Europe

Not because of some vague feeling, but because I myself, friends and acquaintances have been harassed, insulted, robbed, sexually assaulted, and violently injured. I’m visibly queer and can’t use public transport at night anymore because of repeated harassments. I had to run more than once.

I am sorry that this happened to you.

However:

• I do know that locally, in this Eastern German town, right-wing asshats use general feelings pretty much exclusively and don't even care that crime rates have gone down quite significantly or that we're doing better than other cities.
• I do have right-wing family. I can tell you that the only reason you don't run from them in public-transit contexts is that they use cars not transit.

On top of that Islamist knife and vehicle wielding terrorists didn’t used to murder in my city 10 years ago.

Are these a common sight now? And if both of these happened in your city, then I suspect the only German city you may be living in is Berlin.

Yes, poor young single males are more likely to be violent criminals. Maybe that’s a reason to not take them in in huge numbers?

... Or maybe, they're coming here in any case and European societies have too few young working-age people, so on average they're come in extremely handy?

The real learning from this should be not to let social outcomes go to shit for less well-off people.

You’re conflating Islam and Islamism.

I am not. I understand it might read like that though.

However, I meant Islam. E.g. anti-headscarf laws to me, are generally anti-Islam, not anti-Islamism.

Most Muslims are normal and well behaved folks.

So maybe these 40% migrants in some age groups are not all a danger to social cohesion then?

Of course the right populists use issues of demographics, migration, identity, crime, anlienation, etc. to the detriment of the working class. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any real issues.

I guess we're finding common ground there. Except I see that issues arise in terms of there being a large potential of fucking up integration. Like, e.g. Germany which has just cut a lot of money for language courses which were already overflowing to the degree that people couldn't register for way too long.

And yes, different cultures approach problems differently and tend to have different values, and that will obviously lead to certain issues. As long as violence and wild insults are credibly off-limits, there's no real harm in that.