Last night (Monday), public TV (ARD) in Germany....ran the weekly live forum show....Hart Aber Fair (Hard But Fair). The topic? Migration and refugees.
It was a fairly intense show, with the moderator, two political folks, and three journalists.
Over the past year, immigration and asylum has been discussed a great deal via TV reports....mostly over the Med, but more recently over Greek migration camps, and Syrian/Iraqi folks attempting to leave Turkey for central Europe.
There are basically three camps existing in Germany at this point (at least from my humble view). You have the pro-crowd who wants the door open and thousands to enter (the year-number is always left blank but you tend to get the impression it won't ever be more than 10,000). The second group is the anti-migration crowd who wants a very tight door to exist, and bulk entry simply will not be accepted. The third group (the larger of three).....stands and asks a lot of questions. These are typically questions that politicians and journalists hate to answer. This group also would like someone in charge, and someone to be held accountable.....which is something that the Merkel coalition has never been able to create this image.
You can go over to the site of the show, and watch the hour-long discussion....which got a bit heated at times. It's worth a review.
The results of the 2014-2015 period are still fresh in the minds of people, with the clean-up period of 2016 often discussed, and the political consequences year of 2017 the final harsh end-result.
It's almost a nightly thing via the two public TV networks.....to talk over the Greek camps, the Turkish use of refugees, and the boat-people of Africa trying to be rescued. A fair number of Germans have reached the point where they see the segment pop-up, and automatically hit the 'mute-button' on the TV remote control.
Politically, both the CDU and SPD (the king-pins of German politics for the past seventy years) have lost a great deal of support from the voters. The far left (the Greens and Linke Party) are the ones who've picked up the voter support for pro-asylum. The AfD Party has picked up the votes for anti-asylum. So the CDU and SPD try to maintain a minimal position on the topic and just hope that they can continue to slide by.
This entire discussion now affecting secondary topics? Well....yes. You can't really resolve the affordable housing crisis in metropolitan German cities....without bringing up how many new immigrants moved into the cities, and helped to bring up a shortage of housing for the general population. You can't bring up crime that much because the statistics will show at least one-third of all charged individuals in most acts of crime.....are non-German. You can't bring up the impending labor issues because of a declining population, because the replacement workers are mostly non-German.
If you did try to assemble data and make a case over the 'bad-boys' of asylum or migration....the data can't really make a factual case. Maybe over the whole of Germany, with 83-million in population.....you might only be talking about 150,000 individuals who are non-German and considered 'problems'. But a fair number of the non-Germans 'bad-boys' are not really asylum 'players' (being from the Ukraine, Russia, Lebanon, Albania, Serbia, etc).
These public chat forums do provide decent information, but often end up as a harsh-reality moment.....where people strongly disagree on the various outcomes. As in last night's case, it just stirred up more people to have a serious position on the outcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment