Denmark Aims a Wrecking Ball at 'Non-Western' Neighborhoods | Hacker News Reader

Denmark Aims a Wrecking Ball at 'Non-Western' Neighborhoods

nytimes.com

29 pointsjgwil275 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20231026043045/https://www.nytim...

> "The law mandates that in neighborhoods where at least half of the population is of non-Western origin or descent, and where at least two of the following characteristics exist — low income, low education, high unemployment or a high percentage of residents who have had criminal convictions — the share of social housing needs to be reduced to no more than 40 percent by 2030"

A lot of countries have had problems with putting all the social housing in one place and then ignoring it while conditions worsen. Especially in big badly designed tower blocks.

But there's no need to tie it to immigration status, and there's especially no need to tie it to ethnicity! If there really is a crime problem in a place, then let that speak for itself. And of course the creation and suppression of ghettoes has a terrible history in Europe.

(Interestingly, Denmark managed to evacuate 90% of Danish Jews to neutral Sweden during WW2, far higher than other occupied countries)

Yes, the fact that the main criterion for demolition is the proportion of residents of "non-Western origin" (i.e. non-white people) is what I find disturbing. If they wanted to make it about, say, proportion of native Danish speakers, I would think that would have a similar effect without blatantly discriminating on race.

It probably meant "cultural origin", not race, i.e. people coming from countries with different (or undeveloped) value systems and ethics.

The article just says, "non-Western origin or descent," which is a bit ambiguous. I don't know the details, but the use of the word "descent" is concerning: it's an immutable characteristic passed from parents to children, regardless of whether we call it "race" or "cultural origin."

It's based on citizenship. The Danish national statistics agency has an official set of Western countries used when e.g. comparing Denmark to other Western countries. They also define 1st and 2nd generation immigrants

The Danish politicians just reuse these bureaucratic definitions (1st and 2nd gen from non-Western countries).

Yeah, that's also racism.

I suspect it could effectively mean "newcomers". There are.l presumably existing neighbourhoods where there are old-time Danes living with high unemployment etc. and it might be unrealistic to apply this criterion to them.

Not that it makes it nicer or anything.

I remember at university reading that some local governments avoided creating housing for those on benefits, instead setting aside a percentage of housing blocks for those persons, so that they are integrated with persons who were not on benefits. IIRC the thinking was that concentration of poverty and those in poverty leads to more poverty, but integration showed improved results.

yeah im guessing this is the point. keep them all in the same area and you get an ethno-ghetto, and concentrates things like crime poverty.

spreading it around helps (forces) assimilation, and gets them around people of different ages / statuses / etc.

have heard of similar approaches for old folks homes, where they try to integrate them with more diverse communities, different ages, etc. cuz being around young folks and different things keeps them busy and active

“The blend of people from different layers of society is getting higher,” Thomas Monberg, a member of Parliament and the Social Democrats’ spokesman for housing, said in an email response to questions. He said the government acted because it could not afford to “wait until people are killing each other in gang wars.”

Notable things here. It's considered an experiment by the Danish, which shows unusual humility, since it might fail. It is a Social Democrat experiment, which is surprising because I imagine the knee-jerk reaction from the American left will be to descry forcing "non-white" people to do anything against their will. The policy's stated purpose is to avoid much worse outcome down the line. What data showed them that gang wars were coming? And who/ can we use as a control group to see if the Danish government has done the right thing? It brings up an interesting question about assimilation and how much can be or should be demanded of immigrants by the host nation.

If the American left were being what it claims to be, it would have concern for the non-whites whose neighborhoods are being overrun by gangs, not just concern for not imposing white values and culture on non-whites.

In Spain when I met a black kid decades ago I didn't seek for it's African legacy or whatever nonsense the American Left states on his persona. He had the exact culture as me, as he grew up there, with the same Northern Spanish accent from the Bay of Biscay and all.

Who cares about what his relatives where thousands of years ago.

This is not new. It has been done many times in Denmark, and it works.

I like it especially if it is a genuine attempt at integration and not a way to force poor immigrants out of desirable real estate.

In practice, that means thousands of apartments will be demolished, sold to private investors or replaced with new housing catering to wealthier (and often nonimmigrant) residents, to increase the social mix.

It sounds like this is already answered...

It seems partial to encourage assimilation. The question remains as to what happens to those displaced but I think the Danes might have a satisfactory answer as this experiment is not being run by the right.

