Immigration, human rights and the welfare of society

[vordhosbn]

For those of you, who are not familiar, about one month ago, the French government took the decision to demolish a number of illegal gypsy camps, and deport their inhabitants back to their home countries. This has brought much controversy among the EU politicians, with the EU Justice Commissioner Reding urging the European Commission to take legal action against France, calling the France position a "disgrace" and comparing it with the Hitler's regime in WW2.

 

This has all grown into astonishing lump of rhetorics between various countries and political parties.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11338112

In all, Mr Sarkozy said around 500 camps were dismantled in August, of which 199 were Roma settlements.

About 5,400 people were evicted from the Roma camps, but the majority of those living in the camps were French nationals, the president said.

The president's assertions appeared to contradict a leaked memo from the French interior ministry which surfaced on Monday.

It showed the authorities had been instructed to target Roma camps, rather than deal with migrants on a case-by-case basis, as the French migration minister and the minister for Europe had assured the European Commission.

 

I must say I am puzzled with the behavior and attitude of the high ranking EU officials. Resorting to calling the French actions racist and discriminative is, I think, huge misunderstanding of the problem. It's either ignorance, or a deliberate misrepresentation.

 

As a citizen of Bulgaria, where gypsies are relatively large percent of the population, I view them as a very interesting, although problematic ethnicity.

First of all, most of them are poor by choice, however absurd that may sound. They are either working lowest paid jobs, being on social welfare, or just resort to crime.

Despite their low income, it's not a rare sight to see some of them having very expensive mobile phones, cars, and even satellite dishes on their ghetto balconies:

Notice how most of them throw their garbage right out of the window, although they have the same garbage disposal conditions as the rest of Bulgarian citizens.

 

Every individual has the right to spend his money the way he wants, but it says something about their world-view.

Buying quality food or clothes is definitely not a big priority for gypsies, as I have seen numerous times parents forcing their children to beg on the street, only to drink those money in the local tavern.

 

The Bulgarian society hardly tolerates them, and the prevailing opinion is that the world will be a better place without them... and this does not help at all for their integration. They are mostly not considered by the common person to be "Bulgarian".

It's easy to imagine how hard is it for a gypsy to escape this vicious circle.

Bulgarian policeman displaying a prime example of police brutality.

 

For the record, I am not advocating racism in any way. I do not believe, that their genotype has anything to do with their social problems as an ethnic minority.

All of their problems are rooted in their culture, which has been nomadic one - largely incompatible with the modern world.

Gypsies (or as they prefer to be called - Roma people) have been rejected by societies for centuries, and have build intrinsic ignorance about the outside world.

 

Hard to imagine, that Bulgaria is part of the EU, with these kind of sceneries.*

 

What are your thoughts of this recent controversy over their deportation from France, and in general about their culture?

Do you have any direct experience with them? Are there gypsies in your country?

 

 

* All of the photos are from Bulgaria.

[pioneer]

Say you were at your home and a stranger, who was not invited, moved into your backyard. Do you have the right to tell them to leave or are you obligated to build them a shelter and feed them as long as they wish to stay? Say you are generous and decide to help them, but your work hours have been cut and your money becomes tight. Are you still obligated to pay the tab for your original generosity to the uninvited guests, even if your children are now in need? Say you can strong arm your neighbor to pay the tab for you, would this change how generous you can pretend to be?

 

A simple solution to illegal aliens is have them move into the backyards and houses of those who say they are welcome, while letting them pay the entire tab. If one is against, they are under no obligation to pay anything. Would everyone who expresses generosity feel the same way, if you can't force others to pay the tab for your generosity?

 

For example, one might be a college student who is for the uninvited guests. Since you are for, you can take your tuition and use it to support them. The student who feels the opposite is under no obligation to support your verbal generosity. This would allow all to put their money where their mouth is. But the way it is set up, those who are verbally generous want others to pay for their generosity. They may want everyone (tax payer) to kick in, so they can take credit and insult those who are strong armed to pay, for not being as verbally generous. I like the idea of putting your money where your mouth is.

 

This divide may have to do with the entitlement mentality. If you feel entitled, resources are given to you without effort on your part. It is like it falls from the sky, in some abstract way and you merely divert this manna surplus to others who are entitled. If you are have to work for what you have ,since you are not entitled to this stream of free manna, the equation of effort as a function of resources comes out much differently. The reality check presented will help one see the two different curves.

Edited September 17, 2010 by pioneer

[Marat]

Every country has a perfect right to enforce its immigration laws, and international law defines a country as the administration of a territory which has the capacity to control the entry and exit of people at its borders, so any country which foregoes the exercise of that right, as the U.S. has for years on its southern border, risks being denied the status of a nation under international law.

 

However, that right should not be enforced in a racially selective way, since a fair administration of the law has to be race-neutral and treat all non-citizens without a legal visa right to remain as equal, whatever their ethnicity. Now the fact that the internal French memo indicated that Roma camps were being targeted might have been innocuous, since Roma camps may have been focused on just because they were known to be centers of the most illegal immigrants and so the best use of police resources was to concentrate on them. Or it could have been racist, which is what the European Commission seems to think.

