I agree with Michael that Iâm sorry youâre getting downvoted; this is pretty detailed stuff that is very helpful for understanding your views.
However, I strongly disagree with your description of Europe at the object level. Iâm going to focus on the UK because I have the most local knowledge there and itâs specifically mentioned in some of your points (Rotherham, Brexit). So to be specific:
(1) As you appear to acknowledge, concerns about immigration in the UK have skyrocketed over the past 20 or so years. However, this immigration has mostly not been from Muslim countries, rather itâs been from EU countries, see link and link. These immigrants from EU countries are overwhelmingly White and Christian. A particularly large number came from Poland. By contrast, most of the Muslims in the UK are ethnically from Pakistan or Bangladesh, where there have been small decreases in migration. That doesnât sound like a world where people are mostly concerned about immigration because of a clash of cultures and specifically a culture clash with Muslims. The fact that many people voted for Brexit on grounds of immigration further supports a different interpretation; blocking EU migration will mostly block White Christian workers from Eastern Europe and do next to nothing to block further immigration from Pakistan and Bangladesh, itâs a very odd policy to vote for if you were concerned specifically about Muslim immigration.
And we can also see evidence of this more directly, this survey shows that people feel very similarly about migrants from Eastern Europe and migrants from âMuslim countries like Pakistanâ (I grant they feel slightly worse, as in a few percentage points worse, about the latter), namely they feel positively if they have work and negatively if they donât. Again, this seems highly inconsistent with a massive culture clash along religious grounds; there should be sharp disparities in how people feel about the two groups.
In short, I think the view that UK concern about immigration and voting for Brexit is primarily driven by worries about the inability of Muslim immigrants to integrate is thoroughly contradicted by the available data and by peopleâs own statements on who and what they are concerned about.
(2)
Mass migration continues because politicians want it, and the media is in bed with them (consider which political parties the media supports, and which political parties the migrants will vote for).
That might be true in the US, but the mainstream media in the UK, especially the newspapers, are generally pro-Conservative-party (i.e. right wing) and anti-immigration. See chart, and be aware that the Mail and Sun have by far the largest readerships.
(3) You talk about âlaw and order breaking downâ and elevated crime rates which arenât being talked about. In fact, survey data suggests violent crime is at historically low levels search for âTrends in Crime Survey for England and Wales violence, year ending December 1981 to year ending June 2016.
I happen to live in one of the areas you would probably describe as a Muslim âno-goâ area in Tower Hamlets, which is a part of London with a population of around 300,000, 45% Muslim (highest percentage in London). So as a random aside I checked the crime rate for my area, focusing on the homicide rate since thatâs where Iâd expect the official figures to be best. Thereâs been one in the last two years. If it was the average American homicide rate of 4 per 100,000 per year, Iâd expect 24. Apparently you should move.
Thatâs a very tongue-in-cheek comment of course, but quite a decent chunk of the London EA community is based in Tower Hamlets and hopefully that helps you see why the âcountry is falling apartâ suggestions ring somewhat absurd to them; while British Muslims might be more violent than your average Briton (though controlling for income seems important here), they still appear to be safer than your average American.
(4) Finally, you refer to the âmigrant crisisâ in a few places in your writing. This phrase is usually deployed to refer to the crisis resulting a huge wave of immigrants starting in about 2015, but presumably you appreciate that there is this canât be linked to Rotherham; the dates donât line up (Rotherham being 1997 â 2013). So Iâm left wondering what you are referring to and would appreciate further clarification on this point.
Mass immigration is the general policy that I am criticizing. The migrant crisis is the latest manifestation of these bad policies.
Letâs address your points in turn:
Whether concern about Muslim immigration motivated Brexit
Your claim is that Brexit wasnât about a culture clash with Muslims because most immigrants to the UK are non-Muslim EU, and Brexit may not stop Muslim immigration from outside the EU.
First, if other EU countries naturalize Muslim refugees and give them EU passports, then those Muslims would be able to enter the UK.
Second, those details are not how voters think. I am seeing Brexit as a protest vote against the establishment, and one of the reasons for this protest vote is mass Muslim immigration (among other things). Here is my basis for this claim:
The Leave campaign used the possibility of Turkey entering the EU to bolster their case. If Turkey entered the EU, then EU immigrants would be Muslim.
Farage heavily criticized Muslim immigration. He argued that remaining in the EU would put British women at risk of sex attacks like those on New Yearâs Eve in Cologne, and many other European cities. He described the Cologne attacks as a ânuclear bomb.â
Farage used signs like this, which definitely put Muslim immigration at the forefront.
Even if concerns about cultural clashes with Muslims did not motivate a large percent of Leave voters, it could still be the case that those concerns did motivate many of the influencers behind Leave. I say this because mass immigration in Europeâwith Rotherham and Cologne in particularâare motivating the alt right in the US, which influenced the election of Trump due to having an outsized reach. If the failures of multiculturalism in the UK are affecting US politics, then they are definitely affecting UK politics.
Of course, if you ask people in polls, they are going to under-report their concerns about mass low-skilled Muslim immigration because they donât want to be seen as racist. We know from the Shy Tory Factor and Shy Trump Voter effect that people will under-report politically incorrect opinions. Since many Western countries are totalitarian states full of thought policing, and critics of Muslim immigration can result in visits by police, then itâs no surprise that opinion polls are failing to capture how populations actually feel.
