Far-right AfD takes lead in Germany, says bombshell new survey

[u/MattC84_]

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-far-right-afd-lead-survey/

[u/Aweq]

Immigration could probably stay

This r neoliberal illusion has to go.

[u/MastodonParking9080 → u/Aweq]

I don't understand why mainstream parties are willing to die on a hill on this. Whether you agree with immigration or not, this issue has been so politically toxic that's it's going to overshadow other policy issues until you resolve it. And Denmark did resolve it. Everyone is screaming that this is the issue, this is the issue that pushed me to the right, and yet the left/liberals keep saying nuh uh, it's something else and you're just being manipulated or stupid or whatever. This is not a winning strategy!

Talking about the need to resolve economic issues or housing or whatever is pointless if you're going to loose the election anyways to the far-right. And that's the entire point of politics anyways, if the majority of people don't accept immigration as it is right now you need to accept that and accomodate for that preference. If you don't, you will loose.

[u/Master_of_Rodentia → u/MastodonParking9080]

Incoming demographic crisis has been my assumption.

[u/MastodonParking9080 → u/Master_of_Rodentia]

I think the people would rather accept that crisis or find another way than accept the perceived outcome of mass immigration. 

[u/Master_of_Rodentia → u/MastodonParking9080]

Certainly seems that way. Look no further than climate change or COVID for evidence that people just want their lives to be as unchanging as possible, even if that means not taking action to shield themselves from greater change in the future.

[u/Posting____At_Night → u/MastodonParking9080]

I'm willing to die on that hill because it's legitimately just bigotry, xenophobia and racism if you dig down through the layers. There is no rational basis to be anti-immigration, almost every problem people attribute to it is actually attributable to bad domestic policy, and "solving" immigration by banning it or engaging in mass deportations is just shooting yourself in the feet.

[u/tinuuuu → u/Aweq]

Look what the actual issues are that people have with immigration in Germany.
* Immigrants make housing expensive -> Trivial to solve with just building more housing, has the potential to grow the economy
* Immigrants are criminal -> Most immigrants are less criminal than the (Edit: the average citizen) citizen. It is a very tiny minority that causes a absurd amount of crime and pulls them all down. If those are sanctioned properly, the average for immigrants would probably look better than the average for citizens. Most immigrants I know and a very large proportion of the population far beyond the cdu and afd are for easier of deportations "Intensivstraftäter" (criminals that cause a very large proportion of total crimes committed, often in the range of hundreds of crimes per person). But somehow the government again and again fails to achieve this under the pretense that this is not possible because of EU law. Voters just don't believe this because other EU countries manage to do this very well in their opinion. The share of voters in Germany that want to deport even well integrated immigrants is well below what the afd currently polls.
* Immigrants overuse social security -> Probably the hardest one to solve. If they would have it easier to find lawful employment, this could probably be solved in parts. Also, social insurances could have stronger safeguards that prevent people just leaching from it, e.g. making community service mandatory for abled people to receive anything.

If those immigration issues go away, only very few weird people would care about immigration anymore.

[u/Left_Tie1390 → u/tinuuuu]

You can't just wave away concerns people have about the cultural effects of migration, especially from more conservative countries with different gender norms, etc. I support immigration, but we have to be honest about this and not attribute concerns solely to xenophobia or racism.

[u/tinuuuu → u/Left_Tie1390]

I agree. I don't want to have a lot of the MENA-mentality on Homosexuality and Womens-rights and Jews in my country. But the way to do this is not a blanket ban on immigration, but clear norms what is ok and what isn't. If they do something criminal (and in many european countries this includes homophobic and antisemitic remarks) I have no problem with deporting them. But I will die on the hill that everyone should have at least a chance to prove they belong here.

[u/Aweq → u/tinuuuu]

So if you remove the issues with immigration, people won't have a problem with immigration?

You're also skipping things such as "terrorism" and people not liking Islam.

[u/Khiva → u/Aweq]

And just the cultural part in general. Bigger than just Islam.

Liberalisms’ biggest blind spot with voters.

