Sunday, March 15, 2009

To Vera Izrailit, part II

Vera's previous post here. This is a short answer only.

On the question of statistics, I'm not a social scientist, so I don't feel competent to comment on the statistics. The post I linked to and cited quoted sources on the adjustment of statistics to compensate for age groups and socioeconomic factors, and I'm not competent to critique those.

As for the socioeconomic factors - you are right, they do affect it. What difference does it make, though? Crime is still crime[.]

What difference does it make? All the difference in the world. It's totally dishonest to compare the entire Iraqi or Somali population to the entire Finnish population, when the Iraqi and Somali populations in Finland are made up of a totally different mix of social classes, ages and income classes than the Finnish population. I don't mean to be rude, but if you don't understand that, then I'm going to have a hard time believing you're qualified to be commenting in any way on statistics either.

In one sense, I'm presenting my argument badly, and I apologize for that. I want to point out a matter of principle here, and jumping from facts and statistics to principle like this is bad form. Nevertheless, the problem with arguing for accepting less refugees because previous refugees have committed crimes is, to me, totally unethical as it constitutes punishing future refugees for the crimes of other people.

I promise, as soon as Finland changes its policies in such a way that half of working-age refugees are self-supporting after 4 months of being here, I'll say "hurrah, let's get more refugees!" right here in this blog. In fact, if you can find any statistics of any refugee group doing so now, I can say "hurrah, let's get more of those!" now.

And this, really, to me is the core problem. If the problem is Finnish policies, not refugees, why on earth are you agitating against refugees, instead of for political change in Finland?

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