On media in the UK, itâs interesting to hear that they are mostly anti-immigration. Of course, the Mail and Sun are lower in prestige than the Guardian, which is leftist.
Law-and-order breaking down
Thanks for describing your experience in Tower Hamlets. Obviously, it would be better for my case if you were more worried, or if official crime rates there were increasing. However, I still plenty of evidence that law-and-order in European countries, including the UK, is decreasing.
Letâs start with Tower Hamlets itself. I did some searching, and I am seeing articles like these:
Paul Burston edits the gay section in the London listings magazine Time Out. âIn the past few years there have been more and more reports of homophobic incidents in Tower Hamlets, often involving attacks on gay men by gangs of young Bangladeshis,â he said.
Choudary, who runs the banned militant group Islam4UK, warned: âWe now have hundreds if not thousands of people up and down the country willing to go out and patrol the streets for us and a print run of between 10,000 and 50,000 stickers ready for distribution.
Now letâs look at clashes with Muslims elsewhere in the UK:
This video from Luton shows Muslims with Sharia signs, and telling the reporter that she is going to go to hell (full documentary. Here is a another video from Luton where Britain first walks through the town holding a cross, and they get attacked by Muslims. Note that this kind of civil unrest would not show up in homicide statistics, which suggests that itâs the wrong metric.
Clearly cultural conflicts are emerging. The homicide rate may not reflect this. In general, I would expect under-reporting of all Muslim crime. Additionally, note that one of the criticisms of the lack of integration is that entire neighborhoods become parallel societies, or even âno go zonesâ, which enforce their own Sharia Law. If natives donât report Muslim crime because they donât want to seem racist, or the cops brush it off, and if Muslims themselves donât engage with the police and report on crime in their own neighborhoods, then this will distort the crime reports. The Mail claims that 20% of inmates in maximum security prisons are Muslim, while 5% of the population is.
The rise of Sharia Law in Europe is also an example of degrading rule-of-law: the law of the land is being replaced. While I am glad to hear that you donât feel in danger in Tower Hamlets, the environment in the UK looks pretty bad. Sharia parades, Rotherham, Muslim patrols, and scuffles with EDL and Britain First: itâs too much dirt to explain away. If you had tried to predict this reality just a few decades ago, people would have called you a right-wing lunatic.
Finally I will address your comparison to American crime rates:
while British Muslims might be more violent than your average Briton (though controlling for income seems important here), they still appear to be safer than your average American.
Comparison to American crime rates is confounded because America is a highly multiethnic society of groups with very different rates of criminality. Highly violent urban populations skew US crime statistics (which is rarely taken into account in the debates about gun control). If your reference point for a peaceful society is US crime rates, then your standards are too low.
European countries are undergoing an unprecedented experiment of social engineering, enforced by threatening the reputation of dissenters. If it goes wrong, the entire EU could break up, experience local civil wars, or even wider conflicts. The level of ethnic strife and cultural strife that is considered acceptable, the rise of Muslim mayors with foreign values ruling over Europeans in their own countries (e.g. Lutfur Rahman) in Tower Hamlets, and Sadiq Khan in London), and mass rape by imported voters would have been considered unthinkable in the past, yet all these things are now firmly within the Overton Window as acceptable costs of multiculturalism to get those precious, precious leftist votes. An external perspective might see this as a disaster.
Even if concerns about cultural clashes with Muslims did not motivate a large percent of Leave voters, it could still be the case that those concerns did motivate many of the influencers behind Leave.
I certainly grant that this influence-via-influencers argument seems like a more-plausible causal mechanism, though also seems difficult to falsify so Iâm not sure how much weight to put on it.
Of course, if you ask people in polls, they are going to under-report their concerns about mass low-skilled Muslim immigration because they donât want to be seen as racist.
Under-report? Sure. But the âshy Tory/âshy Trumpâ effects are generally only on the order of a few percentage points while for the world to really look the way you say it looks, theyâd have to be under-reporting by huge margins. What reason do you have for thinking that? Is it a falsifiable one? I ask because it seems kinda unreasonable for you to say âpeople are highly concerned about Muslim immigration in particularâ, I say âno they arenât, see surveyâ. and you say âah well obviously huge numbers of people are really concerned, just donât want to admit itâ. If direct survey data doesnât convince you otherwise, what would?
Since many Western countries are totalitarian states full of thought policing, and critics of Muslim immigration can result in visits by police, then itâs no surprise that opinion polls are failing to capture how populations actually feel.
You just gave many examples of high-profile politicians criticising Muslim immigration. Many newspaper columnists criticise it daily (remember, the mainstream newspapers are right-wring/âanti-immigration here). Those people donât get arrested. So I donât know exactly what that man did to merit a police visit, but it seems clear that either (a) it was more serious/âthreatening than that or (b) that particular police force is particularly over-zealous. Without more details itâs hard to judge. But either way itâs not something the general population has to worry about or would worry about.
Incidentally, the article you link to here is a great example of why I donât consider Breitbart a reliable source. It states* that 1,000 refugees were being relocated to a tiny island of 6,500 people, but if you check its source for that number then you discover that actually the refugees are actually being spread across the whole of West Central Scotland.
