Hacker News Reader

Comment by kakacik | Hacker News Reader

You got it reverse - people look at prison populations and deduce criminality rate from there. Switzerland almost 3/4 are foreigners, Germany its 50% and so on.

Unless given country has similar % of foreigners (and of course they don't), you get where they come from and where the emotion 'foreigners bad' stems from. Even if one ignores flashy news about high profile attacks/criminality, which of course are impossible to ignore. Right or not, this statistics is primary level math that anybody can do in their head and even folks following populists will do.

Now what would you say to these people in such case? Bear in mind the topic is in western Europe, ie Germany so toxic that even saying above got high ranking people like police chiefs fired on spot. Exactly kind of dumb over-corrected setup that makes things like ADF thrive quietly, till election come and then folks are 'shocked' that they don't understand their own population at all.

View on HN

> Now what would you say to these people in such case?

The honest thing would have been to tell them - you're right, yes there's an overrepresenation in crime - but we're working on it , it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly), etc. But lots of the establishment doesn't seem able to even do that - they have to completely deny the problem, by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.

2-3 generations? why should we import criminal foreigners that will make our cities and villages unsafe for decades?

it is not said honestly out loud, because it is absolutely insane, and would be rightfully rejected.

> it is not said honestly out loud, because it is absolutely insane, and would be rightfully rejected

I don't think not saying it out loud is helping the current policy makers; the right and the far right understood right away this was their biggest point. By not engaging them in the discussion , or engaging with hand wavy trickery, you kinda lose the debate I think.

As someone who happens to be a descendant of one of the very rare pre-1965 immigrants from the subcontinent, I assure you I am not writing this from the inside of a jail cell.

And even if that would be a reasonable argument it would still be an argument for stopping more migration because otherwise you continue to have new first generations.

>it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly)

What about african americans?

What about african amercians?

It's like I'm the stupid goose in the meme.

African americans were on track to be more wealthy and less crimey, same as every other poor ethnic group in the US has done before. Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. Something went off the rails.

What happened? It ain't the skin or some societal factor that gets applied because of the skin. We got plenty of African and Caribbean immigrants to use as control groups.

(I don't expect you to answer this question, I expect this question to make a lot of people around here uncomfortable.)

>by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.

Agreed

>> It ain't the skin or some societal factor that gets applied because of the skin. We got plenty of African and Caribbean immigrants to use as control groups.

Are you saying that Jim Crow never happened? Pretty sure the violence was applied on the basis of skin color. Can you understand how a century of oppression and expropriation might retard your wealth and likelihood of ending up in jail, relative to an Italian or a Pole?

Why would (more recent) African immigrants be an appropriate group to compare against? They have a completely different economic and cultural history.

As for Caribbean people -- they have their own experiences of slavery and genocide. Migrants to the colonizing nations have not necessarily thrived.

> people look at prison populations and deduce criminality rate from there.

They don't do that. They do not do that for local population either.

> Exactly kind of dumb over-corrected setup that makes things like ADF thrive quietly

Yeah, the far right exists only because of supposed left claim pops up again. The fact it, far right fans themselves tend to be more criminal and more violent then general population. And you make that claim in relation to Germany from all the places. AfD has large popularity roughly where Hitler was popular and roughly where communists led the country for years.

And their big things are more into "Russia should be our friend, actually", "we dont like modern art" and "the retirees will have super large pensions if we win".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com