Always a cute little euphemism for it.
Politicians are quick to criticize when Russia does it, but I guess it's okay because it's Europe. They have magic cheese that can only be bought from one island in Greece........
I'm still mourning the pre gdpr Internet. Now productivity took a hit for cookie theater.
Their biggest ploy was they convicted people 1984 was a description of a communist dictatorship, and not an execution manual for European democracies on how to strengthen their grips.
Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA were "standing on own feet".
That disappeard, now EU is fascist. Somehow Orban never was tho.
It’s just so disappointing how the EU is still so popular across Europe.
Funny given it's not and was never supposed to be a "democracy" or a federation for that matter.
> That disappeard, now EU is fascist
Not necessarily? Mass surveillance is something integral to totalitarian states of any leaning.
> Not necessarily?
I dont think it is fascist, but yes people on HN call it fascist more often then is reasonable.
The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.
Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.
> now EU is fascist.
Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...
Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...
Here is small excerpt:
The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.
War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.
If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.
If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.
So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
Obviously this doesn't always happen, but there's only an extremely small minority that think otherwise.
Maybe put me in the otherwise camp. Disappointed democracy produced Trump. Maybe we need a technocracy to defend the world from China.
Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission).
"The CLOUD Act allows United States authorities to request data from cloud providers and other covered service providers regardless of where the data is physically stored. The act is not limited to companies based in the United States. It applies to "all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate or have a legal presence in the U.S". Courts can require parent companies to provide data held by their subsidiaries."
Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat
You're asking the group profiting from current arrangement to change it.
The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)
The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).
There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.
Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.
So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?
There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).
There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.
Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.
Will we end up with a hodgepodge of national rules from each EU country that is effectively unenforceable? Or is there a different mechanism that allows the EU to enforce a blanket rule over all the EU nations?
55% of voters voted no despite the constant propaganda on TV nudging people to vote yes.
In 2007, the new French president was elected, he was very pro EU (like the vast majority of French politicians), after several meeting behind closed doors, it was decided to bypass the will of the people though the ratification of a treaty without a referendum. The Lisbon Treaty, was voted by the Parliament.
We can argue that this was decided by the French politicians and not EU politicians but we are now two decades into it and the same playbook have been used over and over.
The EU constantly dilute responsibilities. Our local politicians will claim they can't do much, this is now decided in the EU and the EU politicians will claim that the national governments decided to adopt this on their own terms.
We are now completely deprived of any freedom and I personally made the choice to leave the EU because it gives a bad taste to live in a place where everything is decided behind closed door without any possibility to vote on anything.
As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.
The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.
Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.
That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.
Maybe local(European states) won't care as long as they can use it against their people in their feifdom.
It's important to lay the blame on who is actually pushing this crap.
It's little coincidence that the EU parliament, who actually represents the people, that keep shooting shit like this down.
This is an incredibly uninformed take on how the EU is structured and completely undermine the argument you’re trying to make.
Democracy with Brussels characteristics.
This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
The problem is quite simple: people swing more to one side or another if their voices are not heard.
The current boogeyman is the growth of the far-right in Europe. But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.
Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm
more effective tools for law enforcement
in the press release and then infers or implies that this means more encryption backdoors, but I could not find that in an actual EU text?
(Edit: I'm not doubting that they want to make backdoors mandatory, I'd just like to see the actual text.)
More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies
Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data:
…
· A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement,
· A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules.
I have heard this term used before. I think in the chat control stuff.
Its a red herring term. More like unlawful access and they don't want people to suspect that they are trying to illegally break and harm communications
"See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.
Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.
Because said criminals will politely follow the law and use the broken, backdoor-ed encryption? Instead of the widely available opensourced true encryption? Of course not.
The true goal is mass surveillance - not protection from <insert-bad-thing-everybody-has-to-agree-is-bad>
Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.
It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years
There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.
And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.
The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.
Guess I found the trap phrases.
Things will very quickly turn around.