*âThe tiny Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde, which had a total population of just 6,498 in 2011, is expected to take in around 1,000 Syrian migrantsâ
âMore families are set to arrive on Bute over the next few weeks, which will bring the total to 28 adults and 31 children, topping up the small 6,300-strong population. They are among the first of about 1,000 refugees who are to be re-located around the west central area of Scotland after the British Government agreed to take a total of 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020.â
Comparison to American crime rates is confounded because America is a highly multiethnic society of groups with very different rates of criminality. Highly violent urban populations skew US crime statistics (which is rarely taken into account in the debates about gun control). If your reference point for a peaceful society is US crime rates, then your standards are too low.
All agreed, I would be horrified if Europe reached American levels of violent crime. But that makes it sound very strange to European ears when Americans talk about âLaw and Order breaking downâ. If thatâs true for us, itâs definitely true for you.
But I did also point out (and give sources) that violent crime is at historically low levels within Britain itself, so I can also use the reference point of âBritain 20 years agoâ and get much the same conclusion, which indeed seems a lot more reasonable.
Note that this kind of civil unrest would not show up in homicide statistics, which suggests that itâs the wrong metric.
Agreed. I only used it because I expected you to complain about massive under-reporting if I used anything else; itâs hard to massively under-report murders. What metric would you suggest?
While I am glad to hear that you donât feel in danger in Tower Hamlets, the environment in the UK looks pretty bad. Sharia parades, Rotherham, Muslim patrols, and scuffles with EDL and Britain First: itâs too much dirt to explain away.
Not really, itâs quite easy to explain away. Iâm going to mirror your âmainstream mediaâ argument back at you Iâm afraid; the mainstream media is right-wring, wants to eliminate those âprecious, precious leftist votesâ and bolster support for nationalist politics, and does this by a mixture of making things up, ignoring examples to the contrary, and blowing fairly minor events out of all proportion. There are plenty of examples where the general publicâs beliefs about the number of immigrants, their rates of criminality, their rates of worklessness, etc. are completely disjoint from reality, and always in the direction that makes the immigrants look worse (I can give many examples to this effect if required, but Iâm in a bit of a rush so I wonât do it right now). Thatâs what a concerted brainwashing campaign over many years can achieve.
The people most immune to such a campaign are the people actually living on the ground since they can confirm or deny the reports directly, and they indeed tend to be much less concerned than the general population.
I think your objections are fair, unlike many of the other skeptics in this thread. But what I am not seeing is you, or the other skeptics, fully updating on the implications of Rotherham (and Cologne, Sharia demonstrations, violence between nationalists and Muslims, etcâŠ).
If events like Rotherham are able to happen, and itâs not an isolated incident, then this hints at the shape of the probability distribution of Muslim immigrant criminality. Additionally, it indicates that the shape of the distribution of police efficacy, and the probability of cities covering up Muslim crime. If you imagine these distributions as bell curves, then Rotherham is at the right tail, but this means that lesser crimes (and police failures) are likely occurring in high Muslim areas across the UK. And in fact, this is occurring: the Wikipedia Rotherham article lists sex gangs in 10 other cities.
I think itâs a mistake to overly focus on particular flawed crime statistics without trying to actually understand what is going between these two cultures. This is why I am emphasizing qualitative measures like video.
I will also advance another argument: my case about European destabilization does not hinge on a national increase in crime rates. I believe that local conflicts are sufficient enough to be a problem. I am basing this view on studying the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in Kosovo and Bosnia, a history that I donât think anyone else here has studied.
One of the catalyzing events of the Bosnian war was a wedding attack on Serbs by Muslims:
Serbs consider Nikola GardoviÄ, a groomâs father killed at a wedding procession on the second day of the Bosnian independence referendum, 1 March 1992, in BaĆĄÄarĆĄija, to have been the first victim of the war.[40] The Sijekovac killings of Serbs took place on 26 March and the Bijeljina massacre (of mostly Bosniaks) on 1â2 April. Some Bosniaks consider the first casualties of the war to be Suada DilberoviÄ and Olga SuÄiÄ, both shot during a peace march on 5 April at a hotel under the control of the Serbian Democratic Party.
The conflict started with small-scale violent events, which turned into a genocidal war that killed over 100k people. The EU is much bigger than Yugoslavia, it contains nukes, and it is much more strategically relevant between the US and Russia.
Utilitarians donât understand rule-of-law, because they are focused on blunt measures of the number of people affected, without taking into account the second-order effects of reprisals, feuds, and tribal tensions reaching a boiling point.
So itâs not just the crime rate across the country that matters, itâs also local intensity of crime. Could this lead to large-scale sectarian conflict or civil war? I think itâs less likely in the UK, but more likely in other European countries like Germany, France, or Sweden.
But back to crime stats. You are right that crime rates in general have been falling in the UK, but you agreed that statistics of crime reports have flaws. So letâs try to find some other data to resolve this, since itâs data you want.
Rather than looking just at homicide, or at all crime, this article claims that sexual offense were up 36% and violent crime was up 27% in 2015.