The thing is that those who want to integrate will put in a lot of effort in this direction and eventually will make it.

The reality is that the majority does not want to integrate. That's why you have places now that are immigrant only with little to no public order in Denmark, Sweden, France and the rest of the countries that received a large number of immigrants.

It is not about real-estate, it is about people not behaving like the host country expects them to behave and the end result will probably be mass deportations back to the places they came from or maybe other countries in the same region they came from.

You can encourage people to integrate. It’s not a genetic unchangeable.

Denmark requires all immigrant children to take classes on being Danish.

Makes sense. Every time I go to a new country I read about what to do and not to do there and behave accordingly. I consider going to another country as going to someone's house, hence I'm not going to behave like I do at home.

You cannot in general deport people to countries they did not come from, because they have no right to immigrate there either. The UK's attempt to do this with Rwanda required a massive bribe.

There are a few examples where a lot of immigrants from Africa were turned around and sent to Libya. So precedent exists, especially if you send them to places without functioning governments.

If both parents are from a country and their child is born in Sweden he could qualify for dual citizenship. If the child is under 18 deporting both their parents is effectively deporting them, even if they were born in the country

Important context that the article is light on is that Denmark (and Sweden, etc. etc.) all have immigrant populations that are considerably more violent than the rest of the population, sometime more than 10x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Denmark#/media/...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/576081/number-of-sexual-...

If Americans emigrated in droves to Denmark they would also fail to integrate, (although they would face less racism from the locals) and they will also prefer to socialize with their own, retain their own American customs and cultural identity and fail to learn Danish. But all of this is irrelevant. Failing to integrate, by this measure does not lead one directly towards the criminal underworld. There are a few steps in between that are being ignored, and this "failed integration" is being used as a red herring.

And what are those ignored steps?

That's for them to find out. Employment status is probably a big one.

I was just on holiday in south eastern Europe in a resort town where the workforce was entirely composed of the same kind of immigrants, and none of these immigrants were "integrated" by this standard. But there was no criminality. Maybe because all of them were gainfully employed and felt like they had a future.

That's just one example.

My point is, there is a false equivalence being exercised here. Just because somebody is not integrated by whatever arbitrary standard, does not mean that they are prone to engage in criminal activity.

I am sorry but I don't buy it.

If you don't integrate and don't learn the language and never have any contacts outside your community, how are are you supposed to survive, find a job, find spouse and eventually move out from those neighborhoods?

So you either live on welfare or you turn to criminal activities. What else is there?

If you are going to impose impossibly high standards on these people BEFORE they are gainfully employed, you're the problem. They don't need to integrate nor learn the language to do a variety of jobs. Give them a job and a reason to exist and believe they are advancing in life. Then demand that they learn the language. Don't put them in bureaucratic limbo for years, because they aren't "integrated enough". No wonder you end up with problems then.

So you are saying that learning a language is impossibly high standard? You can't be serious!

In which world do you live where not knowing the language is ok for any kind of job?

If you can't understand your coworkers communicate with your managers, talk with you colleagues, how are you supposed to do your job properly then?

It is perfectly reasonable to expect that if someone moves to a new country, they should learn to speak the language so that they can be understood and be an active participant in said country.

If this person is not willing to put in this kind of work, then that is not acceptable. You can't expect the local population to do the work for the immigrants. And that criteria applies to western immigrants too.

You’re saying “learning a language” like it’s learning Python or something. Come to my country and I bet you won’t be able to go through a day without falling back to English earlier than in two years.

You have been given an example exactly in the comment to which you are answering. If you ignored it, it speaks only for the interest you have in carrying a real discussion. In case it was a mistake instead, here's the argument: there are plenty of jobs in the "monochromatic" neighborhood just like in any neighborhood: construction sites, shops, clerks, schools, and I can go on. It seems you simply cannot imagine that an immigrant would do those jobs - when many (most?) of them came exactly for that, to have a stable life.

It’s a shame that more Western leaders haven’t understood that we are simply trustees of the nations and cultures that our ancestors created for our descendants.

More like the reverse. We mixed a lot of cultures in the Mediterranean area of Europe, discarding the non-useful crap and keeping the good traits, such as algebra, architectural techniques, medical techniques, hygiene...