(That, or narrow exceptions will be carved out for those in power.)
Not always a different wrap even. They can essentially do "let's end the encryption this quarter, eh?" "No? Okay, we'll try in 3 months".
Sure, this may be a topic that flies under the radar of common people, because they mostly do not understand implications well enough, but what if it was a push for something that is understandable as very sinister by everyday person?
Would the system allow that?
And lots of people here are spouting FUD.
In the ensuing period, the EU took expert advice later in 2025, and as they say in an update a few months later in June 2025[1]:
The High-Level Group recommended taking a cautious approach to designing solutions for lawful access to systems, whereby industry should not be asked to integrate systems that are likely to weaken encryption in a generalised or systemic way for all users of a service. Lawful access to data must remain targeted and limited to specific communications on a case-by-case basis.
As a general rule, any solutions should be implemented based on clear standards that are developed with input from all stakeholders, including industry representatives, data protection, privacy and cybersecurity experts, and law enforcement practitioners. However, caution is warranted when dealing with encryption, as underlined by the High-Level Group.
It is instead quite clear from the above that the experts are on "our" side AND the EU are listening to them.
Instead, all these publications are just a reflection of a democratic process of discussing modern threats. The documents clearly mention "terrorism, organised crime, online fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse, online sexual extortion, ransomware".
So it is only fair and reasonable that politicians should be discussing ways to counter these threats. And quite honestly they would not be doing their job if someone did not MENTION "encryption" and ask "the question" to the experts and other stakeholders.
The fact they are DISCUSSING "encryption" does not automatically mean they want to backdoor it.
I know it is alien to people in the US under the present administration, but this is how proper politics works. You openly discuss issues of the day, you seek opinions from stakeholders and experts, rinse and repeat until you make a decision (or not). The present US administration could do with learning a thing or two. ;)
People here need to rein in the FUD.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
I believe it has to do with the influx of Muslim migrants and the instability it brings in European societies which could lead to civil war. Politicians realize they need more tools in their toolbox to put a lid on possible unrest, dissent, protests against immigration and upheaval.
It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well.
IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).
Like the bad actors can make E2E apps and side load or have their own store. Now with LLMs, this is increasingly trivial.
You cannot stop pedophiles and terrorists from using math.
They might as well try to outlaw the Pythagorean theorem.
This just makes your average law of abiding citizen more vulnerable and the surveillance state more powerful.
The legislation currently have weak surface level protections against encryption backdoors, but law enforcement are seeking to remove those. The legislation also requires mandatory data retention and surveillance, which also means that messaging apps will ban Canada.
From the article: "The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented." - so a revival of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra?
The question that I have: what do they fear so much they spend so much time and effort trying to weaken or outright ban end-to-end encryption for private communications?
In an earlier one about Iceland and EU, people criticizing EU were downvoted, called russian bots or far-right. I don't expect much difference here.
Chat control and ProtectEU are certainly not the last totalitarian measures EU will invent, there will be more. And I find it interesting that people still defend EU without any hesitation.
Now I think the initial trade union was great and a necessary counter weight when competing with larger economies and countries. But it rather quickly evolving into something that is less concerned about the citizens, and more about staying in power.
Our national government only legislates on populist issues. Racist laws, more surveillance, less oversight of cops and authorities, bans on big dogs and burkahs etc. - either symbolic issues that affect very few people in reality or mostly just limiting freedom and civil rights, never expanding on it.
I don’t like that we have many unelected technocrats and the corruption sucks, but the EU changes my life for the better. I honestly can’t say that about our national governments over the past two decades.
Last year, there many seemed to have major concerns about Hungary but again it was pointed out that things could be turned around. I don't see how the US is doing to turn this around.
Depends on where you live. If for example you live in the UK, they will jail you until you pony up the PIN to your phone and any other passwords they want from you. Don't know how it is other countries.
There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.
It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.
There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".
