As a country of 80M people (Germany), they can probably handle quite a few but there's a point when the demographic shift is going to be.. unpleasant. Most immigrants don't leave their old practices behind and in most cases, that's not a big deal. This group of immigrant isn't Christian or areligious (most of Europe is one of the two) and doesn't hold similar views of [choose: women, society, gays, religion, etc, etc], so there already are and will continue to be clashes.

Hopefully those groups assimilate into the common German belief/societal structures but history says that with big enough numbers, they won't have to..

the cdu isnt really a christian party anymore, considering how many of their staff are self proclaimed atheists

Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)

Singapore even outright discusses how fast infrastructure and services are growing and sets the amount of immigration for the year accordingly. I suspect if Germany really was willing to take up the majority of the million Syrian refugees (and mass immigration from any other country in distress), it would make sure to invest accordingly and be able to integrate that many as the US has done in the early 20th century [1] (so much for history). If they get it right, it might be a huge economic boom and great long term move.

As for "the common German belief/societal structures", no culture is stagnant (and clearly not German values, if you look at the 20th century alone!). Even the US is a strange mix of a dozen traditions, cultures and habits which have blended into "American".

For example, most world citizen think of the US, not Italy, when eating a slice of pizza. People call a flat white Australian, but the Australian coffee culture which is spreading globally today is a direct descendant of Italian immigration to the country. Immigrants adapt to the local custom (cf "Chinese-American" food, secularisation of the second generation, etc.) and the country adapts to its immigrants.

[1] "between 1880 and 1920 [...] brought more than 4 million Italians to America" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American) - this when the total US population in 1920 was 104 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_United_States_Census). How many famous Americans today, like Rudy Giuliani, Jay Leno or Madonna have Italian origins?

The country has at least four major religions and four official languages with considerably larger minorities than any European country, yet, has not seen a race-based breakdown in the rule of law in decades.

It's a failure of government when the rule of law breaks down. It's up to the citizen to figure out the problems and solve them with their votes and by talking to their elected politicians. What have you personally done politically to change the situation in your own country? Personally, I've given up and emigrated to a country with better individual rights.

I'm not sure closing all borders and living in autarky (which is where the UK and US seem to be heading) is a good long term choice. Not my countries, not my problem. It saddens me a little nevertheless to see so many great countries pick it.

If Germany were an island it would do the same kind of processing.

There's nothing wrong with examining a person for a year before letting them settle in your country. The system has worked well thus far, why bust it up?

Again, I see no problem with it. I thought they were escaping a dangerous situation? It seems they are now in a safe third country, it's not a big deal they have to wait a year. I have many relatives who came to the US this way.

The Australian government just got given yet another report telling them that this attitude is dangerous. Most estimates from reviews of Australia's current system (intake is in the tens of thousands, however arrivals by boat are processed offshore in Nauru or PNG) is that the timeframe from someone seeking assylum to being declined/accepted needs to be about three months or less - any longer and mental health takes a serious toll and children end up being behind in education.

Has it? Could it have been working much better for all parties? I think that is distinctly possible.

"you can't just stand by"

yes I can. Why is it my problem? Oh is that supposed to be the guilt of the first world for cooperating amongst each other and paying taxes, I also HAVE to do all things for all people, even those I dont' like and so does my government with my tax money? Hogwash.

The propaganda of we're all "global citizens" sounds great but it doesn't work. You can't sustain a welfare system in 1st world countries when you add the numbers they are talking about here, it doesn't work. And as we know from england and france and sweden, these cultures do NOT mix into their homestay lands all that well. They bring crime with them and they usurp the welfare from the elderly of the host country. They destabilize the economy and hurt the middle class.

You can look at this in a small way. Let's say you're neighborhood isn't as nice as the one down the road. You don't just get to move in there, nor do those people suddenly have to make a space for you. And even if your neighborhood in shambles isn't your fault or even if those other people laid off your parents employment, you still don't get to just come in droves and become a resident of their neighborhood and they have to pay for your lifestyle on top of free room and board.

All it takes is a commitment to finally throttle the military materiel manufacturing economy--that was ramped up during World War 2--back to a peacetime proportion of the budget.

As it is now, the U.S. has to continually go out and look for new conflicts, and beat loudly the drums of war, to justify that high level of military spending. We have been waiting a long time to beat those swords back into plowshares, and they just keep making more swords.

I think that the entire quota of 70k refugees can be adequately provided for in less than one month just by taking the buildings on a bare handful of shuttered military bases out of mothballs.

We can accommodate millions more, and take care of the poor people that are already here. Our elected politicians prevent such occurrences using the flimsiest of justifications.

Have you considered appealing to what your audience is likely to care about, rather than the goals you find appealing?

Rent-seeking behavior seems intrinsic to human society, such that any group of people larger than a certain size will be forced to deal with it in one way or another.

At this point, nothing short of a constitutional amendment is likely to put a dent in the military industrial complex. And that's not happening any time soon.

Complaining about it helps me to not lose my sanity. And that's good, because without my sanity, I might do something like endorse an armed revolution to reduce the political and economic influence of the military in the U.S. See, as a sane person, I know that doesn't make any sense. There is a right way and a wrong way to fight fire with fire; that's the wrong way.

And it gets a dissenting opinion out there, on the off chance that someone might stray far enough from their own echo chamber to see it.

