You're reading the statistics wrong. Whatever group has the lowest status in society is over-represented in crime statistics. It's because they have relatively harder to get jobs. But immigration swells the overall economy. So the effect is that it lifts non-immigrants out of poverty at the expense of immigrants. So crime-rates of non-immigrants drop (if you have immigration).
So, conservation of criminality? Judging from the charts I linked for your major cities, the crime rates of non-immigrants aren't dropping fast enough to keep up with the rise of immigrant crime. It doesn't look like the poor Swedes your immigrants somehow made richer by displacing them out of their lowest-status status had been committing much crime.
I was describing general patterns. You've got to break it down crime-by-crime to make predications on that level.
There's just too many factors to prove cultural tendencies for certain crimes. We just don't know. Most studies show that the biggest factor is poverty. Which has nothing to do with culture at all.
[Consults the linked chart...]
Your immigrants from Vietnam and India are committing crimes at only a little above the rate of locals. In fact, they commit less crime per capita than immigrants from Denmark and Norway. Do you think Danish and Norwegian immigrants are poorer and have a harder time getting jobs in Sweden than Vietnamese and Indians?
The fact that that statistical difference exists at all I think proves my point. There's just too many factors, other than culture or ethnicity that come into play. It could be any reason for that difference. But my money is on that there's nothing inherent in Indian or Vietnamese culture that makes them less prone to crime than members of the Swedish or Danish culture.
There is no culture FOR poverty.
Why do you believe that? All over the world we find communities living side by side where one does a far better job than the other of keeping themselves out of poverty. Chinese fled from war and Mao to all over Southeast Asia, and typically wound up a lot richer than the locals after a few generations.
So you think the goal of Chinese communism was to make everybody poor? You don't think that the goal was to make China rich but that they were just bad at it? Everybody has a goal to become rich. People are just differently good at it.
2. I think this immigration will pay for itself pretty quickly.
Why do you think that? How will it pay for itself when you have cops whose job it is to try to catch refugees getting jobs and stop them?
If we stop doing that. Right now Sweden is artificially making immigration expensi
I've already linked to the study once and I know you've read it.
Are you still talking about the study of the Mariel Boatlift? As you pointed out yourself, the U.S. didn't stop Cuban refugees from getting jobs. How will this immigration pay for itself when you have cops whose job it is to try to catch refugees getting jobs and stop them?
Now I'm confused. Are you arguing for or against immigration? Now it looks like you are arguing for immigration.
Incidentally, there's
a more recent study of the Mariel Boatlift available that didn't broadbrush its effects the way the original study did. True, the arrival of the Cuban refugees didn't suppress wages overall; but it had a brutal effect on the wages of the people they were most directly competing with for jobs: local high-school dropouts.
Market-protection hasn't worked anywhere we've tried it. I think it's silly to rearrange an entire society to suit local high-school dropouts. It's a shame some people can't take the pressure. But we've got welfare for people like that. But most importantly it's to no benefit for society if we encourage people to stay in dead-end jobs. We're in the middle of the Internet-revolution and on the cusp of the robot-revolution. We do not want to make life easier for high-school drop outs to stay in shit jobs.
Hmm, that's funny, sounds like you used to have "a culture FOR poverty". I wasn't inviting you to feel proud of your ancestors. (Why people regard ancestors as something to take pride in is beyond me, even when their ancestors were awesome.) I was inviting you to explain whatever moral theory it is that implies subjecting your own citizens to the negative externalities of bringing into your country hundreds of thousands of refugees, some half of whom are de facto Nazis, is the right thing to do. I don't see how being lucky enough to have 19th-century ancestors who didn't screw up their country puts your citizens on the hook for the obligation to underwrite the human damage of the war in Syria -- not even if you had 9th-through-18th century ancestors who did screw up their country and your 19th-century ancestors had to start by unscrewing-up an already screwed-up country.
My point is that culture is adaptable and in constant change. Move an Arab from the Middle-East to Sweden and he will adapt. He will not become Swedish. He will adopt a third culture. A cross-cultural culture taking the best from each. That's been the pattern whenever there's any immigration anywhere.
I don't think Syria is fucked up because of the Syrian culture. I think Syria is fucked up because of the Ottoman empire and the mess left in its wake. After the Empire fell apart opportunists have exploited the post-Ottoman chaos and seized power. And that's pretty much where they're still at.
And while we're on the subject of your moral theory...
Can you explain how the moral universe you live in -- a universe where natural rights don't exist, ownership is a made up concept, and you'll call the Chinese government bulldozing a family out of their home and paying them 5 cents on the dollar "a bargain" for no better reason than that the Communist Party says it is -- is able to contain anything whatsoever that's "inherently unfair"?!? What on earth do you perceive the semantic difference to be between saying "The Wu's have a natural right to be compensated dollar-for-dollar for the destruction of their house." and saying "The government destroying their house and paying them only enough for them to buy a twentieth of a replacement house is inherently unfair."? Is the correct meta-ethical theory nihilism when others make moral claims, but moral realism when you make moral claims?
I mostly apply pragmatic ethics. I'm a relativist at heart. Usually there's excellent arguments on all sides in any debate, and the ethically correct choice lands on desired outcomes.
To take China as an example. At the time of the Chinese revolution no farmers (the people who actually did the work) owned the land they were working. It was all owned by hereditary landowners who's only occupation was to collect rents and pay taxes. China was in desperate need of a land reform. Ie a revolution. Everybody with any sense could see that. Respecting natural rights and property rights in a situation like that is just dumb-ass. China did experiment with a number of solutions to this problem until they reached the current solution.
When the nationalists took power in 1912 they attempted to reform the Chinese system through regulation, while respecting traditional ownership. Well.. .that didn't work. Turned to absolute shit and starvation. The only feasible alternative was for the state to seize all land and divide it up somehow. This happened in the 50'ies. Too bad those put in charge of this were communists who loved collectivisation making a bad situation worse. But eventually in the 60'ies the Chinese government did simply just divide up the land and distribute it as fairly as they could among the Chinese. The situation for farmers is now way better than it ever was under imperial rule.
There are other examples in history of successful land reforms that ignored natural rights. Back as far as the birth of farming Swedish Vikings farmed collectively. Land wasn't owned by individuals. It was all owned by the village. Decisions were made democratically. And there were exceedingly complicated rules for how everything should be shared. It was such an extreme demand for fairness that it made life very hard for the farmers. Reforms were desperately needed. But people were used to it and feared change. So the king simply went in and seized the collectively owned lands and divided it up among the farmers. And did so fairly. While at the same time seizing all church land for himself. But that's a minor point
The reforms were a massive success in spite of being very unpopular. This king BTW was a horrible tyrant and an in every way evil person, so he didn't do this out of the goodness of his heart. He did this because he wanted to increase efficiency, so he could collect more taxes. Which worked.
Karl Marx summed it up really well. In a stable capitalist market where nothing much happens there will be a slow and constant move toward more and more resources in fewer and fewer hands. That'll always be the end result in any capitalist free market system. Which is what had happened in China. And in Sweden we had the opposite extreme... the fear of this had created a society were private property had been abolished, which was very dysfunctional. Neither is good.
To function, a free market, needs "an invisible hand". Either provided by nature... ie technological innovation, financial innovation, immigration and so on. Or provided by somebody in power with the ability to sort things out now and again. Some markets don't have this natural invisible hand. In those cases we have to ignore natural rights or that market will be dysfunctional.
I think it's good to respect natural rights when there's a good reason to and I think we should ignore them when we have a good reason to. Pragmatic ethics.
