Germany demands quota system for refugees

[Eleas]

Thanas, the article itself is legit... except it says that this is a suggestion as part of a report made to the government from Boverket. The article itself rightly criticizes the suggestion and warns that it may become a permanent thing. On that note, weird as it feels to even say it, I agree with cosmicalstorm. What I don't agree with is his insistence of this suggested course of action being the Government's sinister plan all along. But that's a fallacy for another day.

[Broomstick]

Assuming Google translate did a decent job of it, I have to agree that "temporary" modular housing for asylum seekers can easily turn into a long-term problem - but the article is actually arguing against that solution, not for it.

While there will always be a certain amount of self-segregation in immigrants it is also very important to encourage integration. Warehousing people apart from others - which intentionally or not, is what we're talking about - does not work towards that goal. It's one thing to set apart students at college or soldiers in boot camp because that is a temporary category, it's another to set them apart for a status that will not change, like "immigrant".

[Zaune]

Depends how they do it, I guess. Converted shipping containers are a perfectly reasonable source of low-cost prefabricated housing; we could probably accommodate every refugee in Europe and every native European sleeping rough or in overcrowded conditions that way for far less than we're spending right now papering over the cracks. And the easiest way to deal with the social issues would be to just mix the various ethnicities in with the local population as uniformly as possible rather than clumping them together.

I mean, it's a lot easier to be prejudiced against an abstract concept than it is against people you pass in the street every day, right?

[Broomstick]

While I won't say the US experience is entirely applicable to Europe, our experience with temporary modular housing after Hurricane Katrina does not fill me with optimism.

In theory such housing should work out, in practice it's a lot harder to do it successfully than they theory would lead you to believe.

[Zaune]

I dare say. But if we Brits could make it work in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War then it should be infinitely possible to not fuck it all up in this day and age.

[cosmicalstorm]

What sinister plan? I think they are doing this because they are stupid. Accepting immigrants has become high fashion but for Sweden its not working out at all. The important indicators for successful assimilation are falling. No grades, no jobs, no reason to learn the language. What will this unemployable generation born in the age with no unskilled job openings do? Sit back and eat welfare and be nice and quiet? They wont sit quiet.

When other European countries reject any quota system they will point to the disaster of Sweden.
Btw quotas would be good for Sweden. Its just that they wont happen, politically Europe is racing away from the libertarian no borders doctrine.

I think the EU should mandate that x % of our economy be spent on effective aid and we stop the trade protection bullshit even if that will fill every french town hall with manure rather than open our borders.
Besides, 85 million people in demographic explosion per year, what to do with the ones that cant make it here? We just cut our foreign aid down with an axe to finane Migrationsverket a few months ago.

[Eleas]

What sinister plan? I think they are doing this because they are stupid.

But they are not doing it. That's the problem. You have assumed that this is the government's sinister-or-stupid plan. There's no definite indication that they would do so, because this was a suggestion made to the government that only the most conservative of the blue bloc (their political opposition) touted before.

While I agree with you that confining immigrants to quasi-permanent modular housing enclaves would be an abomination, I see no indication of the rest of your assertions as being relevant. That's why I snarked about a "sinister plan": because there is no sign of there being a plan, or anything else -- sinister or otherwise.

[cosmicalstorm]

I really hope I'm delusional Eleas. Maybe I was just sucked into this vortex of a debate and ended up on the wrong side of the fence. Time will tell us soon.

My suspicion is that Swedens asylum-system will collapse pretty soon under sheer pressure. Throw in a puncturing of the current housing bubble in Sweden and we are set for some grim years.
And once that is done in 2040 we get unfriendly AI

[jwl]

I would think 5% of the population of a country could easily be consisting of refugees if that country has no previous mass immigration from non-western cultures to it.

11.9% of the existing UK population was born abroad with 2/3 of that being non EU immigrants... and that's a 2011 figures so is probably low ball considering EU expansion in that time and it ignores second generation immigrants who are UK born... any idea how that compares to other European countries and would that cover the UK 5% commitment?

Most of that immigration comes from the Commonwealth. They are not refugees. I mean, look at wikipedia (which I assume is where you got it from anyway). Apart from the US and Hong Kong, all of the top 20 countries in there are in the commonwealth or the EU.

[Titan Uranus]

Depends how they do it, I guess. Converted shipping containers are a perfectly reasonable source of low-cost prefabricated housing; we could probably accommodate every refugee in Europe and every native European sleeping rough or in overcrowded conditions that way for far less than we're spending right now papering over the cracks. And the easiest way to deal with the social issues would be to just mix the various ethnicities in with the local population as uniformly as possible rather than clumping them together.

I mean, it's a lot easier to be prejudiced against an abstract concept than it is against people you pass in the street every day, right?

Well, my father is an architect, and according to him it costs the same amount of more to build a container-based building as it does to build a traditional one, and the container-buildings also require far more insulation because their skin is made out of sheet metal instead of a sane sort of building material. I do know that the Auburn University school of architecture (one of the best architecture schools in the US) did a proof of concept building, and in order to make it habitable in the long term they had to build what is basically a traditional building with a sheet metal skin. If this wasn't the weekend before finals I would offer to take some pictures, but suffice to say in addition to the social negatives, sheet-metal buildings simply are not any cheaper unless they are wearhouses or you have no building codes worth the name.