I know that I promised to stop this debate, but I cant help myself, as it is actually a very important one for the whole situation of ÆUG and its nembers
The core in a racist way of thinking is, that you judge people not on their individual properties but rather on their belonging to a certain group like ”whites”, ”blacks”, “muslims”, “jews” etc. and then attach some negative properties to that group as a whole.
Being racist is therefore essentially the same as being biased, prejudiced etc. The problem with the word racist is therefore not, that it is “wrong” in a situation like this. The problem is, that it is a very strong value laden statement, and that it was used to liberally in the past. In Denmark 20 years ago, it was quite common to label anyone, who pointed out problems with immigration and wanted a tighter immigration policy, as a “racist”. Which is clearly to abuse the word, since many of these people were and are not racists, and they were actually right in many ways (just look at Voldsmose etc. - enough said). And because the word racist was abused in the past, today even a correct and legitimate use of the word is often received very negatively
But a racist / prejusticed way of thinking is actually a huge problem in current danish immigration policy, since it is strongly centered around the idea, that immigration from “western” countries is “good”, while immigration from “non western” countries is “bad”.
All official statistics in Denmark and therefore also all news stories and all debate is based on the nationality of immigrants, who are then split into “western” and “non-western” countries. And the obvious problem with that is, that it completely ignores the fact, that immigration types from these two groups of countries are not the same. At lot of the immigration from “non-western” countries has been in the form of unskilled work migrants (before 1973) and refugees (mainly after 1983), while these immigration types are almost completely absent from “western” countries.
So when comparing job frequencies, crime rates etc between people from “western” and “non-western” countries, you are comparing apples with oranges and also focusing on something, that is fairly irrelevant for the determination of the proper policies. Because what you can actually do is to change the rules of the greencard scheme or the rules for family reunification, not the rules for “immigration from non-western countries”, since there are no such rules in the first place.
Moreover because the previous government and the Danish Peoples Party (DPP) has been so obsessed with the nationality of immigrants, they have also completely missed out on obtaining the much more relevant data related to different types of immigration.
There are therefore no data showing how e.g. family migrants, skilled workers, unskilled workers or refugees fare in Denmark as groups. And while data for refugees can be estimated, since some nationalities are almost 100% refugees and most others near 0%, the same is not the case with family migrants. And therefore many politicians blindly assume, that family migrants fare poorly in Denmark or have poor future prospects without actually having any data at all to support their assumptions.
This is something, that ÆUG harped on about quite a bit in the hearing this spring about the new rules for family reunification. And while the government was and still is completely unwilling to change the laws in other ways, than was agreed about in the “Tower” before the formation of the government, they actually listened to this.
So from 2013 we should finally get some relevant data, which could then perhaps help to highten the level of the future immigration debate. And hopefully also lessen the risk, that a future majority would want to reintroduce things like the point system or the immigration test, which were both largely based on a number of either false or unproven assumptions, if it was not solely an admission to DPP and its anti-muslim politics.
Another prejustice, which seems to be extremely sticky, even though there is plenty of data to disprove it, is that family migrants are almost solely from Middle East or Arab countries. DPP does not make a secret out of the fact, that it is mainly from these countries, they want less immigration due to cultural and religions issues. But the immigration test, which DPP demanded the introduction of, had a much larger effect on immigration from the far east than the middle east, which makes the whole thing pretty pointless to say the least