However, this is still crime reports, and these are sensitive to police recording methodology, size of police force, and policing effort. Furthermore, Muslim immigrations are still a minority of the UK population, so trends among non-Muslim groups might mask Muslim crime.
A better approach would be to try to find crime by ethnicity, crime by religion, or crime by immigrant nationality. Unfortunately, I canât find those exact stats (probably because they would be incendiary), but we do have some proxies.
Muslims are 20% of the inmates in maximum security prisons in the UK, but 5% of the population, overrepresented at a factor of 4. In France, Muslims are 70% of the prison population and 8% of the general population, overrepresented nearly by factor of 8.
We have stats from some countries for crime by immigrant nationality. Muslim countries top these charts.
This article takes data from Scandinavian government reports and finds that foreign-born individuals, particularly from Africa and West Asia, committed several times more crime. For example, here is Sweden:
A report studying 4.4 million Swedes between the ages of 15 and 51 during the period 1997-2001 found that 25% of crimes were committed by foreign-born individuals while and additional 20% were committed by individuals born to foreign-born parents. In particular, immigrants from Africa and South & Western Asian were more likely to be charged of a crime than individuals born to two Swedish parents by a factor of 4.5 and 3.5 respectively. In regard to rape, the report revealed that immigrants were 5.5 times more likely to be charged of rape than individuals born in Sweden to two Swedish parent, although the category of immigrant was not broken down by country of origin in this report
This article which I linked to took official Denmark statistics and constructed this chart, where Somalians were found to commit rate at 16x the rate of the native population.
Letâs take stock:
Initial priors were towards integration problems for Muslim immigrants due to Western/âMuslim history of conflict (e.g. Barbary Slave Trade), cultural differences, and ethnic cleansing during breakup of Yugoslavia. Many people in this thread have no sense of the history of Western and Muslim relations.
High profile criminal events and clashes (Rotherham, Cologne, Sharia demonstrations, no-go zones, terrorist attacks) reinforce these priors. We both agree that these events are happening, though weâve quibbled over the details of no-go zones.
Your experience in Tower Hamlets and falling UK crime rates was weak evidence against my hypothesis.
Muslim overrepresentation in prisons in Europe, and disproportionate offense rates elsewhere in Europe show that indeed Muslims immigrants are committing higher levels of crime, and nearly an order of magnitude higher than native for some subgroups. This makes the UK crime trends look confounded.
So there the overall direction of this evidence is in favor of the priors of Western-Muslim conflict. And Iâve only summarized a small amount of the evidence.
My arguments about elevated Muslim immigrant crime rates fueling destabilization in the UK are still in play, though I will concede that Germany, France, and Sweden are likely at much higher risk. The best argument against my case would be that European governments are strong enough, and European nationalism is weak enough, that a cycle of reprisals and civil unrest can never get started (unlike Yugoslavia): native European just learn to live with high rates of crime, eventually becoming persecuted minorities in their own countries.
What would falsify my argument? Since my argument is drawn from a wide variety of evidence, it would take a wide variety of evidence to contradict it, ideally evidence that isnât tainted by the state trying to hide the egg on its face. Examples: Farage recants, or some of the videos Iâve linked to were shown to be staged.
When you are in a society with rape gangs attacking thousands of young girls, you have an uphill battle to rescue its image. I think a lot of people in this thread, would benefit from reflecting more on what it means when this can happen in a society. It took me more than a year to process this information, so I totally understand why lots of people in this thread are having trouble grappling with it.
Anyway, I hope this long comment will convince serious readers that this is a nontrivial subject that deserves further investigation. I would highly encourage people to do their own research. If indeed governments engage in risky large-scale social engineering, and then cover it up when it goes wrong, then that has pretty serious consequences for EA.
I just wanted to reply to deal with one factual claim:
A better approach would be to try to find crime by ethnicity, crime by religion, or crime by immigrant nationality. Unfortunately, I canât find those exact stats (probably because they would be incendiary).
We have stats from some countries for crime by immigrant nationality. Muslim countries top these charts.
Um, no? Hereâs from the link above:
Poland: 4742
Romania: 3952
Lithuania: 2561
Ireland: 2503
Jamaica: 2323
India: 1902
Somalia: 1384
France: 1384
Italy: 1357
Portugal: 1202
Not a lot of Muslim countries there, in particular Pakistan and Bangladesh are notably absent. Yet hereâs the top 10 countries for overall population of foreign nationals in London from Wikipedia.
India: 262,247
Poland: 158,300
Ireland: 129,807
Nigeria: 114,718
Pakistan: 112,457
Bangladesh: 109,948
Jamaica: 87,467
Sri Lanka: 84,542
France 66,654
Somalia: 65,333
And in another entertaining example of MSM bias against immigrants, note how the Mail describes one in four London crimes being committed by foreign nationals as an âimmigrant crimewaveâ, even though over 35% of Londonâs population is foreign-born. Also, even that claim was originally exaggerated; see the correction at the bottom.
Thatâs likely the true reason you were struggling to find these stats by the way; incendiary stats about immigrants are easy to find, the more prosaic ones highlighting that they are less likely to commit crime than native-born people tend to be buried in government reports (until an outlet like the Mail decides to report them and just deliberately mislead people about their relevance).
