Definitely Denmark stands out compared to their Scandinavian measures.
But looking here (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee...) they still have 4x refugees per capita compared to the US, 2x more than Australia, and still have more refugees per capita than Germany. And they're well above most EU countries. And I can almost guarantee they're more generous to refugees than the US.
Seems funny for a US paper to be calling Denmark "harsh".
That certainly was a proud time of the Danish people.
However, the jews were also forced to pay vast amounts - in cash, jewelry and more - to the kind fishermen who ferried the jews over to Sweden. Not all danes participated out of kindness of heart.
The heroes of then - the fishermen - were what we today label as "people smugglers".
The real heroes were the danes who participated without pay and simply because the jews were their freinds, neighbours, parents of their childrens friends etc.
Yeah and Denmark isn't sending home 80k people like Sweden, exactly because it's trying to be responsible to its own population too. Denmark is one of the most generous countries and the article is clearly written by someone who don't really get the Domestic situation. Also keep in mind Denmark is a small country and one in only 5 who spend more than the UN recommended gdp for aid.
They have to be, otherwise the vast welfare state system collapses. It's why the big European welfare states can't handle huge amounts of immigration very well. The greater the welfare state, the greater the influx of immigrants that you're likely to see wanting to get there. The only reason the US was able to absorb the massive immigration it did on a few occasions in its history, was due to the almost complete non-existence of a welfare state at the time, immigrants had to make it on their own at very limited additional cost to the state or tax system. If you deployed a full European style welfare state in the US, and then attempted that scale of immigration again, it would collapse the political system and economy.
I don't want to distract from your bigger point (because the relative numbers have probably gone up at least with respect to the US), but these are mid-2015 numbers, i.e. before the big refugee wave started. They also only count refugees, not asylum seekers.
It seems like a political problem, like most of Europe's problems. People just aren't choosing to work on obvious solutions to the problems, like a coordinated EU-wide refugee program. There is no question Denmark (and others) can afford the refugees, and the refugees certainly are not going to threaten the national security of any nation.
As in the US, the problem is politics. Climate change, health care, judges, and most of the rest of the issues have obvious solutions, it's just that some politicians currently refuse to participate on the grounds that other Americans also get a say in what happens (it is a democracy, after all). Unless they get their way 100%, undemocratically imposing their will on the rest of the country, no matter what their fellow citizens vote for, they won't act.
"Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy."
Europeans have generally experienced good cultural assimilation from immigrant populations, although I imagine conservative Jewish populations are an exception, leading to some troubling parallels right now. American politics and journalism make those parallels uncommonly mentioned in national media, but we should be considering them as societies.
At the same time, lack of assimilation to these previously well functioning societies is troubling. The lack of liberalism (in a formal sense, not an American political sense) is here on HN, too; debate on the story about whether religiously conservative men could/should be able to move women away from their assigned seats on planes was shockingly vigorous to me. This seems like a battle that countries like France and America helped win decades ago.
I read a suggestion many years ago (well before Turkey entered the EU) that in part Northern European countries "worked" because of their social homogeneity, and their success at cultural assimilation of immigrant populations. However true that is or was, that homogeneity is seen as at risk right now.
Like anyone, I have some mixed feelings about this as seen from across the Atlantic. I both like and dislike America's fragmented and vigorous culture, and I think of these more homogenous countries like I think of the small town I live in; with some rose colored glasses on about how 'nice' they must be. And a small town can be nice. But, it can be nasty if you don't fit in. And a small town with a massive population influx can lose its niceness quickly.
At any rate, it seems to me that Denmark should be allowed to ignore Syria if it wants, and also turn away refugees if it wants, or vet them on whatever criteria the country decides to. Right now liberal and right-wing (in the European sense) politics are ending up in bed together over immigrants, liberals on the behavior front, and right-wing on the culture front. Things seem likely to get more heated and violent before they cool down.
