I was under the impression that Finns are grim fellows...
Don't be misled by Romantic stereotypes. Finns are
bitchy people first and foremost: There's nothing we’d like better than whining and moaning about real or imaginary grievances, and we seem to have an endless supply of the latter even in the absence of the former.
I've said this before in one of the bay12 politics threads, but I always love grilling all my north london liblabgren m8s over the fact that they support unrestricted mass immigration despite their only experience of immigration being north london restaurants whilst everyone else's got to deal with the obvious consequences.
That reminds me of one of our massively popular but purely fictitious grievances: The infamous lib-red-green policy of "UNRESTRICTED IMMIGRATION," which is apparently the root cause of all real problems in our society. It's rather hilarious because last year our projected gross immigration was no less than
a staggering 31 000 people, and after emigration we're still left with a whopping 17 000 in net immigration. People are calling these figures "unrestricted" – in a country with
5 046 excess births in 2014, and a total population growth of 20 483. Not to even mention that the same people are totally losing their shit over 15 000 additional asylum seekers that may or may not be accepted this year – in a country that's significantly larger than the UK in land area. You can't make this shit up.
I think the above illustrates the central problem in arguing with anti-immigration contrarians: They'll tell you that they're only against "unrestricted" immigration, but when you ask for their definition of sufficiently restricted, they'll go gish-galloping about crime rates and blood-libel conspiracy theories. Some don't even care if you're talking about work-related immigration or refugees – they're just categorically opposed to foreigners, as simple as that. The smarter ones regularly admit that Finland is in dire need of immigrants to supplement her dwindling and rapidly aging population, but then they'll go on to draw up cunning plans about cherry-picking the “goo'uns" from a mass of undesirables, which often leads them into outright idiocy like only accepting immigrants of German descent:
Should we import Falafel or Kraut? We can do without chickpeas, but, despite all our love of peas, not without fermented cabbage. Kraut will make us powerful, Falafel will only make us fat.
It cannot be stressed enough that
everyone – including my hippie literature-snob classmates and my own bad hippie-green self – is against unrestricted immigration, mostly because unrestricted immigration hasn't been a thing since the Völkerwanderung of the Early Middle Ages. It tells you a lot about the general quality of anti-immigration discourse when, even in a country as sparsely populated as Finland, the typical argument against immigration is modeled after the All-European template of "Holy fuck, too many people, can't breathe!" That may be a perfectly valid concern on a local scale in Greater Londonistan or the Megacities of Central Europe, but from a wider perspective it's painfully obvious that the overall EU population growth is in decline, and the dependency ratio will inevitably go to shit without some new people.
Here's an idea: How about we distribute the refugees evenly between all EU countries, in proportion to land area and population? Someone already suggested that, but it was instantly shot down by politicians? Damn.
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Topic: Sheb's European Megathread: Remove Feta! (Read 1770999 times)