Somalia is up there in the criminal ranking you provided, and itâs Muslim. I would be interested to see how this data defines âforeign born.â Sometimes different generations of immigrants behave differently. In general when talking about immigrant crime, âimmigrantâ refers to 2nd, 3rd, or even nth-generation immigrants if they are not assimilated.
I agree that at least superficially this analysis clashes with my hypothesis, but we still have many pieces of data in my favor (see previous response for links):
Muslim immigrants in Scandinavian countries commit crimes at a multiple of the native population.
Muslims are overrepresented in British and French prisons.
And then of course we know that sexual assault rates are up in particular jurisdictions, like Rotherham in the UK and Cologne in Germany
Additionally, Guardian says that child sexual abuse is up 60% in the past 4 years. Someone is doing the abusing.
On finding stats: What I am talking about with the difficulty finding crime stats is that race and religion arenât broken out clearly. For instance, Muslims are often rolled into âAsian.â And Muslim North Africans are rolled into âblack.â
We could go back and forth for ages dredging up crime stats and the poking holes in the methodology. Crime stats are known to have methodological problems. When British police are allowing Muslim sex gangs to abuse thousands of children in multiple towns out of racial âsensitivitesâ, then you will have to forgive me for not letting police statistics end the debate. At some point, we should consider what our priors should be.
I would also like to reiterate that I am much more worried about France, Germany, and Sweden than I am about the UK, despite most of this debate being about the UK.
I agree with Michael that Iâm sorry youâre getting downvoted; this is pretty detailed stuff that is very helpful for understanding your views.
However, I strongly disagree with your description of Europe at the object level. Iâm going to focus on the UK because I have the most local knowledge there and itâs specifically mentioned in some of your points (Rotherham, Brexit). So to be specific:
(1) As you appear to acknowledge, concerns about immigration in the UK have skyrocketed over the past 20 or so years. However, this immigration has mostly not been from Muslim countries, rather itâs been from EU countries, see link and link. These immigrants from EU countries are overwhelmingly White and Christian. A particularly large number came from Poland. By contrast, most of the Muslims in the UK are ethnically from Pakistan or Bangladesh, where there have been small decreases in migration. That doesnât sound like a world where people are mostly concerned about immigration because of a clash of cultures and specifically a culture clash with Muslims. The fact that many people voted for Brexit on grounds of immigration further supports a different interpretation; blocking EU migration will mostly block White Christian workers from Eastern Europe and do next to nothing to block further immigration from Pakistan and Bangladesh, itâs a very odd policy to vote for if you were concerned specifically about Muslim immigration.
And we can also see evidence of this more directly, this survey shows that people feel very similarly about migrants from Eastern Europe and migrants from âMuslim countries like Pakistanâ (I grant they feel slightly worse, as in a few percentage points worse, about the latter), namely they feel positively if they have work and negatively if they donât. Again, this seems highly inconsistent with a massive culture clash along religious grounds; there should be sharp disparities in how people feel about the two groups.
In short, I think the view that UK concern about immigration and voting for Brexit is primarily driven by worries about the inability of Muslim immigrants to integrate is thoroughly contradicted by the available data and by peopleâs own statements on who and what they are concerned about.
(2)
That might be true in the US, but the mainstream media in the UK, especially the newspapers, are generally pro-Conservative-party (i.e. right wing) and anti-immigration. See chart, and be aware that the Mail and Sun have by far the largest readerships.
(3) You talk about âlaw and order breaking downâ and elevated crime rates which arenât being talked about. In fact, survey data suggests violent crime is at historically low levels search for âTrends in Crime Survey for England and Wales violence, year ending December 1981 to year ending June 2016.
I happen to live in one of the areas you would probably describe as a Muslim âno-goâ area in Tower Hamlets, which is a part of London with a population of around 300,000, 45% Muslim (highest percentage in London). So as a random aside I checked the crime rate for my area, focusing on the homicide rate since thatâs where Iâd expect the official figures to be best. Thereâs been one in the last two years. If it was the average American homicide rate of 4 per 100,000 per year, Iâd expect 24. Apparently you should move.
Thatâs a very tongue-in-cheek comment of course, but quite a decent chunk of the London EA community is based in Tower Hamlets and hopefully that helps you see why the âcountry is falling apartâ suggestions ring somewhat absurd to them; while British Muslims might be more violent than your average Briton (though controlling for income seems important here), they still appear to be safer than your average American.
(4) Finally, you refer to the âmigrant crisisâ in a few places in your writing. This phrase is usually deployed to refer to the crisis resulting a huge wave of immigrants starting in about 2015, but presumably you appreciate that there is this canât be linked to Rotherham; the dates donât line up (Rotherham being 1997 â 2013). So Iâm left wondering what you are referring to and would appreciate further clarification on this point.
Mass immigration is the general policy that I am criticizing. The migrant crisis is the latest manifestation of these bad policies.
Letâs address your points in turn:
Whether concern about Muslim immigration motivated Brexit
Your claim is that Brexit wasnât about a culture clash with Muslims because most immigrants to the UK are non-Muslim EU, and Brexit may not stop Muslim immigration from outside the EU.
First, if other EU countries naturalize Muslim refugees and give them EU passports, then those Muslims would be able to enter the UK.
