http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/no ... ght-threat



Now let's hope they'll wane soon enough.

Exeunt stage left.

Interesting, to say the least. It appears the far right exploits what other political parties left untouched. I'm very curious as to whether a right-wing political party such as those could succesfully run a country. But do these migrants cause any actual problems? Problems worth deporting for?

Well, non-Western immigrants overall fare less well than people who were born here or Western immigrants. This is of course not surprising simply because of cultural differences and language barriers (there are barriers even if one goes to the official language courses (and the quality of those courses are not uniformly good, either)) and to add that many non-Western immigrants are generally poor while the size of the welfare state has overall decreased in Europe. There are also issues with motivation and other problems which mainly lie within the communities themselves and because of more poverty crime is higher as well, but there is really nothing to mitigate the idiotic hardline pursued by the far right. Their tone is rather generalising and there is a lot of prejudice in there.

It is also important to know that much of the bigotry isn't aimed only at immigrants, but also at descendants of immigrants, who are called allochtonous (foreign). Most immigrants obviously try to create connections with the existent community with origins from their former home country and issues discussed above are also issues that play in these communities, though the is a bias in focus.

Indeed the far right exploits issues not addressed by other parties (whether conventional or not) including some which no democratic party should ever try to address, but we must not forget that there is also a large portion of "utopian" escapism that would turn even the most orthodox Marxists and the most strident neo-liberal pallid. The draconic immigration laws are an example of this, but also attempts to introduce religious discrimination are rather illustrative.

Very fair points Villerar. I cannot judge, but I think that the far-right enthusiastics are reacting to some kind of pressure that should have been addressed by the democratic political parties. As for the rising crime rates, in all honesty, they are likely caused by migrants, who are themselves forced to act as they do due to the lack of options.

In the very end, a large portion of the issue can be attributed to the government and economic crisis.

There are, indeed. I think quite some support comes from people who are disillusioned with neo-liberalism to a degree, but who are not left-wing. I think the main left parties (generally social democrats) have been far too tolerant of neo-liberalism. Now many of those far-right parties are quite neo-liberal themselves (strong free trade agendas, shrill opposition to various kinds of subsidies, limiting welfare (in particular for people of non-European (or as they say: immigrant) descent) and pushing for heavy cuts on culture (just look at my country :/)), they tend to copy some issues from the left side of spectrum for electoral gains.

There's indeed a lot of dissatisfaction due to the crisis and I think this contributes both to xenophobia and a call for cuts, not to mention the rampant irrationality.

As you probably can discern, I'm from the opposite side of the spectrum.