Like Japan, or Bhutan, countries have the right to manage migration however they wish. I'm also grateful there are countries which are more diverse like Singapore and India and the US.
People like to repeat the trope that diversity is strength that it's invigorating. But in that, the only diversity that matters is the diversity in thought, not necessarily in culture.
There are as many successful nations which are diverse as there are those which are homogenous and there are as many failed nations which are diverse as there are homogenous.
However, if you look at a Northern Ireland, Algeria or Iraq or India, when trouble hits, it stirs up animosity among the groups who play the blame game.
In times of trouble or uncertainty stability is likely more likely retained the more homogenous the group as everyone is in the same boat and there is no one to scapegoat but the self.
From that perspective I can understand Japan, Denmark or Bhutan.
That said, some cultures integrate into the host culture more readily and successfully --Indochinese (Vietnamese) in France, or Chinese in France, for example, or Jews in Latin America, Indians in the US, Chinese in the Malay peninsula, than some others who retain or want to retain their mother culture and thus find a clash and harbor mixed feelings and alienation.
> although I imagine conservative Jewish populations are an exception
I'm a dane living in Copenhagen. I am atheist as well. I really do not get what you mean by "conservative Jewish populations are an exception" to good cultural assimilation.
I grew up unaware of the jewish population, I studied and later worked with several jews, unaware that they were in fact jewish, My wife had several jewish friends from college. Except for the fact that some of them chose to live "more" jewish than others - and generally take Fridays off - I have never ever noticed them to stand out in any way. In fact, I have known several people for years without realizing that they were jewish.
They seem to have been assimilated to the point where it is actually a threat to the (little) cultural diversity that Denmark has.
It is the same way in the other Scandinavian countries. Your comment is very, very strange.
> I read a suggestion many years ago (well before Turkey entered the EU)
Turkey has not entered the EU. In fact, due to concerns about democracy and human rights, they have not even been promised that they can start negotiations.
> Like anyone, I have some mixed feelings about this as seen from across the Atlantic. I both like and dislike America's fragmented and vigorous culture, and I think of these more homogenous countries like I think of the small town I live in; with some rose colored glasses on about how 'nice' they must be.
One very important mechanism to make the Danish society work, is trust. We are generous with welfare. We have paid education through college/university or equivalent. In fact, in addition to free tuition, we will pay you to take an education. Danish "SU" ("Education Support") amounts to DKK5941 /month - apx $10464/year.
The backside of the trust is, that one of the least socially acceptable things you can do is to cheat the generous system.
> At any rate, it seems to me that Denmark should be allowed to ignore Syria if it wants, and also turn away refugees if it wants, or vet them on whatever criteria the country decides to
It seems to me, that every country in the world - Denmark included - should accept their fair share of refugees. Smaller populations with different cultures are generally not a problem. Only when populations with very different culture and religious views grows faster than their culture as well as the host country culture can adapt to eachother do problems arise.
> In fact, I have known several people for years without realizing that they were jewish.
I'm sure those aren't the people the parent commenter was referring to.
Jews throughout the world follow an incredibly broad spectrum of belief and practice, including an extremely broad set of views about how to relate to other cultures. At the most conservative end, there are some communities who view it as an essential life priority to try to follow all of the laws of the Torah fully and literally. This may include not only the dietary and Sabbath laws, but also rules about sexual modesty and limiting physical contact between the sexes
It still seems very strange to single them out to Europeans, where strictly observant Jews are a tiny minority, especially when in many respects the most strictly observant Judaism resembles far more mainstream Islamic culture, with Muslims being a much larger, more likely to be foreign-born and faster-growing minority.
(This is also reflected in the way anti-Semitic sentiment in Western Europe tends to focus on Israel and perceived Zionist conspiracies whilst Islamophobic sentiment tends to focus on the idea that Islam could never be compatible with European culture)
I was wrong on Turkey, thanks for pointing it out.
