Posted on 02/05/2006 1:57:16 AM PST by mal
In few places on earth is the air fresher than in a Swedish housing project. Take Bergsjon, which sits five miles from the center of Sweden's second-largest city, the stately Dutch-built port of Gothenburg. Home to a Volvo plant and some of the world's biggest shipyards, Gothenburg was long an industrial powerhouse. Bergsjon was built between 1967 and 1972 to reward the workers who made it that. Bergsjon resembles the places Swedes love to retreat to in midsummer — quiet, pristine, speckled with lakes and smelling of evergreen trees — but it is only a short tram ride away from the city's giant SKF ball-bearing plant. The center has no cars. Its 14,500 people live in apartments set within a lasso-shaped ring road, on grassy hills that climb toward the country's rustic uplands. As Asa Svensson, a municipal coordinator for the development, notes, "It was planned for people who like to be in the country."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
As the moslum population increases, and riots spread due to offended moslom cartoon caricatures, governments from around the world make politicly correct statements of appeasement ...
actually, every western govt should be brought up on charges of treason or deleliction of duty at the very least. this should include any member of govt who promoted this immigration during the last thirty years.
Your right, bringing that to happen is another thing.
Add the United Nations social engineers who mandated, by force if needed, that Germany open their borders to foreign immigration right after WWII. This was an effort deemed to "break up" that German Purity master race uber alles dogma.
Well, the new 'master race' has started moving into Germany and everywhere else in Europe, with or without mandates.
What would we do without the Useless, er. United Nations?
All you really need to know about where Bush's guest program will go.
yes, i am well aware of what we made germany do right after ww2. it was a stupid and shortsighted thing to do on the part of the allies.
I like the final paragraph:
"Critics of capitalism used to cite Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell to show that the free market is ultimately undermined by its own successes: the wealth the work ethic creates makes people want to work less. The welfare state has its cultural contradictions, too. It rests on consensus, which is another way of saying a lack of cultural variety. The stronger the consensus, the more room a welfare state has to grow. But as consensus strengthens, so does a certain naïveté, a belief that your own idiosyncratic habits are something that no one else could fail to find irresistibly seductive. Sweden's biggest immigration problem may be a matter not of crime, unemployment and Islamic radicalism but of something else altogether: that its newcomers understand perfectly well what this system erected in the name of equality is and have decided it doesn't particularly suit them.
hope article gets into Swedish mainstream press and other media
I read the entire aticle and other than immigration, legal there but illegal here, I don't see the connection you are making.
Maybe yes, or maybe not. It depends on how the wealth is distributed, sometimes the decadence affects the elites/the rich more. See my tagline.
In long lasting societies the rich were constrained by the strong religious rules and duty of military service (like medieval knighthood) while the working classes were kept poor and toiling.
Machiavelli provides interesting comments on the dangers of prosperity and how to deal with it:
The builders of Cities are free when any people either under a Prince or by themselves are constrained either by pestilence or by famine or by war to abandon their native country, and seek new homes: These either inhabit the cities that they find in the countries they acquire, as Moses did, or they build new ones, as Eneas did. This is a case where the virtu and fortune of the builder of the edifice is recognized, which is of greater or less wonder according as that man who was the beginner was of greater or less virtu. The virtu of whom is recognized in two ways: the first is in the selection of the site, the other in the establishment of the laws. And because men work either from necessity or from choice: and because it is seen here that virtu is greater where choice has less authority (results from necessity), it is (something) to be considered whether it would be better for the building of a city to select sterile places, so that men constrained to be industrious and less occupied with idleness, should live more united, where, because of the poverty of the site, they should have less cause for discord, as happened at Ragusa and in many other cities built in similar places; which selection would without doubt be more wise and more useful if men would be content to live of their own (possessions), and not want to seek to command that of others.
However, as men are not able to make themselves secure except through power, it is necessary to avoid this sterility of country and locate it in very fertile places, where because of the fertility of the site, it can grow, can defend itself from whoever should assault it, and suppress whoever should oppose its aggrandizement. And as to that idleness which the site should encourage, it ought to be arranged that in that necessity the laws should constrain them (to work) where the site does not constrain them (does not do so), and to imitate those who have been wise and have lived in most amenable and most fertile countries, which are apt to making men idle and unable to exercise any virtu: that to obviate those which the amenity of the country may cause through idleness, they imposed the necessity of exercise on those who were to be soldiers: of a kind that, because of such orders, they became better soldiers than (men) in those countries where nature has been harsh and sterile: among which was the Kingdom of Egypt, which notwithstanding that the country was most amenable, that necessity ordained by the laws was so great, that most excellent men resulted therefrom: and if their names had not been extinguished by antiquity, it would be seen that they would have merited more praise than Alexander the Great, and many others of whom memory is still fresh.
