum approval. However, they only included cases for re-evaluation that were already looking suspicious.

It's not "40% of migrants lie about their age". The "study" was not published or at least isn't online.

So let's see what happened.

The Merkel administration had to deal with a surge of asylum seekers.

Some of them claimed false ages to get a better chance in the approval process.

Some courts and Jugendämter in Germany noticed that. People at UKM in Münster re-analysed some suspicious looking cases, and talked about methods for improvement of age determination.

Wouldn't you agree that the system worked? A problem was diagnosed, and measures were introduced to solve the problem.

Now, the AfD's trick is to not tell their voters what's happened since then: The numbers for people seeking asylum went downhill after 2016, so the problem didn't exist anymore, at all [2].

What we're dealing with now are mostly war refugees from Ukraine.

Now, AfD's trick is now to convince people that the amount of fake refugees in itself is problematic, without giving specific numbers, and without telling how it's problematic, and why. They make it seem as if it's a real problem that exists, and as if it's being ignored (it's not, as we see by the scientists trying to solve it)

[1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2019-09/studie-minderjaehri...

[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/76095/umfrage...

I can turn around and ask the same of you: what's your evidence that asylum systems aren't being abused by fraud? What percentage of refugees entered with no documentation? How many have had a through background check, verifying any claims of persecution? If >50% of refugees are entering without documentation, there is zero way one can credibly claim that fraud is rare.

Like I said, evidence is limited because governments aren't bothering to study the validity of asylum claims. You vaguely allude to action:"some courts" tried to look for fraud, and ministers "talked about methods for improvement". Of course people are dissatisfied with this response. Scrutiny shouldn't be limited to just some courts, and better verification shouldn't merely be talked about it should actually be done.

> Now, AfD's trick is now to convince people that the amount of fake refugees in itself is problematic, without giving specific numbers

Of course, there's no way to give a specific number unless there's more rigorous attempts at fraud detection. Again, this is like a company has no mechanism to report harassment, and the points to the absence of harassment reports to insist there's no harassment. This is a trick, too: claim a phenomenon does not exist, when there's been little effort to study it.

> what's your evidence that asylum systems aren't being abused by fraud?

So what are we talking about here?

What's your evidence that aspartame doesn't cause cancer? What's your evidence that God doesn't exist? What's your evidence that X doesn't cause Y?

See, the problem isn't that there are asylum seekers who abuse the system.

Nobody disagrees with you.

It's the extraordinary claim that it's a current and massive phenomenon (A) that is causeing big trouble (B) and that it's not being worked on (C), and that AfD has a solution for it (D) that no other party has (E).

Remember, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Here, we have claims A, B, C, D, and E that each need extraordinary evidence.

We have zero data, and the problem is long gone. Should we spend resources, time and money into investigating a phantom problem that probably doesn't exist?

20% say yes.

I think it's phenomenal that a party can divert attention from actual, real problems into decoy problems and blow them out of proportion to gain power.

That's the actual danger to democracy we're talking about.

> What's your evidence that aspartame doesn't cause cancer?

An extensive body of people taking aspartame compared with oncology patients and a mountain of evidence finding no correlation between the two. Not merely an absence of evidence.

> We have zero data, and the problem is long gone.

Then stop saying fraud is rare. If you have zero data it's entirely dishonest to make any claims about the rates of fraud. And the problem is gone? Did Germany expell the asylum seekers? If so that's news to me.

> Should we spend resources, time and money into investigating a phantom problem that probably doesn't exist? 20% say yes.

And that's an entirely valid position for a political party to hold. Remember, there was a time when most people thought climate change was a phantom problem that didn't exist. Not so long ago, the possibility that COVID leaked from a lab was a phantom conspiracy theory.

Here's an alternate theory as to why mainstream parties are so resistant to auditing and investigating asylum claims: they don't want to face repercussions for shoddy policy that did little to verify asylum claims. You seem so confident that fraud is very rare, yet so defensive about validating asylum claims.

> I think it's phenomenal that a party can divert attention from actual, real problems into decoy problems and blow them out of proportion to gain power.

> That's the actual danger to democracy we're talking about.

What's phenomenal and dangerous is how people can convince themselves that banning a political party because they don't share the same concerns is defending democracy. By this logic, Republicans would be defending democracy by banning Democrats. Democrats are diverting attention from real problems into - according to Republicans - phantom problems like climate change.

You don't have any more right to say what is or isn't a relationship problem than an AfD member. Plenty of people probably believe, with the same conviction, that some of your concerns are phantom problems diverting attention from real issues. Understanding that is what preserves democracy.

It is not an extraordinary claim. It is consistent with what people see before them and with human nature. It is completely different from the claim some substance causes cancer. It is more like the claim that smoking causes cancer: it very obviously did, but the evidence was suppressed and investigations were discouraged.

Of course people in desperate situations in third world countries lie to get into a country like Germany or the UK where they have been told they will get jobs and benefits, no questions asked. To suggest people wouldn't lie in that situation is ridiculous. Even the "genuine" asylum seekers travelling illegally to Germany through safe haven countries are queue jumpers over their much more numerous brethren that have been waiting for years in refugee camps for a chance to get lucky enough to go to a western country. To suggest that people will cross the Med to get to Europe but that they won't lie is ridiculous.

People can see the problem with their very eyes as well. It materially affects them. They witness crime. Are they imagining that too?

It is also not an "extraordinary" claim that it is not being worked on. How could it be? You deny it even exists. How can something both not be a problem and also be being worked on. You can't say "it is extraordinary to claim the problem exists and that it isnt being worked on". That is complete sophistry.

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