But some people just want to impose the worst of their cultures to the Western world. At least we god rid (partly) of the idiotic legacy of the Christianism in Western Europe by arranging a new set of humanistic and universal values at the French Revolution, but some people want to destroy these values back.

Its' not that they haven't understood it's simply that they don't have to put up with the consequences of their actions.

It always amazes me to the see the bleeding hearts politicians on TV welcoming anyone and everyone and telling you that if you have a problem with that, then you are a bigot, a racist, a populist.

But they don't live in those neighborhoods where the main language spoken is not the language of the country, where the unemployment rate is 50% and the streets are unsafe because of gang activity and where women are scared to walk alone at night.

No, these people live in nice comfortable neighborhoods where the cops actually patrol 24/7, where the average income is in the top 5% of the country and you can come at any time day and night without fearing for your life.

That's the problem. Unchecked migration for thee not for me. In France we call these people Bourgeois boheme. They pretend to understand the plight of Joe Blow, are very far left but very high income so they can avoid the worst consequences of their political choices.

> Bourgeois boheme

This accurately describes how I feel about college-aged American liberals on social media

You mean the Martha's Vineyard residents don't have to deal with thousands of people crossing the border? Taxing their emergency and educational services? But they have signs on the front of their homes that say in this house no human is illegal!

Why go through all this effort and expense? Just send them home if they won't assimilate.

"If you aren't going to assimilate why be an immigrant? Why not stay where you're from since that's the only culture you want?"

Because where they're from, by and large, was trying to kill them.

EDIT: OP reworded his comment as I was replying.

Even more of a reason to assimilate?

Integrate, which is a two way street. Ypur the thord xommwnter here using "assimilate" instead of "integrate", that is curious.

What does assimilate into mean? to become part of a group, country, society, etc., or to make someone or something become part of a group, country, society, etc.:

Maybe the non western folks should not have been let in to begin with?

That sounds like an attempt to erase non-government-approved culture to me.

If by "non-government-approved culture" you mean crime, then yes.

Do not migrate into a country if you're not prepared to adopt their culture. Seems straightforward to me.

If your culture makes women and LGBT people inferior, to hell with that culture, the same way the Western world tried to do with die-hard Church sickos two centuries ago in the French Revolution. OFC changes to women didn't come overnight, but it was a tiny step on the right direction.

Would you therefore be in favour of putting the Amish and the Mennonite communities in re-education camps?

Any culture which puts their own citizens under a subhuman second class one should be ultimately fined and sanctioned, of course. Romanticism sucks. You maybe as an American idolize old cultures and traits; as an European, I laugh on that supposed tradition praising the idiocy and being a backwards hick over a progressive reality.

Keep your tradition to Holidays, music and dance lores and the rest of inocuous folklore, that's fine. But don't ever try to bring these old values back, no one with proper sanity would ever want to go back to the XIX century.

First of all, I'm German.

Secondly, I think everyone has a right to have opinions, thoughts and values, that others deem hateful. I would not want to live under your dystopian rule, where there is only one correct way to think.

And who are you to define what "progressive" is? What gave you the right to decide what is good and correct, and what is not?

It's one thing to discourage or eliminate aspects of a culture. It's entirely another to eliminate the whole culture.

The lens I generally use is "does this part of a culture hurt others?" If so, then yes, it should be phased out. If not, I don't see the harm in leaving it alone.

Very good. Look at Sweden nowadays. Trying to integrate people that came to "take over" as opposed to be integrated is never going to work.

> At 4%, male migrants aged 15–64 with non-Western backgrounds had twice the conviction rate against the Danish Penal Code in 2018, compared to 2% for Danish men. In a given year, about 13% of all male descendants of non-Western migrants aged 17–24 are convicted against the penal code.[1]

> In November 2018, the government announced plans to house failed asylum claimants, criminal foreigners who could not be deported and foreign fighters in the Islamic State on Lindholm (Stege Bugt), an island no permanent residents.[92][93] The scheme was approved by Danish parliament 19 December 2018. The plan was opposed by council leaders in Vordingsborg municipality and merchants in Kalvehave, where the ferry to Lindholm has its port.[1]

They are obviously trying to backtrack

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime

>Very good. Look at Sweden nowadays. Trying to integrate people that came to "take over" as opposed to be integrated is never going to work.

Context for others: Sweden has no language, income, employment, or skills requirement <https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...> for obtaining citizenship.