Second, those details are not how voters think. I am seeing Brexit as a protest vote against the establishment, and one of the reasons for this protest vote is mass Muslim immigration (among other things). Here is my basis for this claim:
The Leave campaign used the possibility of Turkey entering the EU to bolster their case. If Turkey entered the EU, then EU immigrants would be Muslim.
Farage heavily criticized Muslim immigration. He argued that remaining in the EU would put British women at risk of sex attacks like those on New Yearâs Eve in Cologne, and many other European cities. He described the Cologne attacks as a ânuclear bomb.â
Farage used signs like this, which definitely put Muslim immigration at the forefront.
Muslim populations have a very different culture and crime rates, so priors for a culture clash are high.
Even if concerns about cultural clashes with Muslims did not motivate a large percent of Leave voters, it could still be the case that those concerns did motivate many of the influencers behind Leave. I say this because mass immigration in Europeâwith Rotherham and Cologne in particularâare motivating the alt right in the US, which influenced the election of Trump due to having an outsized reach. If the failures of multiculturalism in the UK are affecting US politics, then they are definitely affecting UK politics.
Of course, if you ask people in polls, they are going to under-report their concerns about mass low-skilled Muslim immigration because they donât want to be seen as racist. We know from the Shy Tory Factor and Shy Trump Voter effect that people will under-report politically incorrect opinions. Since many Western countries are totalitarian states full of thought policing, and critics of Muslim immigration can result in visits by police, then itâs no surprise that opinion polls are failing to capture how populations actually feel.
On media in the UK, itâs interesting to hear that they are mostly anti-immigration. Of course, the Mail and Sun are lower in prestige than the Guardian, which is leftist.
Law-and-order breaking down
Thanks for describing your experience in Tower Hamlets. Obviously, it would be better for my case if you were more worried, or if official crime rates there were increasing. However, I still plenty of evidence that law-and-order in European countries, including the UK, is decreasing.
Letâs start with Tower Hamlets itself. I did some searching, and I am seeing articles like these:
Tower Hamlets Taliban: Death threats to women who donât wear veils. Gays attacked in the streets.. Excerpt:
âNo porn or prostitutionâ: Islamic extremists set up Sharia law controlled zones in British cities. Islamic radicals were putting up signs proclaiming Sharia zones in Tower Hamlets, among other places:
Now letâs look at clashes with Muslims elsewhere in the UK:
This video from Luton shows Muslims with Sharia signs, and telling the reporter that she is going to go to hell (full documentary. Here is a another video from Luton where Britain first walks through the town holding a cross, and they get attacked by Muslims. Note that this kind of civil unrest would not show up in homicide statistics, which suggests that itâs the wrong metric.
Clearly cultural conflicts are emerging. The homicide rate may not reflect this. In general, I would expect under-reporting of all Muslim crime. Additionally, note that one of the criticisms of the lack of integration is that entire neighborhoods become parallel societies, or even âno go zonesâ, which enforce their own Sharia Law. If natives donât report Muslim crime because they donât want to seem racist, or the cops brush it off, and if Muslims themselves donât engage with the police and report on crime in their own neighborhoods, then this will distort the crime reports. The Mail claims that 20% of inmates in maximum security prisons are Muslim, while 5% of the population is.
The rise of Sharia Law in Europe is also an example of degrading rule-of-law: the law of the land is being replaced. While I am glad to hear that you donât feel in danger in Tower Hamlets, the environment in the UK looks pretty bad. Sharia parades, Rotherham, Muslim patrols, and scuffles with EDL and Britain First: itâs too much dirt to explain away. If you had tried to predict this reality just a few decades ago, people would have called you a right-wing lunatic.
Finally I will address your comparison to American crime rates:
Comparison to American crime rates is confounded because America is a highly multiethnic society of groups with very different rates of criminality. Highly violent urban populations skew US crime statistics (which is rarely taken into account in the debates about gun control). If your reference point for a peaceful society is US crime rates, then your standards are too low.
European countries are undergoing an unprecedented experiment of social engineering, enforced by threatening the reputation of dissenters. If it goes wrong, the entire EU could break up, experience local civil wars, or even wider conflicts. The level of ethnic strife and cultural strife that is considered acceptable, the rise of Muslim mayors with foreign values ruling over Europeans in their own countries (e.g. Lutfur Rahman) in Tower Hamlets, and Sadiq Khan in London), and mass rape by imported voters would have been considered unthinkable in the past, yet all these things are now firmly within the Overton Window as acceptable costs of multiculturalism to get those precious, precious leftist votes. An external perspective might see this as a disaster.
I certainly grant that this influence-via-influencers argument seems like a more-plausible causal mechanism, though also seems difficult to falsify so Iâm not sure how much weight to put on it.
Under-report? Sure. But the âshy Tory/âshy Trumpâ effects are generally only on the order of a few percentage points while for the world to really look the way you say it looks, theyâd have to be under-reporting by huge margins. What reason do you have for thinking that? Is it a falsifiable one? I ask because it seems kinda unreasonable for you to say âpeople are highly concerned about Muslim immigration in particularâ, I say âno they arenât, see surveyâ. and you say âah well obviously huge numbers of people are really concerned, just donât want to admit itâ. If direct survey data doesnât convince you otherwise, what would?