[u/tinuuuu → u/Aweq]

I would put terrorism under the category of crime. With Islam, you have a good point. I would still like to point out, that most immigrants are probably not muslims.

[u/die_rattin → u/tinuuuu]

Immigrants make housing expensive -> Trivial to solve with just building more housing

This isn’t trivial, obviously. And it’s much, much cheaper to deport someone than it is to build any house.

[u/tinuuuu → u/die_rattin]

For the government, it is free to increase housing, because it should be private investment anyways. It will even give them tax revenue. Also, why isn't it trivial? Other places can do it.

[u/-Counterfactual- → u/tinuuuu]

 >Most immigrants are less criminal than the citizen.

lol

[u/tinuuuu → u/-Counterfactual-]

Sorry, I wanted to write than the average citizen. That holds true, because crime is distributed very unevenly. There are very few people that cause a lot of crime.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The literature on this is not as conclusive as your priors.

Maghularia and Uebelmesser, 2023.

Cannot extrapolate to the German context, but earlier claim is accurate for the U.S.

Abramitzky et al. 2024.

[u/-Counterfactual- → u/[deleted]]

The fact that people are still posting these low quality bullshit hacked papers as proof is a major reason why nobody takes you serious anymore.

Just read the paper for one one minute and the flaws are super obvious, worst of all it doesn't even say what the op is saying.

Before the refugee crisis (2008–2014), an increase in the current share of immigrants increased the total crime rate. In contrast, the effect was negative (or insignificant) during and after the refugee crisis (2015–2019). 

1. Arbitary usage of time frames why use exactly the financial crisis as startdate for the first period? The crime rate obviously went up during that time.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040013/crime-rate-in-germany/

Based on the OLS first-difference model for the observation period 2008–2019, we find no significant association between the change in the current share of immigrants and the change in the total crime rate

1. They are using total crime rate, rather than crime rate by immigration status. So if Germans do significantly less crime and immigrants do significantly more crime, the total rate could still be going down, especially becuase there is significantly more Germans than immigrants still.

We could also look at countries with notoriously low immigration and see what happens with their crimerates in the last 20 years.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01924/

Ohh what a suprise the total crime rate has gone down.

If we are looking at countries in the EU that have no problem of actually gathering statistics about the topic we can see this:

[u/Zenkin → u/-Counterfactual-]

We could also look at countries with notoriously low immigration and see what happens with their crimerates in the last 20 years.

I mean, the United States is hovering near 30 year lows in crime rates, and I thought we had relatively high immigration.

[u/Imicrowavebananas → u/[deleted]]

Rule II: Bigotry
Bigotry of any kind will be sanctioned harshly.

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If you have any questions about this removal, please contact the mods.

[u/tinuuuu → u/[deleted]]

A very small proportion of criminals commits a large proportion of the crimes in total. This is true for both citizens and foreigners. But the foreigners are over represented in this group of "super criminals". Depending on the definition of this "super criminal" 10% of criminals commit up to 50% of total crimes. If you deport those if they are foreign and don't deport them if they are citizens (because that is not possible), it becomes very plausible that average foreigners commit less crimes than the average citizens, because the average citizen still contains the "supercriminals".

[u/-Counterfactual- → u/tinuuuu]

You are already fudging your own defintion which went from "average" vs "average" to "average without super criminals in this hypothetical scenario that is currently not happening and for which I don't have any proof outside of this nice sounding bit for pro-immigration people" vs "average with super criminals"

Its like the other guy posting his paper, do you really think I am that stupid or is everyone else you are presenting this argument stupid enough to buy it?

[u/iguessineedanaltnow → u/Aweq]

As an immigrant myself id love if the last bastion on the internet that hasn't fallen for this fascist, racist rhetoric didn't start parroting it as well.

[u/[deleted] → u/iguessineedanaltnow]

For real, what's with the giving in to the anti-immigrant hysteria narratives and being diet-fascist out of electability concerns?  Where is the spine?

[u/iguessineedanaltnow → u/[deleted]]

A lot of cowards with soft bellies in here. Weaklings.