In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden <https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...>.

I’m about as far left as they come, but things like this make me proud to be an American, and even more so live in a state with a massive number of immigrants, including from majority Muslim countries, and the world’s 5th largest economy. The bigotry in Europe is just psychotic. You sometimes get a real picture into why they murdered each other for centuries over speaking minor variations of each others languages.

As I pointed out elsewhere, it's really quite hard to believe it's bigotry on the basis of skin color or language. The mix of immigrants they have commit violent crimes (robbery, rape, murder) at several multiples of the Danish population.

It's resulted in graphs that look like this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/576081/number-of-sexual-...

There's a direct feedback loop between EU bigotry and US bigotry. They go to each other's conferences and read each other's publications. And the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel etc radicalize both sides.

I don’t disagree, but you can go to Los Angeles, where something like 40% of people don’t speak English at home and see there are no actual problems with massive numbers of immigrants and mixing cultures. All the social problems that do exist (e.g. with housing and homelessness) are the result of the rich waging battle against the poor. The food is also a hell of a lot better than Northern Europe and we share it with each others children.

These issues will change when people fought for his labour rights and not for a culture they weren't part from long ago. They relatives where Hispanics, maybe; but by just watching the 'quality' of translations of some public traffic signs iinto Spanish, as I Spaniard I could say these people are barely Hispanic, they have no bounds to any of the zilions of Hispanic subcultures; and, even worse, they aren't even fluent in their supposed 'own' language. So the best these people could do would be to keep their customs such as the gastronomy and join the Anglosphere without a hitch.

This is exactly what I would expect a European to say about people whose culture is a mixture of indigenous traditions, Spanish colonialism, and its intersection with all the other parts of Southern California. Yes, we’re not upholding honorable Hispanic traditions, nor do we want to. We’ve arrived at something more tolerant, and it’s certainly not representative of the wider “Anglosphere”. Half the people in the US hate California for its cultural differences. You think Brits are going to feel right at home in East LA? Give me a break.

Spain itself it's a mixture between different kingdoms, indigenous cultures, self-imposed Castillian colonialism (and, mostly, utilitarianism on commerce by using Castillian back in the day), and yet everyone agrees on using a common core of values, rights and language to be able to communicate between ourselves.

The Andalusians and Valencian/Catalans are both located in the Mediterranean and they can have huge cultural related differences and traits, and they can differ a universe from the Castilles and the Northern Spain which is a bit less "partier" than the always-sunny Southern part of Spain. Also, you have microclimates and microcultures in these regions. Yet, I repeat, a common background it's stated by pure practicalism. It's either that, or isolation and poverty.

Because if you have a look on the map of Spain, you'll find that half of the map of Iberia it's crossed by mountain ranges creating isolated regions up to very recent years (relatively compared to the Middle Ages), making the cultures of Spain anything but homogenous.

…and yet California is even more linguistically and culturally diverse AND economically powerful than Spain. If there was some real benefit to the kind cultural uniformity you’re insisting upon, then Spain should outperform it, but of course it doesn’t.

Right now, the main problem Spain seems to have is the right wingers wanting to take back over and run the country into the ground (again) in pursuit of the kind of things you’re espousing. And the only thing really stopping them is the Catalans, who would rather not have anything to do anything with the rest of the country because of how obnoxiously intolerant it is.

I'd suggest you to read the history of Carlism and the backstory of both the Catalan and Basque nationalisms.

Hint: the Spanish Francoism, Catalan's burgueoise nationalism and the Basque-Navarre ones came from the same nest.

If any, every nationalism in Spain (no matter which side, either independentist or statist) was bound to the old regime and later... money and crushing labour movements.

Inb4 the Basque Left and ETA... ETA joined the labour movements in Francoism as a quick alliance against Franco. After that, the nationalist side took far more precedence that the universalist pro-labour one. Far more.

The origins don’t really matter because under Franco, there was such extreme repression of Catalan language and culture that the nationalism merged with the Leftist resistance to Franco in a new conjugation that still, to this day, prevents a return of the same right wing ideology. You can’t honestly claim the groups like the MIL are tied to the old regime. It’s absurd. But the fact that you chose to elide Francoism’s repression of local culture, which was framed in almost exactly the same terms you’re using about the need for cultural and linguistic uniformity, tells me that you’re not really having this conversation from a very honest starting place.

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