Inre: Jews in Europe, I was referring to more strictly observant Jewish communities, a feature of life in Europe for hundreds of years, sometimes coalescing into voluntary Jewish quarters and often in involuntary ghettos. There are places in America that you would feel very uncomfortable walking if you were without a beard, hat and tzitzit (a vest/shirt with tassels). I don't know if Denmark has a population so observant, but if it does, I would bet they consciously try not to integrate into general society.
Denmark has a proud history of standing up to Hitler in WW2 inre: Jewish rights, and if I lived there, I would be proud of it.
I think that the acculturation issues are deeper than you seem to, though. For instance, I'm half Greek -- I can tell you for some Greeks cheating the system is a cultural positive. That is so very, very different than what you describe in Denmark. And that culture-cheating perspective is far more common in the Mediterranean basin than it seems to be up North, for whatever reason.
If my grandfather was any indication, you can put an immigrant in a new country (America in my case), but you will not take away the whole culture. It takes a generation or two, and that's in a population that's pretty aggressive about assimilation -- greek immigrants are encouraged to go to good universities and climb the social ladder. My grandfather was full of stories about working the system until he died, and he was proud of them. I don't think it's uncommon.
One reason why cheating on the system is heavily frowned upon in the Nordics is that generally the system is considered fair, without much corruption and we have chosen for the system to be generous. When you then cheat then you are essentially stealing from everyone and it is considered bad.
Also, taxes are particularly high, so people who do pay them are not happy about people who don't.
But it's really a cultural thing. In France, my garage would offer two options for paying, "with receipt" and "without receipt" as they put it nicely. This didn't raise an eyebrow.
I suppose you refer to South America, because the North is not BY ANY MEANS fragmented.
You can go anywhere in the US, from West Coast to East Coast and you see:
Everybody speaking the same language. Some small places will also speak Spanish and French, but everybody speaks English.
Everybody having the same religion -puritan culture. There is a significant amount of people believing in creationism as something Christian, when in fact Catholic or other views of Christianity had not accepted that for centuries.
Everybody sharing their own political believes. All believing the same mythology(the founding fathers like sacred creatures, the Constitution and so on).
Everybody watching the same TV channels, going to the same stores(Wallmark...)
They play the same sports. They go to a basketball play and first thing they do is put their hands over the heart and sing the same hymn.
Now compare that to Europe when you cross the channel from France to England , and you have different language, different cultures, people driving on the other side, values change, religion change, even weather is completely different.
Denmark is totally different to Holland, to France, to Switzerland, to Poland, to Italy, to Spain to Greece...
I take it you've never actually traveled across the US.
Hispanic culture in Los Angeles is noticeably different from white culture in Boston, which is noticeably different from black culture in New Orleans. First generation Filipino culture in Seattle is noticeably different from second generation Cuban culture in Miami. What does South Dakota culture have in common with Little Armenia in LA? Only the minimum things that all people share, otherwise they're very different. Is most of rural Texas similar to the cities of New York or San Francisco? Not even remotely close.
America is in fact wildly diverse, from food to media to customs.
I'd like to add a few points to the article. First, the party which got the most votes at the election was SD, the center-left Social Democrats, not DF (Dansk Folkeparti). However, overall the left-wing "red block" did not have enough representatives to form a coalition government. Out of the right-wing "blue block", DF was the party with the most votes [1].
Secondly, the current conservative government has indeed a tough line when it comes to asylum seekers and refugees. Their allies from DF have in particular an obsession for muslims, which leads to fairly transparent measure such as mandating the presence of pork in menus offered by the city of Randers to "preserve Danish food traditions" [2].
If we ignore momentarily foaming-at-the-mouth-about-muslims-but-we're-really-not-racist DF types, it's hard to deny there are real integration issues with immigrant populations. However, I wouldn't be so quick to put the blame squarely on these people. You regularly have tests which show that, depending on how ethnically Danish the name on your resume sounds, your chances of getting an interview, all other things being equal, are drastically different. And I have the feeling that anti-Muslim feelings have become relatively mainstream.
