Interesting info

Yikes, wrong link?
Try here.

Painfully few people actually take the time to
read some statistics on crime, foreigners, social status, gender distribution, etc.
Here is my extract and translation of some Swiss
documents.

Philip, Your comments remind me of a quote from someone famous, possibly me – “All generalizations are wrong”. I can’t really blame you, tho. If I tried to paint a picture of the USA based on comments by the Americans that I know here in Europe, it would not be very accurate either. For example, I have not met a single American here that supports Bush on Iraq. I guess that’s because they are not subjected to Fox news.

Around the London metropolitan area, commutes of two hours are very common. Large numbers of people (some of whom I worked with on a daily basis before moving to Norway), probably not the majority, commute from one satellite town of London to another every day for work. Ask anyone who is crazy enough to drive in along one of the major commuter highways whether two-hour commutes each-way are rare.

To address the original issue though:

Europeans have acquired a social conscience after the events of the last few centuries, which is IMO a good thing. This is behind the generally easy immigration into European countries for those from relatively nearby very poor countries, and by geographical coincidence, this includes a lot of the middle eastern states, as well as parts of Africa.

Now, if European states choose to admit more uneducated people than their social fabric can tolerate (uneducated people are more likely to commit crimes and avoid following the rules of the social system, which are intended to make things easier for all users of the social system, e.g. avoid paying income or sales tax whilst demanding free healthcare due to poverty), then destabilisation will occur which will tend in influence European voters (assuming they are in the majority) to restrict completely the introduction of more people who will add to this effect. There’s been a foreshadowing of this with recent political trends in Europe. I believe this is part of a natural sociopolitical cycle. To avoid this, presumably because one believes that free immigration for all uneducated and asset-less people of the world into Europe is a “right”, massively increased spending in direct, microeconomic projects in third-world countries will be required by Europe. This will require a lot of effort to implement correctly, rather than just handing money to dictators or business interests with political control (e.g. Russia, etc), so it’s generally shied away from by pro-immigration Europeans, who naively assume that someone else will take care of all the so-called problems.

Either way, I hope the racial/cultural admixture isn’t slowed down or causes too much social unrest, as it will lead to a breakdown of barriers between cultures, which are the exact reason that Muslim populations in Europe tend to keep to themselves and harbour antipathy to their host nations, and that the indigenous populations of the host nations regard the Muslims as free-loaders and potential terrorists, which is, IMO, a bad thing born from short-term thinking and (easily-harnssed) idealism.

Muslim immigrants to Europe might disagree with me in my presentation of the situation, but surely, if they integrated better into European society, the problems wouldn’t exist. When I move to different cultures, I make an effort to learn the language and culture; generally I’m not viewed as a threat or a free-loader by educated residents, as far as I can tell.

Just a couple odd things ; – 2 hour each-way commutes into London are rare, certainly on a 5-day-a-week basis. The old saying is that in the US a hundred years is a long time, while in Yurrup a hundred miles is a long distance. And CDs at $27? In England more CDs were sold this year than ever before because all the supermarkets were discounting them to about

Hmmm…Along the lines of the “Dirty Pretty Things” recommendation, see the film “In This World”. It is a great film that I saw at a local film fest, it also has shown on PBS. It chronicles a refugee journey to England. Look out for it and (with luck) glean some insight from this side of the story. The director is Michael Winterbottom, of “Welcome to Sarajevo”.

>England is, by American standards, hardly large enough to qualify as a state much less a country.
Not true. It’s about the size of an average US state, like Georgia. It’s bigger than many US states. And if you’re talking about the UK, it’s closer to 100,000 sq. miles. Besides, you demonstrate in your own statement why it’s incorrect to apply US standards of “metro areas” to the UK, you’re dealing with a completely different scale. You might want to stick to computers and leave Sociology to people who know what they’re talking about. You wouldn’t expect a Sociologist to try to write complicated pieces of software from scratch. But you’re still right about anti-semitic Europe is, despite its incredible self-righteousness.

I’m guessing that housing would not be nearly so cheap if everything else weren’t so expensive.

I think your comment ‘or they’d all have been homeless’ is tongue in cheek… but regardless: realistically, is it plausible for housing in an area to get expensive enough so that no one can afford to live there? Housing prices are created by demand, and they can’t reach a level beyond what there are people around actually willing to pay.

The less advantages an area has in all other respects, the cheaper the housing will be.
Not that I think VAT is a good way to control housing prices.

Max, I don’t want to burst your balloon but England is, by American standards, hardly large enough to qualify as a state much less a country. When the US Census Bureau looks at a metro area they often include suburbs that are as far away as 2 hours, e.g., southern New Hampshire is part of metropolitan Boston as far as they are concerned. For London the same process would certainly include Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Bournemouth, Dover, etc., all of which are within commuting distance of London.

However you slice it, people in the UK who don’t live near one of these centers of wealth are fairly poor. Their low salaries and the ridiculously high prices of goods in the UK (audio CDs were $27 in towns where people would be lucky to earn $50 in a day; renting a Cessna was 4X the price of what someone in Los Angeles or Boston would pay; housing was fairly cheap, thank God, or they’d all have been homeless) ensure a low material standard of living.