And whoever had considered the Kingdom of Soldan and the order of the Mamelukes, and of their military (organization) before it was destroyed by Selim the Grand Turk, would have seen there how much the soldiers exercised, and in fact would have known how much they feared that idleness to which the benignity of the country could lead them if they had not obviated it by the strongest laws. I say therefore that the selection of a fertile location in establishing (a city) is more prudent when (the results) of that fertility can be restricted within given limits by laws.
(Discourses, book one, chapter I)
As happened in Sweden these people have no sense of Swedish nationality. Neither do the vast majority of illegals here have a sense of nationality to the U.S.
Eventually they will come to expect more than Bush's legal status. They will expect citizenship. It will most probably be given to them. All of their expectations will have been met.
What then, is next? Clearly they will then expect the welfare system in our country to back them up. And, our ever generous govt., will oblige them.
As it stands now an illegal does not have the right to collect SS or welfare, yet many do. What will happpen when millions more are automatically added to that pool?
I am saying that Bush's guest worker program, regardless of the rhetoric he offers now, will lead to citizenship. I am against that.
There are millions of people around the world that wish to come here. Most of their governments are more friendly to us than Mexico (where the overwhelming majority of people who will benefit from Bush's program come from). Why should they get preferential treatment?
Eventually they will come to expect more than Bush's legal status. They will expect citizenship. It will most probably be given to them. All of their expectations will have been met.
It is my understanding that those who participate in the guest Worker program will first have to return to Mexico, join the program legally and then return here. They will have to have work contracts with specific employers and once that contract is up they will have to return to Mexico until the next year or until they get another contract. This nails down the worker and the employer. If they don't do that but instead just stay here as they are, they are not eligible for citizenship.
If I am right, that sounds to me like a good start on solving the problem.
I disagree with allowing those here illegally to particiapate at all. They should go back first and then apply. Also, will Bush give out applications to people from other countries like Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Japan, Ethiopia, Australia, New Zealand, etc.? Or, will it only be limited to hispanics as it seems it would be now?
There are many problems to be solved and, like you, I don't know the answers. Rounding up those here now and returning them will require a giagantic undertaking, one I am not sure could be politically accomplished considering the makeup of Congress. It would also cause a big economic disruption of jobs stopped and companies going out of business during an adjustment period. That would have a large negative effect on everyone. Getting real citizens to fill those jobs won't be a snap considering there alternatives for government help.
Look at what is happening in New Orleans. People from all over are going there to participate in the cleanup programs. I have some friends who are there making good money. Are the residents of New Orleans returning to do those jobs and making that money? Not to any noticable degree. In fact, it would be noticable if they did. Instead they are whining for the government to continue to pay their hotel bills because they don't want to live in government provided trailers in New Orleans.
So, many illegals are gravitating there as well as others from a round the country. The non illegals who are going there are entreprenuers who know how to make money anyway and would not be available to fill jobs left by deprted illegals. That is an excellent microcasm of what we would face.
First, the borders have to be closed and that is not easy either, considering all else that is going on in the world. Then the massive job of dislodging those already here to return them can proceed, with the above mention caveats.
That is why it seems that the most workable program is to give incentives for the illegals to cooperate. That is what the Guest Worker program is intended to do. Will it work? Is it a perfect solution? Maybe and no.
Hey! Sweden is just like us.
"Because if the problem is not discrimination, then the problem is the Swedish system ["vaunted welfare state"] itself."
No. Wait a minute. We could never say that about a U.S. welfare system in the NY Times.
Sweden's biggest immigration problem may be a matter not of crime, unemployment and Islamic radicalism but of something else altogether: that its newcomers understand perfectly well what this system erected in the name of equality is and have decided it doesn't particularly suit them.
Listen up, Sweden. Here's how we do it. When our undocumented immigrants like the dollar but nothing else here our leaders say, "they do jobs Americans won't do." Got it? Oh.. yeah, do two screams of "Bigots! Xenophobes!" daily.
The welfare state is, at its heart, paternalitic. and inevitably the step children and the bastards cannot be treated as the equals of the children of the "first" wife.
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