illegal immigration

[potatolord]

I wasn't referring to any specific group, i was questioning why some people want to restrict their dataset to the last 10 years, however Irish republican / unionist terror groups did enter my mind when i thought about what data is being intentionally excluded without reason and going further back the crusades.

I'm fine with excluded data if there's a logical reason for doing so, however in this instance no one has said why they're excluding it so I'm inclined to think there are ulterior motives for doing so.

What would you say is a good starting point? 50 years ago?

In my opinion, going back to the Crusades is a bit much!

 

[Murphy]

I wouldn't know as I'm not daft enough to think correlation proves causation and so I'm not trying to use that to either prove or disprove something, you'd have to ask the people who've cherry-picked statistics from the last decade in an attempt to prove something.

Going back to the crusades would only be a bit much, IMO, if you were more interested in something other than extremism and body counts.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

I wonder if you went back to the times of the empire, how many terrorist attacks we made by todays standards

 

[Mr C]

I wonder if you went back to the times of the empire, how many terrorist attacks we made by todays standards

I'd reckon just thinking about the recent (last decade) and the period before (60s to 10s) that the majority of terrorist attacks are done by individuals or organisations associated with a country or countries that are being unceremoniously occupied or under duress from the country that the attacks are occurring in.

The troubles and Irish terrorism existed before the GFA and were entirely brought upon by the tensions between NI/IRE/GB, the "Islamic terrorism" that this thread keeps dragging up only appears after the Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria occupations by the US and Europe.

Thinking further back, I wonder what level of accounts of US Terrorism happened to the UK occupiers within the USA and UK shortly before or during the US revolutionary war or during the invasion of India in the 1600s (under the Empire as you quite rightly mentioned).

In reality, when framed in these circumstances, are they isolated terrorist attacks or merely someone attempting or being enticed to continue their support for a side they sympathise with during the ongoing war between these nations. AFAIK Amaryllis Fox has a lot more to say on the subject than i can merely comment and is a bit of an expert in the field, perhaps people might want to educate themselves on the intricacies of terrorism with her book Life Undercover (published almost 1 year ago).

A transcript from her conversation with Stephen Levitt on his Freakanomics podcast:

LEVITT: I know it’s hard to prognosticate, but what do you think the chances are that something absolutely disastrous would happen in a major city done by a terror group in the next five years, whether it’s a dirty bomb or some kind of biological attack?

FOX: I think that it’s very difficult to — it’s almost like quantum mechanics. These are clouds of probability. But I do think that the democratized grievances that we’re seeing right now don’t feel new to me at all. For anyone who was overseas and paying attention over the last 20, 30, 40 years, the frustrations and eventually the rage that result from the same policies that I think now are fueling wealth inequality in the United States have been simmering around the world for a long time. And I think that a lot of the divisions that we’re seeing domestically are very familiar to me as someone who has looked at extremism overseas.

And, I think in both cases they are fueled by this feeling of being unheard and unseen for so long that grievances begin to metastasize and become increasingly dangerous. The first level is something like graffiti, which is completely benign, really, but is a sense of like, “I am here. See me. I matter.” And when that continues to become more and more virulent and more and more dangerous, you end up getting to spasms of violence that can eventually bubble up into attacks and eventually into mass-casualty attacks.

The question that you ask, “Are we going to see one of these things in the next five years?” — depends enormously on the work that we do communally and the work that each of us does individually to try, day after day after day, to build common humanity, to reach out and build unity. I really do think that finding common ground is the greatest act of patriotism any of us can engage in right now.

LEVITT: So, it sounds like you’re suggesting that the greatest domestic threat right now is from domestic terrorism, not from foreigners.

FOX: I think that’s right on the balance of where we are right now. In a broader sense, I don’t really see them as two different things. In both cases, they grow out of this sense of objectifying the other and feeling completely unheard. And those are very human experiences.