 

But can a race or ethnic group ever be assumed to be a threat to society because it has been objectively proved always to have been a group with a high percentage of criminals? Police now use non-racial profiling techniques to spot likely criminals, but is it just racist or can it be objectively justified to use racial membership as a profiling technique? The law enforces certain deliberately unrealistic ideals, such as the assumption that all people are equal, or that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the refusal of the law to recognize any possibility of a correlation between a race, an ethnicity, and criminality is just another one of those consciously unrealistic, idealistic and moral assumptions with which the law always operates.

 

When I lived in Germany there were periodic Roma 'invasions,' and they would come into a fast food restaurant where the mother would distract you by hovering around you and asking for money, while one of her young children would put her hands all over your food. Since the child was dirty (perhaps this was part of the plan), you would not want the food any more, and so the mother and child would take your food for themselves. This happened so many times that I just had to give up eating out and instead stared eating in my student residence room. Finally the police started putting guards at the fast food restaurants and the Roma moved on.

 

This type of behavior may just be the traditional cultural use of a travelling people who have never been able to earn their living from the land or from stable professions, and it is hard to break engrained cultural habits.

[lemur]

For the record, I am not advocating racism in any way. I do not believe, that their genotype has anything to do with their social problems as an ethnic minority.

All of their problems are rooted in their culture, which has been nomadic one - largely incompatible with the modern world.

 

 

The following link provides a short explanation of "cultural racism." Please don't react to the word, "racism," as an accusation. Researchers of race and ethnicity use the term broadly to study both discrimination-oriented and non-discrimination oriented forms of racial knowledge and culture.

http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/Halstead.html#cultural

 

I think the criticisms of targeting Roma as an ethnicity instead of on an individual basis is valid. Whenever people start regarding each other as parts of a collective ethnic whole, it is a step in the direction of war. No individual should be judged and punished (or rewarded) according to an ethnic identity. But for that not to happen, people have to stop thinking in terms of ethnic collectives, including nations, which is far from reality at present. These kinds of problems should cease to exist when individuals are all treated equally including having the right to practice whatever language or ethnic identity culture they choose wherever they want to go, but for some reason many people have trouble with this. Any insights into why this is?

[Marat]

But consider the thugee culture of southern Pakistan in the 16th century. This was a group which traced its origins to a single, common tribe and which had its own distinct cultural practises. It lived by infiltrating caravans transporting goods along the route between the Middle East and India, and once it had joined up with a caravan, the thugees would pull out their knotted cloths and, in special a technique they had developed, quickly strangle all the traders and steal their goods before their victims knew what was happening to them. They flourished until the British eventually wiped them out in the 19th century. Now would it be fair to embark on a campaign to eliminate the thugees (from whom we derive the modern English word 'thug') as an evil ethnic group, or to express prejudicial views against them, or to make the assumption that every thugee we meet is quite likely a dangerous criminal?

 

We have to accept that nature, history, and culture are not moral forces, and so they can operate to produce an entire race, culture, religion, or ethnic group whose members are so consistently evil that we would be foolish not to assume, in our own defense and for the protection of our society, that they are evil. On the other hand we have our legal and moral idealization which says that we have to treat everyone with respect and presume that all people are equal, and that no one is an evil person unless we can prove that he is, even if he belongs to the thugee tribe whose members were trained as robbers and murderers from childhood. Which should win out, our possibly unrealistic moral rules or our pragmatic statistical inferences?

[lemur]

But consider the thugee culture of southern Pakistan in the 16th century. This was a group which traced its origins to a single, common tribe and which had its own distinct cultural practises. It lived by infiltrating caravans transporting goods along the route between the Middle East and India, and once it had joined up with a caravan, the thugees would pull out their knotted cloths and, in special a technique they had developed, quickly strangle all the traders and steal their goods before their victims knew what was happening to them. They flourished until the British eventually wiped them out in the 19th century. Now would it be fair to embark on a campaign to eliminate the thugees (from whom we derive the modern English word 'thug') as an evil ethnic group, or to express prejudicial views against them, or to make the assumption that every thugee we meet is quite likely a dangerous criminal?

 

We have to accept that nature, history, and culture are not moral forces, and so they can operate to produce an entire race, culture, religion, or ethnic group whose members are so consistently evil that we would be foolish not to assume, in our own defense and for the protection of our society, that they are evil. On the other hand we have our legal and moral idealization which says that we have to treat everyone with respect and presume that all people are equal, and that no one is an evil person unless we can prove that he is, even if he belongs to the thugee tribe whose members were trained as robbers and murderers from childhood. Which should win out, our possibly unrealistic moral rules or our pragmatic statistical inferences?

 

Surely there are ways of addressing organized crime without resorting to ethnic profiling. Why not just treat people as participants in criminal networking activities and arrest and prosecute them in that framework?