Last month I was sorry to report that a retirement village in my suburb of Melbourne (Eltham) had been bought by a Catholic agency and was going to used to house refugees alongside the elderly residents. It's a similar pattern to what is happening in places like Sweden and Germany.
There are some important updates to this story. I had a conversation with a councillor who told me that the refugees will not be just from Syria but from a range of places. There is a council election happening right now and unfortunately the choice seems to be between left-leaning candidates who want a Middle-Eastern refugee intake and right-leaning candidates who want to build units for Chinese investors. If I learn of any independent candidates I'll publicise this in a further post.
There is some resistance to the plans. A petition is up at Change.org which I'd encourage Victorian readers to sign (see here). There will also be a demonstration outside the local MP's office (Jenny Macklin) from 10.00am to 11.00am on Saturday 1st October (149 Burgundy St Heidelberg).
I'll repeat again the obvious. The current refugee system is irrational. The sensible option is to offer to resettle asylum seekers in countries which are the most similar in living standards and culture to those they are leaving. This would give no incentive to those who are economic migrants and it would be the least disruptive in terms of culture and identity to the host nation. The scheme could be funded from a pool paid into by the wealthier nations.
Hopefully the resistance in Eltham will grow over coming weeks.
It's a similar pattern to what is happening in places like Sweden and Germany."
ReplyDeleteI can confirm that!
Retirement homes are a very common target for housing immigrants in Sweden. The stories of the native elderly persons are almost to heartbreaking to read sometimes. In some cases, they are forced out and suffer very badly from a totally new, and often much worse, environment. In other cases, they remain, but with new neighbors that make their life hell.
It may seem absurd, but it is quite common now that 60-80 year old women get raped by the vibrant diversity.
"The sensible option is to offer to resettle asylum seekers in countries which are the most similar in living standards and culture to those they are leaving."
I agree! This has also been proposed on and off for the past 20-30 years in Europe. About 10 years ago it was a big thing in the UK debate. But nobody actually takes action and this means that the debate actually makes the situation worse, since the third world people then feel that they must hurry and get to the west before something like this gets implemented.
In this regard, Australia seems like a lone success story and is often held up as a positive example by nationalist in Europe. But if you open up ways for the "refugees" to come in to Australia, instead of your asylum centers off shore, one thing is a 100% certain: They will adapt and use this to their benefit. And to your detriment....
EuroSwede, thanks for this comment. If you do happen to come across any stories about problems with resettling refugees in retirement homes in Sweden (or elsewhere) I'd be grateful if you could post the links in a comment, even if they are in Swedish (perhaps you could translate a key part).
DeleteAs for the Australian model, it is true that we do at least have some border control, so in that sense it would be a step forward for Europe. But at the same time both major parties here are committed to mass immigration and multiculturalism, and the border control is often argued for on the basis that it "gives the public confidence to support mass immigration flows", so I would not want Europe to adopt that part of the Australian model.
Here is a story from Austria:
Delete"An Austrian judge who ruled that an 18-year-old asylum seeker who raped a 72-year-old pensioner must serve just 20-months in prison"
https://www.thelocal.at/20160229/asylum-seeker-rape-case-judge-gets-police-protection
In Sweden, you have many cases like that. It is not possible to get any hard numbers, but we are talking hundreds of cases of women over 60 getting raped every year.
Regarding retirement homes being used to house immigrant, it is very common. Here is one recent example from Stockholm:
http://www.stockholmdirekt.se/nyheter/aldreboende-pa-sodermalm-stangs-blir-bostader-for-nyanlanda/aRKped!zF5z3E0vzT@5EYHlK2U3IA/
In this case, 50 apartments in a housing complex for older people run by the local government has been reallocated to house asylum seekers.
Prices in central Stockholm are similar to Sydney and a small 1 bed apartment costs around 5-7 million AUD, so most of the former residents can not buy something in the area. Instead, many have been given housing in the suburbs and this is very unpleasant for many of them. Often they have lived their whole lives in the city and now they find themselves in a totally different environment.