LEVITT: And again, I know you’re not a prognosticator, but let me ask you to do one more. So, domestically, the words you’ve used could equally well describe the far right and the far left. Do you see one of those as being a greater threat for mass-casualty attacks than the other?

FOX: In general, what I’ve seen in extremism is that the actual attacks are often perpetrated either by lone wolves or small splinter groups. And as a result, I think you can see those individual people or small groups of people splinter from actually quite unlikely places. So, I think it’s very difficult to say a particular group could or could not give rise to them. The importance is recognizing the scale of alienation and how far along it a particular person or a particular group is and feels. And I think one of the important components of this is recognizing that “listening to” does not mean “agreeing with.”

This is something that we often forget in our country. It became really clear to me in working against the people who hated us most in the world that, as uncomfortable and often abhorrent it is to listen, it’s the only way to anticipate attacks and, more importantly, to be alert to any possibility of actually bringing the temperature down and finding some path to peace. In the war on terror context, there was this really dramatic oversimplification that the leadership and the media engaged in, which was this, “they hate us because we’re free” narrative — the “they hate us because girls wear miniskirts in Times Square” kind of thing.

And I’ve never in my entire time in the Middle East, even in the most traditional settings, ever heard anybody back that up. What I have seen is that over the 10 years prior to 9/11, there was a very consistent drumbeat of expression from the Al Qaeda leadership, from Egyptian Islamic Jihad — a lot of the leadership of Al Qaeda came from E.I.J. — of saying, “Here are the very specific grievances we have.” And one of them was supporting financially the security services in Egypt that were so notorious for torture.

That’s one I don’t think that most Americans would want to withstand a terror attack in order to continue to fund the Egyptian security services. I think if you put that to a vote, most Americans would say, “No, I think we’re good on that.” But then, there are others — support for the state of Israel that I think probably, if you put it to a vote, there would be the tolerance of periodic attacks in order to continue. That’s the adult conversation that I think was really important for leaders to have following 9/11. But instead, it was this series of “they hate us because we’re free” tropes.

LEVITT: And my hunch is we have a tough path because the academics who’ve studied this have come to the somewhat obvious conclusion that if you occupy someone’s territory and you kill their father or their brother, you create really serious enemies who have long memories about what you’ve done. And we’ve done a lot of that over the last three or four decades.

FOX: Yeah, you know it’s interesting. I was down in Houston after Hurricane Harvey volunteering with Team Rubicon, which is a really awesome veterans’ organization that goes in after natural disasters. And the last house we mucked out on this Friday, the guy, he had a bunch of live rounds in the floodwater. And he was very pro-Second Amendment, I guess you could say. And he said while we were working, “I just don’t know how all y’all were willing to be over there among those A-Rabs.” And I said, “Let’s have a beer after this because you’re our last house.”

And when we were sitting there I said, “Imagine that the Iranians stood up in front of the United Nations and said, ‘We love the American people, but their government is failing them. Police are killing people in the streets. They’ve got mobs storming their capital. Their country is a mess. On behalf of the American people we’re going to liberate them. And you’re going to see some Iranian bases on Fifth Avenue and on La Cienega. Don’t worry about it. We’re here for you. You’re going to see some Iranian drones flying over Chicago and Kansas City and the odd explosion, but it’ll just be against targets that are protecting you. We’ll probably be here for 20 years or so.’ What would you do?”

And he goes, “That’s why we have the Second Amendment. I would never stand for that. We would be down there in a second and get them the hell out of our country.” And I said, “Exactly. Whether that’s right or wrong, we shouldn’t be shocked that certain parts of the communities in other countries have met us with the same approach.” And he got actually quite teary — and maybe it was the beer — but he got quite teary, and said, “I can’t believe that I’ve gotten to this point in my life and I’d never actually thought about something that simple.” So, yeah, I think we do have a lot of work to do. And we have incredible legacies of oppression and violence here and economic cruelty. So, I think there is a lot of healing to be done and a lot of restoration to be done.