On the other hand, you do have a number of Muslim extremists which clearly have absolutely no intention of integrating and who'd be better off emigrating to Saudi Arabia, for everybody's good.
As a brown man who's lived awhile in Northern Europe, watching this saga unfold, I have to say the nimbyism shown by Denmark and Norway has been astonishing. Only Sweden and Germany seem to still be able to hold their heads high, actually treating brown people as humans without prejudice. Norway and Denmark have shown small mindedness comparable to the likes of Poland and Hungary while being vastly richer and better educated.
I've had to eat my prior words and praise sung in favor of N.Europe to my friends and family and restrict it to just Sweden, because the entire world can now see the reality of the actions taken in adversity by each of the countries and not just the words.
It is a small matter of consolation that the iphones so many Danes and Norwegians love is the brainchild of a man with Syrian blood whom they would have refused to shelter while counting their nickels and dimes. They are welcome to deal with that cognitive dissonance as they fade into the twilight of history while hoping the names of their ancestors are not much tarnished by the actions of the current generation. It would take a long time for the world to forget these things.
For Norway it is a perfect storm. A right wing coalition government (with the "extreme" right wing party as member for the first time in history no less), a slump in the oil price, and therefore a slump in offshore related services and industries, and a influx of refugees, in particularly across the border with Russia.
I find it unfair to compare Steve Jobs to the current wave of immigrants. Personally, I have nothing against immigration in general. However, I strongly oppose and rationally worry about any kind of mass immigration, especially to countries that haven't experienced it before. They don't know how to manage the flow of people, they might have no place to put them (i.e. houses), they don't know how to "integrate" them (enought to enable them to get educated and get jobs), they might simply not be able to handle a sudden 20% increase in population.
As a dane, I would like to point out that the largest group of "Muslisms-not-welcome" are the people who are seemingly at the bottom of society. They are the ones spewing uneducated nonsense on social media, and in general, have no idea what they are talking about. Most of the time, their "solution" is simply to "send them home". I feel bad for this group of people living in fear, when there's (perhaps) not that much to fear. I can however understand that you would feel threatened when you don't have an education, and can see the government trying to help refugees by offering them the same jobs you would be applying for.
Also, if you have any questions regarding this whole matter, I would like to answer them as best as possible.
You are used to having poor and stupid people being right and anti-immigration, easy to mock, with stupid arguments.
Brace yourself, a new wave of anti-immigration thinkers arrive, like me. We are educated, we are smart, we are non-dogmatic. Now it will be the left whose arguments will look stupid and unwieldy. You better prepare your best thing.
I'm not sure I understand, you say they have no idea what they're talking about, but understand that they may feel threatened by immigrants taking their jobs. Seems like a not so irrational fear.
The article is even taking about others problems "Though Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the population, there is growing evidence that many of the new arrivals fail to enter the workforce, are slow to learn Danish, and end up in high-crime immigrant neighborhoods where, while relying on extensive state handouts, they and their children are cut off from Danish society".
As a french guy, I think people should be really cautious about taking a large proportion of (relatively) poor people less educated than natives, sure it makes you feel good about yourself, then you realize that these people are more likely to be unemployed, criminals, and discriminated. I don't think it makes a country more tolerant, I think the opposite happens, prejudices simply grow, and not only without rational explanation. And 40 years later you have gigantic problems.
Are french people of Arab descent discriminated in France for example? Yes I think so, and I'm pretty sure it would not be the case if the only Arab immigrants France had taken had been very educated people. Presumably the prejudice about them now would be that they are very educated/successful.
Sure France did a terrible job at integrating immigrants from Arab countries, and I'm 100% sure Danemark will do better. Still, it's very difficult.
I'm seeing it right now in Europe, helping these refugees didn't make the countries more tolerant, it only had the opposite effect of giving more power to far-right parties.
