Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> You have an entire generation of people in the west socialized to think that a Bangladeshi will be just like a British person soon as they set foot in London.

It did not appear from your comment that this was a person in the west socialized to think like that but another immigrant who thought like that. Which makes it a completely irrational response. The fact that they weren't tolerant themselves of others like themselves is what makes it utterly surreal.

If there is one thing I'm proud of for NL (and I can't speak for the UK, I haven't spent enough time there but I have spent enough time in Canada to have some idea of how things work there) then it is that for the most part people here get along. My kids have friends across all cultural groups here and they visit there and those kids visit here. Never a single issue.

The only issues that we do still have is a lot of latent racism in small towns and concentrations of crime (across all cultures, including those lily white Dutch) related to drugs and such. The people that want to blow this out of proportion are the ones on the far right, typically their main reason for their stance is that they are afraid that new entrants are going to compete with them for social security. And to some extent they have a point.

But refugees should always be permitted to flee from wars, famine, natural disasters and whatever else can happen to people outside of their control.

I'm Dutch but I left the country long ago though I still regularly visit.

But I think the Netherlands is taking too much credit for being tolerant. It's not anymore. It was in the late 90s but I'm the 2000s things changed and lately it's particularly racist and intolerant. Not just against immigrants but also LGBT minorities especially trans people. I find the so called 'funny' memes from the people I still know there despicable. And I've already discommunicated the worst ones in this regard. Lately even people who were formerly nice have become rabid racists.

And in a recent election the extreme right won more than a third of the votes.

Where I live in Spain it's honestly a lot more tolerant. Although even here the extreme right are on the rise, unfortunately.

That is a problem all over Western Europe, which is really annoying. The extreme right (and unfortunately also the not so extreme right) is fomenting a lot of this, but fortunately on a local level they are not yet very effective unless you go into the smaller towns. I spend a lot of time in two places in NL, a small town (40K population) and one of the larger cities (by Dutch standards) 300K pop. Obviously there is a world of a difference between the two but overall, and compared to other countries that I'm familiar with I'd say we are still doing ok. Whether it will remain like that I would not dare to say. Agreed that LGBT minorities, trans people have it harder than it was a few years ago and this really irks me. Again, here too the extremists are pushing for this and in turn they are making a lot of people feel like this is now normalized again to the point where they no longer need to hide their bigotry. At the same time: this was always there, it was just better hidden.

Another problem is that the rise of social media has given bigots the world over a large enough echo chamber that they feel supported, even though their direct environment does not support them.

> Lately even people who were formerly nice have become rabid racists.

This is not something I have seen yet but that could be luck of the draw.

> And in a recent election the extreme right won more than a third of the votes.

Indeed they did. But: that percentage wasn't all that different in previous years overall, if you add up the various splinter groups. They were just less vocal and they did not have international ties the way they do today. This is an extremely dangerous development.

> Where I live in Spain it's honestly a lot more tolerant.

I believe you.

> Although even here the extreme right are on the rise, unfortunately.

Yes, it is like a cyclic thing that is driven by the loss of lessons learned from the past. NL is in a particularly difficult spot here with our history in Surinam, former dutch Indonesia and the slave trade. We've done some very ugly things and a lot of that required de-humanization of other people to a degree that it still stains our culture in a very significant way.

Lots and lots of crimes were committed, lots of mistakes were made. It will take many generations to come to some kind of new equilibrium. It certainly won't happen in my lifetime, and probably not in my kids' lifetimes either.

concentrations of crime (across all cultures) related to drugs and such

The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration, which is just false. For example, children of two foreign born residents are 5 times more likely to be criminals than children of two native Dutch people. The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.

> > The only issues that we do still have is a lot of latent racism in small towns and concentrations of crime (across all cultures, including those lily white Dutch) related to drugs and such. The people that want to blow this out of proportion are the ones on the far right...

> The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration

Not really. It’s still possible to “blow this out of proportion” even if the distribution does not factor along immigration status.

> The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.

It’s not rational to respond to a 5x prevalence (simply using your figure for the sake of argument, and assuming that future immigrants are similar to past ones) as if it were 10x or 100x, and that seems closer to jacquesm’s point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com