And I think we have this very old, entrenched, human problem, which is let’s make peace, but you go first. And I just found that if you sit down with someone, whether in my case, somebody that is trying to kill your countrymen, or maybe in today’s context, just a family member that is tricky at Thanksgiving. But if you go first with something vulnerable, something that you’ve made a mistake about or changed your mind about, it is really amazing when you ask for help or you show vulnerability as the first step, how that immediately gives the person that you’re talking to permission to do the same thing.

 

[omnomnom]

.

 

[omnomnom]

Lol ignore

 

[The Running Man]

 

[arknor]

We need some positive immigration stories.

surely there's some good ones somewhere

 

[kinetic747]

We need some positive immigration stories.

surely there's some good ones somewhere

Probably 99% of them but there's not much point is there?

 

[Mr Badger]

We need some positive immigration stories.

surely there's some good ones somewhere

Probably 99% of them but there's not much point is there?

The positive stories are presumably the vast majority of law abiding people that perform useful roles every day without undue drama?

In the interest of keeping the thread balanced, perhaps someone could post all the crimes bring committed by people that aren't recent immigrants to the UK...

 

[Skunkworks]

Home grown criminals are our problem. Imported criminals are entirely optional. No immigrant should make this country poorer, dumber, or less safe.

 

[The Running Man]

The positive stories are presumably the vast majority of law abiding people that perform useful roles every day without undue drama?

In the interest of keeping the thread balanced, perhaps someone could post all the crimes bring committed by people that aren't recent immigrants to the UK...

Being normal is a minimum expectation.

Killing people or raping them.is abhorrent and is not wasted.

 

[arknor]

Being normal is a minimum expectation.

Killing people or raping them.is abhorrent and is not wasted.

I don't think them being migrants was the issue though, nor them being Muslims

The culture of Afghanistan is pretty bad for women, I doubt you can easily break the cycle with education either.

when someone has that line of thinking their whole life and it benefits them why would the opinion change.

No doubt we get a lot of issues at some point from it, we've already had news paper articles about the Muslims trying to force dress codes in Asda etc claiming it's company policy and "you can;'t dress like that"

these people need kicking back to Afghanistan or wherever they come from, our culture is obviously an assault on their senses

 

[The Running Man]

I for one welcome our new Shariah overlords.

 

[Murphy]

We need some positive immigration stories.

surely there's some good ones somewhere

15% of NHS staff report a non-British nationality so you or your relatives being alive would probably be one and that's a trend we see in other jobs so roughly 1 in 7 people who provide the things you buy and use everyday are only available because of immigration. Unfortunately we recently made it harder for immigrants who are more likely to have a positive net fiscal impact to come here so i guess that's no longer a positive.

How far do you want to go back though as immigrants help us rebuild the country after WWII and going further back there's the Saxons who migrated from Germany and the Romans who made a rather noticeable impact, basically England is a country of migrants.

 

[arknor]

thats legal immigration though this thread is about the ones who turn up at dover unannounced

 

[Murphy]

thats legal immigration though this thread is about the ones who turn up at dover unannounced

You said and i quote...

We need some positive immigration stories.

You did not say we need some positive stories about the ones who turn up at Dover unannounced.

Not that you'd actually get those as by their very nature someone who's not meant to be here isn't exactly going to go around making themselves known, it's a bit like saying we never get positive shoplifter or murder stories.

 

[The Running Man]

The fact that they are working and taking up a job isn't a success or even a good news story.

It is infact bad news because it means that a British person has less jobs to apply for because we turned to cheap labour.

 

[Mr Badger]

The fact that they are working and taking up a job isn't a success or even a good news story.

It is infact bad news because it means that a British person has less jobs to apply for because we turned to cheap labour.

Where would you set the benchmark?

 

[Skunkworks]

When it comes to immigration the country should be treated like a business. You bring something of value that we need. If you stop being of value you leave.