Isn't Danemark already relying on the "solution" of "sending more and more of them home"?
The US has still only welcomed 2,300 refugees. That is less than Denmark, a country the size of the state of Maryland, received per month this fall. In one week alone, Denmark received 11,000 refugees from the Middle East. I'd like to see the reaction in American media if you received 300/6 x 10,000 = 500,000 refugees in one week. Denmark received 21,000 official asylum seekers in 2015, most in the second half of the year, and mostly young men from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. That is like if the US received 1 million. And on top of that a much larger number seemingly just traveling through.
With 31 governors refusing to receive any Syrian refugees at all (and so too your likely next president) I think Americans should keep the Euro bashing at a minimum.
The US is and has been taking massive numbers of refugees from Latin America (how many are European nations taking from Latin America?). Latin America over the last 30 years has witnessed a lot of chaos, war, huge murder rates, etc. of nearly the scale Syria is seeing. The murder rate in Honduras for example is half the casualty rate of the Syrian civil war. How Honduras isn't considered an active war zone I don't know. If Honduras were the size of Syria, it would have seen upwards of 100,000 murders in just the last five years. In just seven years in Mexico, around 164,000 people were murdered in the cartel wars.
The US has taken in 10 million immigrants (twice the population of Denmark) from just Mexico in the last 30 some years. You don't think those people are every bit as much refugees as the people of Syria? They've fled intense poverty and domestic war, and they're willing to die to try to get across the US border to a better life.
How much more do you think the US can absorb exactly?
As a non-Dane living in DK, I feel the conservative viewpoint has seeped into the mainstream, in part due to good old-fashioned fear-mongering. That said, I do think there are real questions about integration, when you look at unemployment numbers in immigrant ghettos, they're not pretty.
Of course those at the bottom of society fear uneducated immigrants the most, they're the ones that will have to compete with them for jobs and share the most space with them.
The middle and upper classes can afford to feel nice about supporting unrestricted immigration for the longest, because they don't have to see or acknowledge the problems it causes until it's too late.
You see the same kind of hypocrisy in the US west coast, where wealthy liberals treat poor southern conservatives with contempt and ridicule for their "racist" opinions of immigrants... up until the "white tech dudebros" started moving into their cities, at which point they used every law on the books to impede development and prevent newcomers from integrating into their society...
I envy Danes, at least they seem to decide for themselves.
I can't, most of people in most of countries can't too.
We're instead driven by a combination of dictatorship, baseless populism promoting things nobody wants, alienation ans promoting political agenda over citizens' wishes.
Yes, we reduced social benefits to refugees by 45%, from $1600/month to $871/month, which means that we now provide roughly the same as in Norway and Sweden. If that is harsh then I'd rather not tell you what I think of the Mexico–U.S. border. Please America, go fix your own problems before you point fingers at your friends.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 1405 ms ] threadBut looking here (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee...) they still have 4x refugees per capita compared to the US, 2x more than Australia, and still have more refugees per capita than Germany. And they're well above most EU countries. And I can almost guarantee they're more generous to refugees than the US.
Seems funny for a US paper to be calling Denmark "harsh".
However, the jews were also forced to pay vast amounts - in cash, jewelry and more - to the kind fishermen who ferried the jews over to Sweden. Not all danes participated out of kindness of heart.
The heroes of then - the fishermen - were what we today label as "people smugglers".
The real heroes were the danes who participated without pay and simply because the jews were their freinds, neighbours, parents of their childrens friends etc.
As in the US, the problem is politics. Climate change, health care, judges, and most of the rest of the issues have obvious solutions, it's just that some politicians currently refuse to participate on the grounds that other Americans also get a say in what happens (it is a democracy, after all). Unless they get their way 100%, undemocratically imposing their will on the rest of the country, no matter what their fellow citizens vote for, they won't act.
"Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy."
Europeans have generally experienced good cultural assimilation from immigrant populations, although I imagine conservative Jewish populations are an exception, leading to some troubling parallels right now. American politics and journalism make those parallels uncommonly mentioned in national media, but we should be considering them as societies.
At the same time, lack of assimilation to these previously well functioning societies is troubling. The lack of liberalism (in a formal sense, not an American political sense) is here on HN, too; debate on the story about whether religiously conservative men could/should be able to move women away from their assigned seats on planes was shockingly vigorous to me. This seems like a battle that countries like France and America helped win decades ago.
I read a suggestion many years ago (well before Turkey entered the EU) that in part Northern European countries "worked" because of their social homogeneity, and their success at cultural assimilation of immigrant populations. However true that is or was, that homogeneity is seen as at risk right now.
Like anyone, I have some mixed feelings about this as seen from across the Atlantic. I both like and dislike America's fragmented and vigorous culture, and I think of these more homogenous countries like I think of the small town I live in; with some rose colored glasses on about how 'nice' they must be. And a small town can be nice. But, it can be nasty if you don't fit in. And a small town with a massive population influx can lose its niceness quickly.
At any rate, it seems to me that Denmark should be allowed to ignore Syria if it wants, and also turn away refugees if it wants, or vet them on whatever criteria the country decides to. Right now liberal and right-wing (in the European sense) politics are ending up in bed together over immigrants, liberals on the behavior front, and right-wing on the culture front. Things seem likely to get more heated and violent before they cool down.
People like to repeat the trope that diversity is strength that it's invigorating. But in that, the only diversity that matters is the diversity in thought, not necessarily in culture. There are as many successful nations which are diverse as there are those which are homogenous and there are as many failed nations which are diverse as there are homogenous. However, if you look at a Northern Ireland, Algeria or Iraq or India, when trouble hits, it stirs up animosity among the groups who play the blame game.
In times of trouble or uncertainty stability is likely more likely retained the more homogenous the group as everyone is in the same boat and there is no one to scapegoat but the self.
From that perspective I can understand Japan, Denmark or Bhutan.
That said, some cultures integrate into the host culture more readily and successfully --Indochinese (Vietnamese) in France, or Chinese in France, for example, or Jews in Latin America, Indians in the US, Chinese in the Malay peninsula, than some others who retain or want to retain their mother culture and thus find a clash and harbor mixed feelings and alienation.
FYI: Turkey is not in the EU.
I'm a dane living in Copenhagen. I am atheist as well. I really do not get what you mean by "conservative Jewish populations are an exception" to good cultural assimilation.
I grew up unaware of the jewish population, I studied and later worked with several jews, unaware that they were in fact jewish, My wife had several jewish friends from college. Except for the fact that some of them chose to live "more" jewish than others - and generally take Fridays off - I have never ever noticed them to stand out in any way. In fact, I have known several people for years without realizing that they were jewish.
They seem to have been assimilated to the point where it is actually a threat to the (little) cultural diversity that Denmark has.
It is the same way in the other Scandinavian countries. Your comment is very, very strange.
> I read a suggestion many years ago (well before Turkey entered the EU)
Turkey has not entered the EU. In fact, due to concerns about democracy and human rights, they have not even been promised that they can start negotiations.
> Like anyone, I have some mixed feelings about this as seen from across the Atlantic. I both like and dislike America's fragmented and vigorous culture, and I think of these more homogenous countries like I think of the small town I live in; with some rose colored glasses on about how 'nice' they must be.
One very important mechanism to make the Danish society work, is trust. We are generous with welfare. We have paid education through college/university or equivalent. In fact, in addition to free tuition, we will pay you to take an education. Danish "SU" ("Education Support") amounts to DKK5941 /month - apx $10464/year.
The backside of the trust is, that one of the least socially acceptable things you can do is to cheat the generous system.
> At any rate, it seems to me that Denmark should be allowed to ignore Syria if it wants, and also turn away refugees if it wants, or vet them on whatever criteria the country decides to
It seems to me, that every country in the world - Denmark included - should accept their fair share of refugees. Smaller populations with different cultures are generally not a problem. Only when populations with very different culture and religious views grows faster than their culture as well as the host country culture can adapt to eachother do problems arise.
I'm sure those aren't the people the parent commenter was referring to.
Jews throughout the world follow an incredibly broad spectrum of belief and practice, including an extremely broad set of views about how to relate to other cultures. At the most conservative end, there are some communities who view it as an essential life priority to try to follow all of the laws of the Torah fully and literally. This may include not only the dietary and Sabbath laws, but also rules about sexual modesty and limiting physical contact between the sexes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzniut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negiah
and for some people also varying degrees of effort to limit social interactions with non-Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishul_Yisrael
See generally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism
for the people who are making the most conscious effort to be socially and culturally separate from secular society.
(This is also reflected in the way anti-Semitic sentiment in Western Europe tends to focus on Israel and perceived Zionist conspiracies whilst Islamophobic sentiment tends to focus on the idea that Islam could never be compatible with European culture)
Inre: Jews in Europe, I was referring to more strictly observant Jewish communities, a feature of life in Europe for hundreds of years, sometimes coalescing into voluntary Jewish quarters and often in involuntary ghettos. There are places in America that you would feel very uncomfortable walking if you were without a beard, hat and tzitzit (a vest/shirt with tassels). I don't know if Denmark has a population so observant, but if it does, I would bet they consciously try not to integrate into general society.
Denmark has a proud history of standing up to Hitler in WW2 inre: Jewish rights, and if I lived there, I would be proud of it.
I think that the acculturation issues are deeper than you seem to, though. For instance, I'm half Greek -- I can tell you for some Greeks cheating the system is a cultural positive. That is so very, very different than what you describe in Denmark. And that culture-cheating perspective is far more common in the Mediterranean basin than it seems to be up North, for whatever reason.
If my grandfather was any indication, you can put an immigrant in a new country (America in my case), but you will not take away the whole culture. It takes a generation or two, and that's in a population that's pretty aggressive about assimilation -- greek immigrants are encouraged to go to good universities and climb the social ladder. My grandfather was full of stories about working the system until he died, and he was proud of them. I don't think it's uncommon.
But it's really a cultural thing. In France, my garage would offer two options for paying, "with receipt" and "without receipt" as they put it nicely. This didn't raise an eyebrow.
I suppose you refer to South America, because the North is not BY ANY MEANS fragmented.
You can go anywhere in the US, from West Coast to East Coast and you see:
Everybody speaking the same language. Some small places will also speak Spanish and French, but everybody speaks English.
Everybody having the same religion -puritan culture. There is a significant amount of people believing in creationism as something Christian, when in fact Catholic or other views of Christianity had not accepted that for centuries.
Everybody sharing their own political believes. All believing the same mythology(the founding fathers like sacred creatures, the Constitution and so on).
Everybody watching the same TV channels, going to the same stores(Wallmark...)
They play the same sports. They go to a basketball play and first thing they do is put their hands over the heart and sing the same hymn.
Now compare that to Europe when you cross the channel from France to England , and you have different language, different cultures, people driving on the other side, values change, religion change, even weather is completely different.
Denmark is totally different to Holland, to France, to Switzerland, to Poland, to Italy, to Spain to Greece...
Hispanic culture in Los Angeles is noticeably different from white culture in Boston, which is noticeably different from black culture in New Orleans. First generation Filipino culture in Seattle is noticeably different from second generation Cuban culture in Miami. What does South Dakota culture have in common with Little Armenia in LA? Only the minimum things that all people share, otherwise they're very different. Is most of rural Texas similar to the cities of New York or San Francisco? Not even remotely close.
