Discussion between Relaxed and JonathanReez

JonathanReez

04:39

@Relaxed Not IT, real engineering: robotics, mechanical, electrical, (hopefully) nuclear

The Spataussiedlers are mostly from the Soviet Union and were corrupted by Soviet mentality. Having German genes is not important - having German culture is

@Relaxed are the interviews actively trying to assess the persons degree of compatibility with German values? How many are rejected by the interview alone? In Russia at least they don’t even ask people whether they support Putin

Even though that’s a basic important question

@Relaxed there should never have been a second/third generation in the first place. Low wage workers from a highly incompatible cultural region should never be allowed to stay permanently

Turks where both parents who could speak C1 German back in 1970 all likely had very well integrated kids as well

Relaxed

07:42

@JonathanReez Again, whether the kids are “integrated” or that cultures or people have some sort of fixed and predetermined “level of compatibility” isn't the problem, that's a way to understand integration that has no relationship to the reality of the process.

there should never have been a second/third generation in the first place. Low wage workers from a highly incompatible cultural region should never be allowed to stay permanently I think they most definitely should but it's not like the German state didn't intend or tried to prevent that…

JonathanReez

@Relaxed what physical force of nature stopped the German government? They could’ve simply never issued their families any visas and that would be the end of it. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been doing just that for decades now.

Relaxed

Regarding interviews: So you realize your earlier messages where complete BS and your ideas are already official policy, your only point is that “if only they would do it right”, it would work fine. That's a very convenient way to never face reality…

JonathanReez

@Relaxed what? Of course there’s compatibility levels! Just look at what Russian cities look like compared to Japanese cities. The Japanese are way closer to German ordnung and will integrate easily. Russians are farther and will have issues.

@Relaxed I went through the full immigration cycle in Czech Republic and have been at several interviews: for the original visa, first residency permit, permanent residency, citizenship. The interviews are a complete joke

I also did an interview for a German internship visa at the consulate in Prague which did not strike me as comprehensive to say the least

Relaxed

@JonathanReez Uh? Decency and a little bit of squishiness. They had restrictions of all kinds. That's the one issue where the ECHR does have a bit of influence, you can filter all you want, it's not true they have any concerns about interviews being racist or anything like that but if you decide people are good enough to come and work, you cannot absolutely deny them any family life.

JonathanReez

Go to Tel Aviv airport and you’ll see how interviews need to be done - profiling is a skill that can be taught and you can train people to quickly spot who’s likely to be well suited to your nation and who’s not. Won’t be 100% accurate of course but can be improved over time as you collect data and learn from past mistakes.

@Relaxed what? Nothing stopped Turkish workers from family life. All they had to do was hop on a plane or a ship and go back home.

Relaxed

07:56

That's not what family life means…

This is still rooted in the fantasy that it's just a matter of finding the right people with zero impact of the conditions they find and what happens afterwards. It just isn't so.

If only the interviews were more thorough, etc.

Fact is that contrary to what you were saying, this is already policy, not something the ECHR or whoever would prevent from happening and that lack of integration due to some sort of innate inability to integrate isn't the main problem at all.

JonathanReez

@Relaxed cool and those who don’t like it can simply not come. Statistically 20% of men don’t have children in their lifetimes - that’s more than enough workers for Europe. All the family men can stay home.

Relaxed

Ironically, that's exactly the kind of things you heard about Italians in France in the 1920s and 1930s (cultural incompatibility, etc.) It wasn't true then, it's not true now and obsessing with the language ability of the parents only makes sense if you assume integration is only a function of the person's personal characteristics and willingness to integrate. It just isn't.

JonathanReez

You’ve yet to explain how the UAE is successfully attracting millions of workers despite doing exactly what I’m talking about

Relaxed

@JonathanReez I never say nobody would come. They did come in high numbers under exactly the conditions you describe, Italians came under similar visas to Switzerland all the way to the 90s. I am saying that it's costly to enforce in a non-authoritarian state (and also completely wrong).

JonathanReez

@Relaxed it’s a function of a combination of IQ (that helps learn languages and rules) plus some personal traits such as open mindedness, sense of wanting to be fair to others, desire to work hard, etc

Relaxed

08:08

You're using words like “just” or “simply” all the time but again the fact is that it was actually the original policy and it didn't work that way. There never was an official policy to welcome everybody or encourage people to stay or anything like that.

JonathanReez

@Relaxed why is it costly, I don’t get it? You just don’t issue family visas and that’s it? Costs 0 euros

@Relaxed yes I’m well aware of that. The UK under Conservatives even had an official policy of restricting immigration and then in 2023 they’ve welcomed an all time record high number of illegal immigrates

Relaxed

@JonathanReez No it's not, context and the conditions you find in the local society are a lot more important than all this. If anything, among personal characteristics, social capital and income are more important than this fantasy of IQ + character, which is based on nothing else than unreconstructed racism and a desire to just find scapegoats.