One of the main reasons that this is happening is that there are quotas for all municipalities, i.e. they must all accept a certain number of "refugees". Since it is happening in a large scale, the local governments are forced to use any housing that they control and this very much included homes for the elderly. But they also go out and buy properties on the open market. This is very, very scary for a lot of the liberals. They felt safe in their expensive areas, but now this is no longer the case. For anybody that has opposed the massive immigration, there is a lot of schadenfreude when you read about these do-gooders that have just found out that the house next to them will by used by a family of 8 from Somalia.
Thanks!
DeleteMy guess is that you are looking for something that you can use in your own debate in Melbourne. If you can be more specific about what you are looking for, I could do some digging and translation.
DeleteIf you google "äldreboende asylboende" you get a feeling for how common this conversion is. It can well be a hundred cases. Most of the articles just state that a conversion has happened or will happen and in some cases there are also reactions from the former residents. These old people are mostly very, very nice and humble. Typically, they have worked from 14 to 65 and paid unbelievable amounts of tax. But they hardly even protest even if they are devastated and the women often cries.
But it is way, way to much for me to translate all of it.
Yes, I'm looking for something that can be used in the debate here, e.g. negative fallout for the local community. I could pass it on to those organising the campaign here. Don't worry if there's nothing suitable, I just thought it was worth asking the question.
DeleteSome inspiration from history:
ReplyDelete"The battle had begun earlier when President Theodore Roosevelt had declared in his State of the Union address back in 1906 that Congress needed to have the power to “deal radically and efficiently with polygamy.” The Immigration Act of 1907, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, had banned “polygamists, or persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.”
It was the last part that was most significant because it made clear what had only been implied.
The Immigration Act of 1891 had merely banned polygamists. The newest law banned anyone who believed in the practice of polygamy. That group included every faithful believing Muslim."
"In his 1905 State of the Union address, President Theodore Roosevelt had spoken of the need “to keep out all immigrants who will not make good American citizens.”
Unlike modern presidents, Roosevelt did not view Islam as a force for good. Instead he had described Muslims as “enemies of civilization”, writing that, “The civilization of Europe, America and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization", praising Charles Martel and John Sobieski for throwing back the "Moslem conquerors" whose depredations had caused Christianity to have "practically vanished from the two continents.""
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263879/when-teddy-roosevelt-banned-muslims-america-daniel-greenfield
USA and Australia are successful immigrant countries mainly because of who was allowed to immigrate. The same goes for Switzerland. But it seems that there is a big risk that successful historical immigration becomes interpreted as meaning that all immigration is beneficial. To some extent, this is what happened in Sweden and Germany. Very successful immigration of workers during the 1960-70 period was used as motivation for letting everybody in. In the case of Sweden, the workers mainly came from Finland. This is like the UK taking in people from Ireland. Big surprise that it worked out great! But this was then used as motivation for let in Somalis, Arabs, etc, etc.
This may seem strange, but remember that from the liberal point of view, it is impossible to reason in any other way. If all people are the same, and some immigration is beneficial, it follows that all immigration is beneficial. They can not escape this conclusion unless they change some very fundamental beliefs. Hell will freeze over before that happens.....
(Or from a Scandinavian perspective, hell will stop being frozen, because for us, hell was cold!)
This may seem strange, but remember that from the liberal point of view, it is impossible to reason in any other way. If all people are the same, and some immigration is beneficial, it follows that all immigration is beneficial.
DeleteThat's a good insight. Also, when liberals think that all people are the same they assume that all people are, at heart, good liberals - unless they are suffering irrationally from fear or are trying to preserve an unearned privilege.
The other part of this too is that liberals conceive of a world in which there is no objective right or wrong, but instead the good consists in millions of people defining their own right and respecting others doing the same. Therefore, to be moral means being tolerant, non-discriminatory, non-judgemental and so on. Therefore, you show yourself to be a good person in a liberal society, not by your character or the strength of your moral choices, but by demonstrating that you are most open to "the other" - which liberals apparently identify as Muslims. Liberals are good if they embrace the Muslim other (so apparently these days are Catholics) with the underlying assumption that all people are the same anyway and are really destined to be liberals.