America is in fact wildly diverse, from food to media to customs.
but seriously, what is your point? Why are these people "hordes" rather than "a group", and why are they "invaders" rather than "refugees"?
I smell prejudice...
Secondly, the current conservative government has indeed a tough line when it comes to asylum seekers and refugees. Their allies from DF have in particular an obsession for muslims, which leads to fairly transparent measure such as mandating the presence of pork in menus offered by the city of Randers to "preserve Danish food traditions" [2].
If we ignore momentarily foaming-at-the-mouth-about-muslims-but-we're-really-not-racist DF types, it's hard to deny there are real integration issues with immigrant populations. However, I wouldn't be so quick to put the blame squarely on these people. You regularly have tests which show that, depending on how ethnically Danish the name on your resume sounds, your chances of getting an interview, all other things being equal, are drastically different. And I have the feeling that anti-Muslim feelings have become relatively mainstream.
On the other hand, you do have a number of Muslim extremists which clearly have absolutely no intention of integrating and who'd be better off emigrating to Saudi Arabia, for everybody's good.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_general_election,_2015
2: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/danish-city-pork-prote...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir
I've had to eat my prior words and praise sung in favor of N.Europe to my friends and family and restrict it to just Sweden, because the entire world can now see the reality of the actions taken in adversity by each of the countries and not just the words.
It is a small matter of consolation that the iphones so many Danes and Norwegians love is the brainchild of a man with Syrian blood whom they would have refused to shelter while counting their nickels and dimes. They are welcome to deal with that cognitive dissonance as they fade into the twilight of history while hoping the names of their ancestors are not much tarnished by the actions of the current generation. It would take a long time for the world to forget these things.
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Its basically a very messy situation.
Also, if you have any questions regarding this whole matter, I would like to answer them as best as possible.
Brace yourself, a new wave of anti-immigration thinkers arrive, like me. We are educated, we are smart, we are non-dogmatic. Now it will be the left whose arguments will look stupid and unwieldy. You better prepare your best thing.
As a french guy, I think people should be really cautious about taking a large proportion of (relatively) poor people less educated than natives, sure it makes you feel good about yourself, then you realize that these people are more likely to be unemployed, criminals, and discriminated. I don't think it makes a country more tolerant, I think the opposite happens, prejudices simply grow, and not only without rational explanation. And 40 years later you have gigantic problems.
Are french people of Arab descent discriminated in France for example? Yes I think so, and I'm pretty sure it would not be the case if the only Arab immigrants France had taken had been very educated people. Presumably the prejudice about them now would be that they are very educated/successful.
Sure France did a terrible job at integrating immigrants from Arab countries, and I'm 100% sure Danemark will do better. Still, it's very difficult.
I'm seeing it right now in Europe, helping these refugees didn't make the countries more tolerant, it only had the opposite effect of giving more power to far-right parties.
Isn't Danemark already relying on the "solution" of "sending more and more of them home"?
With 31 governors refusing to receive any Syrian refugees at all (and so too your likely next president) I think Americans should keep the Euro bashing at a minimum.
The US has taken in 10 million immigrants (twice the population of Denmark) from just Mexico in the last 30 some years. You don't think those people are every bit as much refugees as the people of Syria? They've fled intense poverty and domestic war, and they're willing to die to try to get across the US border to a better life.
How much more do you think the US can absorb exactly?
The middle and upper classes can afford to feel nice about supporting unrestricted immigration for the longest, because they don't have to see or acknowledge the problems it causes until it's too late.
You see the same kind of hypocrisy in the US west coast, where wealthy liberals treat poor southern conservatives with contempt and ridicule for their "racist" opinions of immigrants... up until the "white tech dudebros" started moving into their cities, at which point they used every law on the books to impede development and prevent newcomers from integrating into their society...
I can't, most of people in most of countries can't too. We're instead driven by a combination of dictatorship, baseless populism promoting things nobody wants, alienation ans promoting political agenda over citizens' wishes.