IMMIGRATION thread

[Husar]

Sweden makes quality stuff. But tell me, even if they have a good reason to want to move to Sweden, what reason do they have to not behave themselves in Sweden? Only South-Africa has worse rape-statistics. Guess whos doing it.

None, did I ever say otherwise? The only issue I have with what you say is that when you talk about the people who move there and the ones who do not behave, you say "they" in both cases, which can easily look like you mean exactly the same group of people (i.e. all of them). It's not so hard to say "some of them" in the second instances to make it clear that you mean a sub-group, is it? Or are you actually saying that none of the immigrants in Sweden can behave themselves?
And please don't talk about common sense or whatever, you do this all the time and it confuses people all the time.

Thanks for the links.
The plans to build an arms factory in Saudi Arabia is of course far from acceptable. But I cannot see any trace in your sources (good that they are for the matter they discuss), for Sweden supplying offensive military equipment to states which are party to the conflict in Syria. There is no flood of refugees from Pakistan, Egypt or Thailand, though I will agree that we should not sell them weapons either. One of your articles writes about technology transfers and sales to India, which I would consider a good thing if anything. As for the Bofors guns, it is simply so that once a weapon has been sold there is very little that the Swedish state can do to control where they go next.

I'm not against arms deals in general, but some governments just can't be trusted with them. Including the US government apparently. While I like Colombia in general, it is currently not a country to which german arms exports are legal. The rules state that arms cannot be sold to any country if that country wants to resell them. Heckler & Koch sold guns to the US Army and they then sold or gave them on to Colombia. The german police raided the Heckler & Koch offices as a result due to the suspicion that Heckler & Koch was aware the guns would not stay in the USA. So yes, it is not always completely controllable, but I'd say it's pretty clear like you say, that countries like Saudi Arabia are not reliable customers for our weapons. We can't even exclude that they don't hand some of them to their allies in Syria or elsewhere. In addition Saudi Arabia and the UAE are currently involved in a war in the region to support their own interests and are definitely using European weapons such as the Leclerc tanks of the UAE. I'm not entirely up-to-date on who the bad guys are down there but it certainly produces a lot of refugees and Saudi Arabia is not exactly known to have our best interests in mind anyway. If even the US ignore our weapon sales restrictions in the most blatant way, how can we trust SA or other unreliable countries to abide by them?

As a fun tidbit, are you aware that Bofors was founded as a way to circumvent restrictions on Nazi German weapons production and export?

Nope, that's pretty interesting though. I only knew that a whole lot of nations used the 40mm design though, apparently some were derivatives or modified ones, but overall quite a widespread gun.

Are you aware of the concept of taxes? It is this fun notion where we collectively decide to give the government money in order for services to be rendered. Not to be squandered to the tune that we spend more on newly arrived immigrants this year than the entire Afghan state budget including aid.

There are so many things to say about that:
1) I wouldn't say it is squandered on all of the immigrants.
2) I like the idea that I pay taxes to help those who are more in need, both Germans and foreigners.
3) If you do not like what the government spends taxes on, you can elect a different government. In some cases it may have other consequences though or require a new party. Democracy isn't always easy.
4) If your other countrymen do not agree with you and do not vote for the government you want, what are you going to do? Flee to somewhere else to save your precious taxes from being squandered?