I've been thinking about this idea that liberals assume that people are innately good liberals unless otherwise corrupted lately, and it's a point I think isn't made enough in the mainstream debate. I would add that liberals assume that everyone who's "on their side"--i.e., nonwhites, third-worlders--not only hold the same views as liberals, but hold them for the same reason. That is, that they're intelligent, rationally-minded, principled liberals.
DeleteWe see this with the race riots that keep occurring here in the USA every time a black person is shot by a police officer. Liberals in the media keep referring to these "protesters" as though breaking windows and looting stores were somehow a legitimate, principled form of protest. In reality, these people are just rioting for the sake of rioting. But the liberals start with the assumption that the "protestors" are engaged in legitimate, principled protest about white racism, and work backwards from there to a deduction about how bad race relations must be, figuring "well, if white racism is so extensive that it's worth rioting and looting over, it must be truly, outrageously, heinously extensive!"
We also saw this in the USA in the Democratic primary elections this year. Hard leftists shunned establishment Democrat Hillary Clinton, and favored Bernie Sanders, a long-time independent who had not even historically been a Democrat, and were dismayed to find that his support was almost entirely white. They figured "blacks vote like us, so they must be intelligent latte-sipping book-club-going social-democrat lefties like us, so they should be on board with the Sanders movement." It didn't occur to them that most blacks simply vote tribalistically, and of course were going to favor the establishment Democrat (and wife of a former President who was well-liked by blacks) over the maverick independent, even if the latter had more left-wing policy proposals.
@ Hermes,
Delete"But the liberals start with the assumption that the "protestors" are engaged in legitimate, principled protest about white racism, and work backwards from there to a deduction about how bad race relations must be, figuring "well, if white racism is so extensive that it's worth rioting and looting over, it must be truly, outrageously, heinously extensive!"
Yes, something like that is how it works. It is really interesting to observe it in Sweden. From a US perspective, you can think of it as a big Vermont that all of a sudden has a big inflow of third world people.
So, a place that is all white and all liberal, gets confronted with Muslims and Africans that are failing in every way possible. School results are horrible, they don't work, etc, etc.
The only possible reaction from these liberal, if they stay liberals, is to blame this on factors outside of the immigrant groups. They can find several (believe me!) but the main one is that there are racists views in the original population. Now, this is so unreal, if you know anything about regular Swedish people, that it is similar to saying something like "Germans really cannot organize anything". It is almost insane, but still this is their view and they refuse to let go. To the bitter end.....
Hermes, good comment, thanks.
DeleteThese days I'm extremely suspicious of charities and church organisations. They mostly seem to have become fronts for SJWs and globalists.
ReplyDeleteThe change in the mission statements for the charities is remarkable. 30 years ago they were mostly dedicated to third world development and the like. Now, if you read the mission statements, they are dedicated to liberal/SJW political aims.
DeleteI would be very careful about donating money to charity these days. At least, check out the mission statements on the websites before you do so.
A correction:
ReplyDeleteI think that I wrote "AUD" when I gave a price range for an apartment in Stockholm. If so, that is of course wrong and it should say "SEK". One AUD is around 6.5 SEK.
I'm waiting for this to hit the front page (it won't) and watch as the Left/Greens try to paint the old people in the aged care facility as racist.
ReplyDeleteIf we pay to resettle refugees in countries where they are more assimilable, then we will not be able to pat ourselves on the back and proclaim how open we are to the Other. In fact, attempting such resettlement elsewhere might be taken as a declaration that we are not open to the Other, thus proving that we are equivalent to Hitler, etc. So, your alternative proposal is infeasible. :-)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I made two comments recently where I selected "WordPress" as my means of commenting, and in both cases when I clicked on Publish, I was taken to a WordPress page that showed all my subscriptions to various blog posts. I was logged in to WordPress prior to submitting my comments, which never appeared on your site, so I will revert to the Name/URL choice.
You've expressed well why liberals won't take the rational option to resettling refugees. Sorry about the WordPress issue, must be glitch in blogger.
Delete