You just gave many examples of high-profile politicians criticising Muslim immigration. Many newspaper columnists criticise it daily (remember, the mainstream newspapers are right-wring/âanti-immigration here). Those people donât get arrested. So I donât know exactly what that man did to merit a police visit, but it seems clear that either (a) it was more serious/âthreatening than that or (b) that particular police force is particularly over-zealous. Without more details itâs hard to judge. But either way itâs not something the general population has to worry about or would worry about.
Incidentally, the article you link to here is a great example of why I donât consider Breitbart a reliable source. It states* that 1,000 refugees were being relocated to a tiny island of 6,500 people, but if you check its source for that number then you discover that actually the refugees are actually being spread across the whole of West Central Scotland.
*âThe tiny Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde, which had a total population of just 6,498 in 2011, is expected to take in around 1,000 Syrian migrantsâ
âMore families are set to arrive on Bute over the next few weeks, which will bring the total to 28 adults and 31 children, topping up the small 6,300-strong population. They are among the first of about 1,000 refugees who are to be re-located around the west central area of Scotland after the British Government agreed to take a total of 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020.â
All agreed, I would be horrified if Europe reached American levels of violent crime. But that makes it sound very strange to European ears when Americans talk about âLaw and Order breaking downâ. If thatâs true for us, itâs definitely true for you.
But I did also point out (and give sources) that violent crime is at historically low levels within Britain itself, so I can also use the reference point of âBritain 20 years agoâ and get much the same conclusion, which indeed seems a lot more reasonable.
Agreed. I only used it because I expected you to complain about massive under-reporting if I used anything else; itâs hard to massively under-report murders. What metric would you suggest?
Not really, itâs quite easy to explain away. Iâm going to mirror your âmainstream mediaâ argument back at you Iâm afraid; the mainstream media is right-wring, wants to eliminate those âprecious, precious leftist votesâ and bolster support for nationalist politics, and does this by a mixture of making things up, ignoring examples to the contrary, and blowing fairly minor events out of all proportion. There are plenty of examples where the general publicâs beliefs about the number of immigrants, their rates of criminality, their rates of worklessness, etc. are completely disjoint from reality, and always in the direction that makes the immigrants look worse (I can give many examples to this effect if required, but Iâm in a bit of a rush so I wonât do it right now). Thatâs what a concerted brainwashing campaign over many years can achieve.
The people most immune to such a campaign are the people actually living on the ground since they can confirm or deny the reports directly, and they indeed tend to be much less concerned than the general population.
I think your objections are fair, unlike many of the other skeptics in this thread. But what I am not seeing is you, or the other skeptics, fully updating on the implications of Rotherham (and Cologne, Sharia demonstrations, violence between nationalists and Muslims, etcâŠ).
If events like Rotherham are able to happen, and itâs not an isolated incident, then this hints at the shape of the probability distribution of Muslim immigrant criminality. Additionally, it indicates that the shape of the distribution of police efficacy, and the probability of cities covering up Muslim crime. If you imagine these distributions as bell curves, then Rotherham is at the right tail, but this means that lesser crimes (and police failures) are likely occurring in high Muslim areas across the UK. And in fact, this is occurring: the Wikipedia Rotherham article lists sex gangs in 10 other cities.
I think itâs a mistake to overly focus on particular flawed crime statistics without trying to actually understand what is going between these two cultures. This is why I am emphasizing qualitative measures like video.
I will also advance another argument: my case about European destabilization does not hinge on a national increase in crime rates. I believe that local conflicts are sufficient enough to be a problem. I am basing this view on studying the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in Kosovo and Bosnia, a history that I donât think anyone else here has studied.
One of the catalyzing events of the Bosnian war was a wedding attack on Serbs by Muslims:
The conflict started with small-scale violent events, which turned into a genocidal war that killed over 100k people. The EU is much bigger than Yugoslavia, it contains nukes, and it is much more strategically relevant between the US and Russia.
Utilitarians donât understand rule-of-law, because they are focused on blunt measures of the number of people affected, without taking into account the second-order effects of reprisals, feuds, and tribal tensions reaching a boiling point.
So itâs not just the crime rate across the country that matters, itâs also local intensity of crime. Could this lead to large-scale sectarian conflict or civil war? I think itâs less likely in the UK, but more likely in other European countries like Germany, France, or Sweden.
But back to crime stats. You are right that crime rates in general have been falling in the UK, but you agreed that statistics of crime reports have flaws. So letâs try to find some other data to resolve this, since itâs data you want.
Rather than looking just at homicide, or at all crime, this article claims that sexual offense were up 36% and violent crime was up 27% in 2015.
However, this is still crime reports, and these are sensitive to police recording methodology, size of police force, and policing effort. Furthermore, Muslim immigrations are still a minority of the UK population, so trends among non-Muslim groups might mask Muslim crime.
A better approach would be to try to find crime by ethnicity, crime by religion, or crime by immigrant nationality. Unfortunately, I canât find those exact stats (probably because they would be incendiary), but we do have some proxies.
Muslims are 20% of the inmates in maximum security prisons in the UK, but 5% of the population, overrepresented at a factor of 4. In France, Muslims are 70% of the prison population and 8% of the general population, overrepresented nearly by factor of 8.