JonathanReez

@Relaxed my own family integrated extremely well in several different countries, all starting out from near poverty as they came from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Zero social capital either at the beginning. Our only difference was having the right culture that we’ve managed to keep by miracle despite living in the corrupt totalitarian world of the Soviets

@Relaxed racism has nothing to do with this. If you put a Syrian child into a German home, never tell them they’re Syrian and raise them as a German with no contact with Syria, they’ll be perfectly fine.

Same applies the other way around - as you correctly pointed out, Germans who were tainted by Soviet culture are struggling in Germany to this very day

Argentina is 99% European but they’ve lost their cultural strengths and turned into a semi failing state. Being white is not enough

You’re seeing everything in racist terms and lack understanding of just how unique and valuable European culture is, which is a common problem among Westerners.

Relaxed

09:54

What is that based on? Where did I say anything about whiteness? You just invoked personal traits like desire to work hard, the notion that it's just inherently lower in some people than other is what I call unreconstructed racism. I also think the cultural essentialism is not much better as an explanatory framework but that's not what we are talking about if we talk about personal traits.

There is also a lot of irony in all this, you talk about integration a lot but you praise a country (the UAE) and policies that are explicitly trying to prevent exactly that. You talk about looking for people who want to work hard as if it was a novel idea but that was exactly the basis for selection in the 1960s onwards.

In some cases, industry recruiters would go to villages (because rural populations were supposed to make for harder working and more obedient factory workers) to pick people they wanted to hire. What makes you think you would be better at gauging what we really need?

Meanwhile, the second or third generation obviously speaks the local language and yet they are facing a lot of challenges. It's just silly to think that their parents' language level has more influence on that that everything that happens afterwards.

JonathanReez

20:35

it’s based off working in an extremely international environment with coworkers from dozens of countries. The more successful someone is, the more likely they are to be able to integrate perfectly well among the locals - of any country. You can keenly observe this with Indian citizens - ask them what their percentile was on the centralized college admissions test and you can very accurately predict how integrated they would be into the rules of American life.

I have no idea where racism comes into play here at all, as I’ve pointed out several times how my own ethnicity (Whites/Slavs) are h…

You’d not believe me but I have friends of every ethnicity, from every continent and from every background, what unites them all is compatibility with my own values of wanting to be an upstanding citizen, of respecting the local culture and traditions, of trying to contribute to your community and of being “civilized” in general.

@Relaxed you can be a good factory worker but the problem is that most people cling on to their national identity and end up creating a household that puts emphasis on your home country values. If these values are in conflict with the values of the host country, you’ll end up with children who might speak the local language but fail to fully integrate due to being surrounded by kids of their parents friend group who all received toxic cultural values as part of their upbringing

This is where the C1 language test is important and why id require it for both spouses before the family is granted permanent residency (let alone citizenship): you want to ensure that the immigrants are above a certain intellectual and work ethic threshold (studying languages is hard - I’ve done it three times and appreciate that) to minimize the odds of them raising their kids in a way incompatible with the Western rules of life

If someone is from Japan or South Korea this is not a problem - them absorbing Japanese or Korean values will cause a bit of tension with locals but fundamentally they won’t cause any trouble to the locals around them

This is also where IQ comes into play - at a certain threshold you become free of delusions about national identity and can appreciate the fact that we’re nothing more than primates fumbling around on a small planet spinning around one of the billions of stars in this galaxy, making all “culture” fundamentally pointless with the exception of core principles that support the flourishing of technological prosperity.

We’ve discussed this on many other Politics questions: I’m genuinely baffled by (say) the Irish people wasting their time on the Irish language because for me personally language is of zero importance and I’d be happy to switch to Mandarin or Hindi or Klingon if necessary because it’s merely a tool of communication, not something that needs to be respected.

The true value of German culture is ordnung, not the German language or national clothing or history or traditions. Ordnung is what’s important and only those who can embody that principle should be allowed in.

Relaxed

20:57

The more successful someone is, the more likely they are to be able to integrate perfectly well among the locals That part is broadly true and well documented… and that's exactly why it has very little to do with any distance between cultures or any cultural group being inherently unable to integrate and a lot more to do with the opportunities immigrants and their children have in the host society.

you can be a good factory worker but the problem is that most people cling on to their national identity and end up creating a household that puts emphasis on your home country values. There is very little evidence of that and it flies in the fact of what you just wrote…

If someone is from Japan or South Korea this is not a problem - them absorbing Japanese or Korean values will cause a bit of tension with locals but fundamentally they won’t cause any trouble to the locals around them How does that have anything to do with “integration” then?

It goes without saying that “IQ” or “being civilized” are not serious concepts when discussing all of this, it's completely useless to explain anything, not only integration or economic success.

JonathanReez

@Relaxed integration is primarily about being respectful to the law, to your neighbors, to your city and to your host country. It’s about things like always being respectful of the property of others and leaving every place you visit better than how you’ve found it.

It’s about working hard, learning the local language to perfection, figuring out how to help your local community in whatever small ways you can, and never using public resources unless you absolutely have to by reason of serious disability

Are there rich and smart assholes who end up wrecking peoples lives and being complete degenerates? Yes. But it’s less likely.

Relaxed

21:25

You seem to be confusing integration with assimilation and even then that's a very superficial view. Integration is a two-way process and take a couple of generations. The notion that it is all about what individuals (in this case migrants) are or do is empirically unwarranted and politically useless.

On the other hand, I already acknowledged that economical success (and therefore access to schools, employment discriminations, etc.) is important, that part is well-documented.

Access to public resources typically improves that so there is no contradiction and also no surprise that people who face various difficulties in accessing it on a par with natives would face worse outcomes.

Ultimately, I don't see any coherence in your policy proposals beside establishing meanness as a goal and making things as hard as possible just for the sake of it. You seem to be in love with UAE policy but it seems entirely designed to prevent integration, which you purport to value.

The importance of economic integration is another reason why it makes no sense to discuss refugees together with other migrants. Outcomes for refugees are still better than many people give them credit for but they clearly face a lot of challenges, starting with the fact that in Europe, they are not even allowed to work when they arrive, often for years.

@JonathanReez And the things you just mentioned are exactly why the German government adopted the policies it did back in 2015. They didn't particularly welcome Syrian, that's just a urban legend. When people were boarding trains in Hungary, they were still trying to invoke the Dublin system or negotiating a repatriation agreement with Turkey.

But they also understood that once they arrived in Germany with no realistic way to send them back to Syria, the only way to give them a chance to get on a path to integration is to offer various type of support, from housing to language courses, schooling for the kids, etc. Yet you seem to have a particular scorn for these policies.

JonathanReez

23:28

@Relaxed yes, I was convinced about this back in ~2017 (I think?) by your great response to an old question of mine. I do think Merkel should've openly started a conversation on amending the ECHR rules to explicitly excluded non-EU and non-NATO citizens from being covered by any protections, but otherwise, yes, they did do their best within the confines of the system.

@Relaxed integration can be achieved anywhere extremely quickly once/if you know the local language. It's not about knowing the national anthem or dressing up in dirndls and lederhosen, its purely about being a net-positive taxpayer, able to solve basic bureaucratic hurdles and a pleasant person to interact with as far as the locals are concerned

Took me about 2-3 years in Czech Republic due to the language barrier and maybe 2 months in the US because I already spoke fluent English + had an understanding of how Western bureaucracy works

the policy proposal is very simple: divide people into three categories and don't deviate from the plan

a) Temporary workers: you get to come in, work, change employers, but have zero access to any public funds, no family migration, no path to stay permanently under any circumstances
b) High-added-value workers with a strong promise for integration: members of academia in STEM and those in the top 25% of workers by income. Allowed to bring in spouse and children, but both spouses and kids over 13 must pass the C1 test to become permanent residents followed by citizenship.

Relaxed

23:45

That's not really what integration means honestly and not a realistic policy goal.

JonathanReez

Of course for c) You'd ideally only allow women, the disabled and men over 50, the rest you'd pay other countries to take in, but currently that's off the table

Relaxed

Re: refugees in Europe, the ECHR really doesn't have much to do with it, not even sure many cases make their way there and it doesn't have much enforcement power. There are international conventions, EU rules, EUCJ rulings but even that isn't terribly constraining and hasn't prevented bouncing people left and right at the EU's borders and within the EU.

JonathanReez

@Relaxed Why is that not 'integration'? Assuming I took the time to learn German up to C1 and found a job, what else would I need to be considered integrated into German society?

Relaxed

The real problem is the sheer costs and optics of flying people back to Syria. For anything else, you need some other country to agree to take care of the people who made it to your territory. It makes no sense from any point of view but it's not like EU countries haven't been trying with Turkey, Tunisia, even Libya.

The EU doesn't “allow” refugees, that's just not what it does or the issue we are dealing with.

Refugees are there, what do you do then.

That's the only real question.

JonathanReez

there are ~1m (?) Syrian refugees in the EU. That's ~3,500 flights, upper estimate of cost is $1b in plane charter costs.

Remember than 1 **billion** passengers are transported by plane in Europe alone (obviously not unique people), 1m is a drop in the bucket

Enforcement would be costly for the first ~10 thousand, after that people will see that you're serious and would show up for flights voluntarily if you give them a few thousand dollars as a reward. Let's say $10k/person * 1m people = $10b + $1b in charter costs = $11b. That's at least 10x less than what the EU has spent on the refugees so far

For proof see: Australia and Nauru. Once people have realized Australians will send them to a hellish island in the Pacific, the boats have stopped entirely

And like I said, I'd offer all women, the disabled and men over 50 the opportunity to stay

It's the men aged 13-50 that cause all the troubles

OK, and let's throw in a carrot of $10k/refugee for the Syrian 'caretaker' government, plus some other costs, round it up to $25b

tiny cost to pay for a huge reduction in crime, dependency on public benefits, generations of poorly integrated people, rise of far-right parties, etc

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