Europe

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The thing is, immigrants are the perfect victims. They often don’t have....

The problem is that people are not able anymore to discern things. What you say it could be true but the problem is that it applied mostly to illegal immigrants.

I think the distinction of legal and illegal immigrants serves as a foot in the door for culture war distraction. First there is about needing to surveil some immigrant communities because of terrorist acts associated with foreigners, then it’s about not wanting to take in refugees because other nations in the EU are not putting in enough of an effort, then it becomes an issue of illegal immigration – which is synonymous with undocumented immigration. The step after that is introducing legislation to make working visas less of a certainty, usually that’s coupled to worse working conditions. Lastly deportations, nowadays called remigration, strip large sections of immigrants and those with an immigrant background of citizenship. This furthers an erosion of basic rights and puts those affected in a position where it’s do or die, which means proving your worth as an immigrant to state and industry.

Furthermore, many currently legal and working immigrants have histories of undocumented migration, receiving government aid, and some even have engaged in illegal activity.

True, some people are assholes also to legal immigrants (stupid people alway exists). Most people have not problems with the immigrants that work and partecipate in the society but with the immigrants that live by petty crimes.

Many voters of right wing parties don’t have a probblem with immigrants as long as they’re the right immigrants in their view. Immigrants are disadvantaged though and this makes some turn to crime. Crime that could be in large part prevented if these people had their needs better met. Trying to kick out criminal immigrants potentially makes the problem worse because it puts them in an even more precarious situation where they are even more incentivised to do crime. This creates pressure for the vast majority of immigrants who by the way are not criminals to conform even harder.

Criminals doing petty crime are not able to find regular employment when the state cracks down on them. They walk into the arms of human traffickers, which does not decrease the crime rate in any way. At best, crimes are made hidden or moved geographically.

Many nationalists force use immigrants because left wings (and other btw) parties make it too easy to use them as bogeyman: it is not too hard to point your finger at them saying "they are all criminals" when looking at situations in the cities (I always use the Milan Central railway station as example).

Reformist-progressive parties are in power in urban areas where inequality is high. They are not able to change anything because the entire country’s economy is built in such a way that creates significant discrepancies in wealth, which is magnified in urban areas. The left leaning parties are not sending the “bad” immigrants elsewhere because A. it costs money and B. it does not address the cause. This does not seem like a local left wing party problem, they seem like a correlation at best.

As I said elsewhere, years of immigrations left unchecked has caused the society to switch from the "they need help" mentality to the "they are all criminals, we don't need them" mentality, offering an easy target to nationalist forces even because everyone else refused to look at the problem.

I think “unchecked immigration” is a misnomer. I would not say that immigration was ever left unchecked, immigration has always been a gigantic cornerstone of policy.

I would not commit murder because I think doing it is enough of a punishment. My not-terrible upbringing has led me to dislike such acts. I have nothing to gain from just murdering people and that has rather little to do with punitive consequences

The basic question is: would you think that people would do something illegal if they would be sure to be caught and punished proportionally to the crime ?

I’ve answered this numerous times in great detail at this point and the answer is yes and besides, there is this assumption that just “bringing people to justice” is most important in order to prevent crime. There are crimes that have high clearance rates, meaning that on paper a very high number of reported crimes are figured out. People still commit these crimes and it’s sort of a ‘mystery’ of the justice system why that is still the case. Well, clearly there are factors, which I have previously pointed to, that go beyond catching the bad guys and punishing them for effect.

The phrasing here is a little unclear to me. I presume you mean that you want to preserve the potentiality of becoming a state servant or business owner. Statistically speaking (and logically speaking) workers don’t just move up the ladder. If everyone could the system as it is would implode and we know that it’s self-correcting against collapsing in on itself. As a worker it’s very difficult to start a business because you need money and time to plan. Oftentimes you fail because the real world is noisy and certainties are few.

No, I mean that I was s state servant (I served in the militay like every other man did up until 20 years ago) and I was a business owner.

Thank you for clarifying.

But your point is wrong: everyone can try and that does not mean that everyone will succeded. There is nothing that can stop me to try to become again a business owner, only my choice to not be one.

This, with the exception of the very last part, is what I was saying. Sure, you can try to become a business owner, there are no limits to you choosing to. The important distinction here is trying and being. As someone who works, you likely have rather few resources to fund a business. You won’t be able to provide as much collateral on loans as people with capital, i.e. people whose property works for them. You are significantly disadvantaged.

And likewyse there is nothing that stops me to try to become a state servant again if not objective things: I am too old to join again the army or I have not the correct studies for a certain work in the state apparatus for example.

Certainly. But you have duties and in the army example those duties entail grave acts such as taking another’s life and giving one’s own. Then again the army is a low hanging fruit since they’ll take all kinds of people. It’s good that you realise that there are certain prerequisites that the vast majority of people do not have when we turn our eyes away from the army example. This gate is education and education is highly determined by the financial situation of one’s parents.

And society do not implode because someone move up the ladder.

Yes, when one person moves up the ladder society does not implode, but what I was saying is that society implodes when a fair chunk of people can simply choose to move up the ladder, by applying themselves better for example. If everyone became self-employed, you’d be back in feudalism and that simply isn’t efficient enough in order to sustain industrial production.

But the punishment here does not come out of thin air. There is a monopoly on violence that is in the hands of the state.

The alternative is a never ending chain of personal vendettas.

I don’t think so. The state, police and monopolies on violences are a recent phenomenon. History is littered with systems where social conduct was shaped without purely punitive or violent measures. Who is to say that the nation state is the end-all-be-all?

It is a problem that the UK and the EU created. It is a problem of the contradiction between the local level and the international level. This problem is quite relevant for the EU, because it signals greater antagonisms affecting the entirety of Europe.

The UK created the problem when decided to leave the EU. Think about EU like a private club: you could enter if you are a member. You leave the club, you can no longer enter. Who caused the problem ? The club which follow its rules of you that decide to leave the club thinking that you could still enter whenever you wanted ?

This does not really engage with the argument. States don’t have responsibilities like people. They don’t join private clubs as it were. The rules you are seeing are a result of negotiations based on leverage and generally this is in the interest of the most powerful nations. First the EEC (EU-predecessor) is created out of a strength in numbers calculation. The United States and the Soviet Union are blocks that could overpower any one member of the EU, but as a regional alliance the scales can be balanced. The rules of the EU are based on that. It’s not a rules-first thing, if it was Hungary would have long been kicked out for repeatedly flunking the rules of the EU flagrantly.

Assuming rules are static and respected: Wars cause innovation because either side seeks to win. Technical novelties are extremely important. You may not see mustard gas be used or soldiers being blinded by lasers, but you might have to deal with new technology for which no specific laws exist. There are these magical battle technologies called autonomous drones and autonomous turrets.

That does not means that everything is allowed. The use of every weapon, old or new, ultimately has a resposinble: who gave the order to deploy it.

Of course it does not mean that everything is “allowed”. So long as there are states there is war and there is an incetive to come up with new ways of brutalising your enemy. My argument is this, mustard gas wasn’t banned prior to the end of WWI, then it got banned. Nuclear bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Nuclear aspect was legal at the time. Now there are many states that have pledged to not use nuclear weapons.