IMMIGRATION thread

[Viking]

Baltics: No. Estonia's the only one that isn't a basket case.

Poland: Don't equivocate.

Georgia:

Funny that you gave Georgia the laugh. According to this, Georgia has 262 704 internally displaced people. Despite this and despite the (related) breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia has a functioning democracy; and is certainly in no state of disintegration. So there is empirical evidence that Georgia meets the bar I set for these countries.

No alienness, hence no difference in alienness.

Not sure what you are saying here. Syrians are, for example, not Kazakhs. If they migrate to Kazakhstan, they'll stand out. But they will find fellow Muslims there, which means intermarriage between Syrians and Kazakhs should be considerably more likely than intermarriage between Syrians and native Europeans. Hence, it is considerably more likely that Syrian migrants will assimilate in Kazakhstan than in Europe. But there is no guarantee that they will.

Enables economic diversification. Do you really think they're that stupid they haven't thought of that...?

You present these countries as fragile, and their economy relies heavily on state-owned oil production. Once that oil runs out, they should become even more fragile, regardless of economic diversification (oil comes relatively effort-free). So when will they become robust states, and how?

and left it to the islamists

Nope, that was a much later development. Unless you would call the NTC for islamists; a group that stepped down peacefully after the first elections, anyway.

It also armed a population and caused a national security crisis in a stable country.

The only arming of Libyans that I am aware of, was in the Nafusa mountains by the French; and does not seem to be a huge amount. The war did not start there, anyway.

Qaddafi was no angel but most of my Libyan friends can tell you that life was 10x better back when he was around. they can tell you that stones weren’t hurled when they leave the house without a headscarf. Libya was happier, and especially women.

Yet Libyans under Gaddafi rose up. If NATO hadn't gotten rid of Gaddafi, we could have had another Syria and another country where IS was really strong. That would have been inconvenient - imagine two big fronts against IS rather than one.

A modern state with a seemingly grim future of water scarcity, oil, no native blue-collar working force, no real military. All you have to do is give it a slight push and it will fall over into the Persian Gulf towards their potential future overlords.

A miracle that anyone there sleeps well during the night given how precarious the situation there apparently is.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/09/world/...ees-countries/
http://america.aljazeera.com/article...-refugees.html

I don't see anything there contradicting what I wrote, namely that they don't get permanent residence.