We have stats from some countries for crime by immigrant nationality. Muslim countries top these charts.
This article takes data from Scandinavian government reports and finds that foreign-born individuals, particularly from Africa and West Asia, committed several times more crime. For example, here is Sweden:
This article which I linked to took official Denmark statistics and constructed this chart, where Somalians were found to commit rate at 16x the rate of the native population.
Letâs take stock:
Initial priors were towards integration problems for Muslim immigrants due to Western/âMuslim history of conflict (e.g. Barbary Slave Trade), cultural differences, and ethnic cleansing during breakup of Yugoslavia. Many people in this thread have no sense of the history of Western and Muslim relations.
High profile criminal events and clashes (Rotherham, Cologne, Sharia demonstrations, no-go zones, terrorist attacks) reinforce these priors. We both agree that these events are happening, though weâve quibbled over the details of no-go zones.
Your experience in Tower Hamlets and falling UK crime rates was weak evidence against my hypothesis.
Muslim overrepresentation in prisons in Europe, and disproportionate offense rates elsewhere in Europe show that indeed Muslims immigrants are committing higher levels of crime, and nearly an order of magnitude higher than native for some subgroups. This makes the UK crime trends look confounded.
So there the overall direction of this evidence is in favor of the priors of Western-Muslim conflict. And Iâve only summarized a small amount of the evidence.
My arguments about elevated Muslim immigrant crime rates fueling destabilization in the UK are still in play, though I will concede that Germany, France, and Sweden are likely at much higher risk. The best argument against my case would be that European governments are strong enough, and European nationalism is weak enough, that a cycle of reprisals and civil unrest can never get started (unlike Yugoslavia): native European just learn to live with high rates of crime, eventually becoming persecuted minorities in their own countries.
What would falsify my argument? Since my argument is drawn from a wide variety of evidence, it would take a wide variety of evidence to contradict it, ideally evidence that isnât tainted by the state trying to hide the egg on its face. Examples: Farage recants, or some of the videos Iâve linked to were shown to be staged.
When you are in a society with rape gangs attacking thousands of young girls, you have an uphill battle to rescue its image. I think a lot of people in this thread, would benefit from reflecting more on what it means when this can happen in a society. It took me more than a year to process this information, so I totally understand why lots of people in this thread are having trouble grappling with it.
Anyway, I hope this long comment will convince serious readers that this is a nontrivial subject that deserves further investigation. I would highly encourage people to do their own research. If indeed governments engage in risky large-scale social engineering, and then cover it up when it goes wrong, then that has pretty serious consequences for EA.
I just wanted to reply to deal with one factual claim:
LMGTFY
Um, no? Hereâs from the link above:
Poland: 4742
Romania: 3952
Lithuania: 2561
Ireland: 2503
Jamaica: 2323
India: 1902
Somalia: 1384
France: 1384
Italy: 1357
Portugal: 1202
Not a lot of Muslim countries there, in particular Pakistan and Bangladesh are notably absent. Yet hereâs the top 10 countries for overall population of foreign nationals in London from Wikipedia.
India: 262,247
Poland: 158,300
Ireland: 129,807
Nigeria: 114,718
Pakistan: 112,457
Bangladesh: 109,948
Jamaica: 87,467
Sri Lanka: 84,542
France 66,654
Somalia: 65,333
And in another entertaining example of MSM bias against immigrants, note how the Mail describes one in four London crimes being committed by foreign nationals as an âimmigrant crimewaveâ, even though over 35% of Londonâs population is foreign-born. Also, even that claim was originally exaggerated; see the correction at the bottom.
Thatâs likely the true reason you were struggling to find these stats by the way; incendiary stats about immigrants are easy to find, the more prosaic ones highlighting that they are less likely to commit crime than native-born people tend to be buried in government reports (until an outlet like the Mail decides to report them and just deliberately mislead people about their relevance).
Somalia is up there in the criminal ranking you provided, and itâs Muslim. I would be interested to see how this data defines âforeign born.â Sometimes different generations of immigrants behave differently. In general when talking about immigrant crime, âimmigrantâ refers to 2nd, 3rd, or even nth-generation immigrants if they are not assimilated.
I agree that at least superficially this analysis clashes with my hypothesis, but we still have many pieces of data in my favor (see previous response for links):
Muslim immigrants in Scandinavian countries commit crimes at a multiple of the native population.
Muslims are overrepresented in British and French prisons.
And then of course we know that sexual assault rates are up in particular jurisdictions, like Rotherham in the UK and Cologne in Germany
Additionally, Guardian says that child sexual abuse is up 60% in the past 4 years. Someone is doing the abusing.
On finding stats: What I am talking about with the difficulty finding crime stats is that race and religion arenât broken out clearly. For instance, Muslims are often rolled into âAsian.â And Muslim North Africans are rolled into âblack.â
We could go back and forth for ages dredging up crime stats and the poking holes in the methodology. Crime stats are known to have methodological problems. When British police are allowing Muslim sex gangs to abuse thousands of children in multiple towns out of racial âsensitivitesâ, then you will have to forgive me for not letting police statistics end the debate. At some point, we should consider what our priors should be.
I would also like to reiterate that I am much more worried about France, Germany, and Sweden than I am about the UK, despite most of this debate being about the UK.