Immigration and self-determination

Last updated on: October 5, 2015 at 8:29 am by Jane the Actuary

Immigration and self-determination 2015-10-05T08:29:42-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Here’s the latest news: two items from the Washington Post, as I blow through my monthly allotment.

“Some refugees in Germany get Zumba classes, but others sleep on the streets” — the headline wants to suggest that Germany is treating its refugees unequally, but the article itself makes it clear that Germany is facing a major problem. The article repeats prior statements of 800,000 arrivals this year; other sources now say that’s been revised to 1.5 million – and still Europe is being called hard-hearted, at least by Americans who don’t recognize the chaos Germany is now experiencing. And this article, like so many others, describes scenes in which young men, having left unpleasant but not life-threatening situations not just in Syria but all over the Middle East, with the expectation that Germany would be the economic Promised Land, are now pretty p***ed off that Germany is not, in fact, meeting their expectations of jobs, apartments, and cash.

“I read about how industrious and successful the Germans are,” said [27 year-old Ahmed] Hamadich, who worked as a lab technician in Damascus. “But this,” he said, using both hands to indicate the refugees bundling up for another night on the sidewalk, “is not working.” . . ..

In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said Germany is managing, “but with difficulties.” He noted that the country had to roll out a huge operation to shelter asylum seekers “within weeks.”

He blamed the problems in Berlin on refugees who come to the capital even though many should instead be registering in smaller cities and towns.

“In a way, they cannot complain that they are queuing here when they don’t want to go other places,” he said. . . .

Monika Hebbinghaus, a city spokeswoman, acknowledged that some refugees were sleeping on the streets and blamed the chaos on the surging numbers. At one point, she said, frustrated refugees attempted to storm the processing center.

She also said asylum seekers were not following instructions. They are supposed to wait at shelters for word that it is their turn to come back in for processing. But instead, she said, they are simply showing up every day and waiting. Because refugees are constantly moving around, she said, it has become difficult to locate them in shelters when it is time for their appointment.

And, “As Europe makes room for refugees, some in Japan ask: Why not us?” — which describes emerging discussion in Japan on accepting more refugees (they currently accept refugees in the single digits per year), though the article makes much of very small numbers of voices proposing a greater openness, and editorializes:

But Japan also faces a demographic time bomb – one that could be significantly eased by an influx of new people. With its rapidly aging population and paltry birth rate, Japan is getting smaller and grayer by the year.

Japan’s government estimates that the country’s population will shrink from the current 127 million to 95 million by 2050, and by that stage, 40 percent of Japanese will be over the age of 65. Who’s going to pay for their retirement and their health care?

And it’s not as if Japan doesn’t have the space. The New York Times recently reported that there are 8 million “ghost homes” in Japan already, as the population shrinks and people move to the cities. This phenomenon prompted one real estate expert to warn: “Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits.”

Of course, this follows on criticism of the rich Gulf States for their closed-door policies, though the motivation is rather different — in the case of the Gulf States, they are culturally very similar to the Syrians, but opening the doors means taking the fixed “pie” of oil wealth and dividing it into more, and smaller pieces. In the case of Japan, though, the motivations are very different.

Japan is actually doing much to help refugees, but this is via funding and staffing refugee camps, rather than via resettlement in their own countries.

But Japan’s culture is an insular one. All this fluff about “everyone’s basically all the same”? No. Remember when I told you about Shutting Out the Sun? Their culture is simply not our culture, in ways far deeper than the food they eat or their music and dance traditions. Without commenting on whether their cults “bad” or “good”, it is clear that it is very different, and it is reasonable of the Japanese to expect that if they open their country up to refugee resettlement, or to large-scale immigration of any kind (there are guest workers there currently — so, yes, even now, “it’s complicated,” as they say), they will necessarily be obliged to change their culture. They have made the decision that they want to keep their culture, thank-y0u-very-much, and have, so far as I understand, accepted that this means that their population will shrink, and are looking to robotics as a partial solution.

Oh, and there have been a spate of articles on the 1965 immigration act in the United States, for instance, this one from National Review, pointing out how dramatic an effect this legislation has had on the demographics of the United States.

So here’s my bottom-line question:

Is pressure to accept immigrants — either from supranational bodies or from the so-called “ruling elite” — a violation of a nation’s right to self-determination? Does a nation, as a collective whole, have a right to preserve their culture, and restrict immigration if they feel this threatens it?

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