So, friend, I ask you to stop and consider how you want people who encounter your lone voice in the wilderness to react. Assuming you care - perhaps you value having something to complain (and thus wish to ensure its continued existence) about more than you do persuading people that It Doesn't Have To Be This Way.

As a political minority, I am well aware that there are literally tens of millions of people who will dismiss my opinions without even pausing to think about them. That doesn't mean that I should stop having them, or stop expressing them in whatever way that pleases me.

I'm not exactly sure what you hope to accomplish by your responses. It almost sounds like you agree with the sentiment, but not the expression. If so, it is not a tad hypocritical to complain about how I am arranging my words rather than try to say it better yourself?

There's always going to be something to complain about. If not how the military-industrial complex is preventing the realization of peacetime prosperity, it might be how we have all this peacetime prosperity, but can't keep the mosquitoes from biting everyone at the picnic. If we run out of truly awful things to complain about, we can always complain about the merely annoying things. So I find your suggestion that complainers would actually prefer that the things they complain about not be fixed to be misguided.

I perhaps could say it better myself, but that's not my goal at this juncture.

What is straining to you? I would describe our education system, our legal system, our prison system and our welfare system as all being currently "strained" so we must have different definitions.

(and to the downvoting crew, feel free to explain to me what productive disagreeement looks like, eh?)

You've also made the mistake of thinking that just because you've found one problem that others must not exist. We can have broken systems and problems caused by immagration.

10% ESL students in our public education system should qualify as a strain. 17% of California's prisoners being born abroad should qualify as a strain. Are these numbers not high enough for you? If not, what does too high look like to you?

A 10% ESL student population doesn't solve itself. That's like a child thinking that their refrigerator magically fills itself when it gets empty. If you ignore that solutions have costs than yes by your definition ESL students have no costs associated with them.

I asked about the strain on the legal system due to immigrant populations, specifically the prison system in California. You said we should put less people in jail. While that's true it doesn't solve the problem unless we're going to change our laws to the extent that aggravated assault is no longer a crime. Then we've once again solved the problem by refusing to admit it even exists.

As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes.

By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

Only 10% of California's prisoners have never been convicted of a violent crime. I doubt they all need to be locked up but I'm not seeing those prisons as being filled with peaceful drug dealers like the rumor has it.

I would guess in New Hampshire there isn't much of an immigrant population. I just looked it up and it's about 93% white there. My state's about 2/3's white, I live in a part of town where I don't walk around after dark because I might get jumped for being white which does affect my perspective. I have neighbors who immigrated from Mexico decades ago and still don't even speak basic english. I'm not saying my state should become all white or anything like that, but maybe we've reached a good mix and we could deal with the problems our hispanic and black communities already have because that's a challenge as it is. We're struggling to get them to stop killing each other, make it through high school and to read at a basic level. If we can't do that I don't know why we think we can take on even more people.

19% of high school graduates in the US are functionally illiterate[0]. Nationwide only half of black males are graduating at all. Half. We're already failing to take care of our poor. We're spending a very large amount of money trying to but it happens to be expensive.

If you go back to the start of this thread you'll see I've been consistent that there's a point where taking in more people is no longer a good thing. That doesn't mean I think it's always a bad thing, just that we should be honest that it can be.

[0] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3...

Second, my main assertion is the existence of a point where immigration is problematic. Example: colonialism.

Third, as to the side conversation of whether or not America is experiencing a problematic level of immigration I've already submitted the fact that 10% of students in US public schools are ESL learners. We can add to it that 16% of California's prisoners were not born on U.S. soil and they're so overcrowded the Supreme Court ordered them to do something about it. I'm calling these things "strain". I hope we can agree that immigration plays a role in both examples.

"A refugee is a person who is outside their home country because they have suffered (or feared) persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion; because they are a member of a persecuted social category of persons; or because they are fleeing a war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee

Why, do you want to see a lot of dead refugees? Because that's where all of this is heading. It'll happen in Europe first, since they have a stronger sense of national identity than most Americans, so we get a preview of what will happen here. Germans have started attacking refugee centers. Anti-immigration political parties are rising in popularity with shocking speed throughout Europe. The Greek and Italian coast guards have quietly started to sink refugee boats coming from Africa. It'll take the US a little longer to get there, but when small town America starts to feel unsafe in their own communities, their reaction will not be peaceful.

> That is what it was for me when I moved to the US from Switzerland.

> Only then I realized that the way people live in Switzerland is not something you can take for granted and in the end made me move back.

Since you don't live in the US anymore, please stick to trying to influence Swiss policy. Since you aren't going to have to deal with the consequences of a widely expanded US refugee policy.

Furthermore, it's not unreasonable for people living in one country to have opinions on the policies of others, especially when it's something like taking in refugees which has strong influences on a global scale.

And in this specific case: citizenship and residency ought to give one's voice more weight.

When members of a group discuss policy for that group, they do so under the implicit assumption that their values are similar enough that what they are doing in the conversation is trying to find a way to achieve their shared values.

But the great-great-great-grandparent comment was simply a statement of values, not a suggestion of how parties concerned could achieve theirs.

I realize the lines are fuzzy: HN is certainly not a 'murican forum for 'murican issues. But its composition is such that neither is it a non-American forum. As such, the greatx3-grandparent could have been more sensitive.

That is ad hominem -- specifically, ad hominem circumstantial [0] -- and lies at the nexus between the genetic fallacy and appeal to motive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Circumstantial