The next generation must understand how stuff works. If we have privacy and no education, we might get burnt on stakes because any invented stupid reasons, no matter if someone read or not your communications.
In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.
A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.
The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.
So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.
[1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.
I'm pretty sure they'd see it as a win, at least unless it led to massive public backlash. So why not skip that step and just give them the backlash?
The blockchain was designed originally to survive state-level attacks. I responded because you brought up both the subject of censorship resistance and cryptocurrency, implying that the two are unrelated, when the former is the latter's raison d'etre.
Fine for us, my mom is never managing.
Hopefully if it gets more mainstream some of these things get smoothed out, because it's nice once it's working.
[1] https://benharri.org/matrix-sucks/ [2] https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07 [3] https://piegames.de/dumps/a-week-in-matrix/
It's indoctrination, math, and reading.
- 57% of A. think the USA contribute to peace in the world a great or a fair amount.
- Republicans and supporter think so at 82%.
- Outside of the USA, the median is at 35%.
> Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative
The experts they choose can just be anyone with a bit of authority whom the bureaucrats can find to support what they already want to do. Plus lots of paid expert consultants to make plans after the policy is enacted who know to tell them what they want to hear.
It's similar to the US media when they bring expert talking heads on their shows (academics, ex-military, etc). They come prepackaged with views the network's want.
The EU has plenty of deficiencies, but calling it a dictatorship is wildly inaccurate.
There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects.
Why would you create such a blatant red herring?
But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
What kind of loss of power are you referring to?
Let the MEPs of each country vote on who amongst them will sit on the Commission.
For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control.
This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.
The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had.
But if law enforcement wants to be lazy, they can say, look, this whole search warrant business is so tedious, and even then it might take time before the owner capitulates, so why not just pass a law that requires all locks to have backdoors in them so we can open them? Then we can just let ourselves into someone's home whenever we feel like it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave a bona fide need to do so in order to protect the public.
The latter is what the EU Commission is trying to do.
Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".
There's a matter of scale and friction. If the police have to work for six hours to get into something, they can't mass-surveil that way. While we still might not like that, it's much better than mass surveillance.
It used to be like that - they'd have to clip an expensive machine onto someone's phone line to record who they called. They'd have to tail someone to know where they went. Criminal still got caught in those days.
Same idea, yeah. One of the issues with "TSA-approved" locks is that the corresponding keys are widely available. We should not expect a government backdoor key to be secured any better than that.
The idea of backdoors needs to be drawn and quartered, and the pieces buried under crossroads.
This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.
You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.
The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.
And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!
There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.
Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.
Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.
The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.
I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.
The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.
Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.
That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.
So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.
And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.
”> In reality, they want to be dictators. Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.”
Edit: to expand on what I mean. I read so much negativity and hyperboles here on the EU. It is full of problems absolutely but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame. EU has problems but what large organization works better? US? India? China? Brazil? I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.
A (raising an issue): This hole in the wall sucks, I can't stand it. At least if we were in a tent we could sew it shut.
B (planter of herrings): So you'd rather live in a tent than in a house? Don't you know that tents are generally worse than houses?
C (the innocent bystander lead astray): I also much prefer houses. You hear so many bad things about them, but in the end nothing is better. No caves, no huts, and certainly no tents. I'd pick a house any day of the week.
Did you notice that we are no longer talking about the hole in the wall? The hole could be required for mold-prevention, it could just be an oversight that is actually fixable, it might be a trade-off. But since we are no longer talking about the hole we will never know.
> ... but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame.
This is you talking about the hole in the wall. I am also not convinced by the original argument, but I do believe that there is some substance to be explored.
> ... I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.
This is you falling for the red herring. We don't know if the original poster lives in the EU. We don't know if they prefer it to a dictatorship, but it also does not matter. The original qualms are that there is seemingly no single point you can go to to stop the endeavor once and for all, which in this context is encryption backdoors within the EU. We could be talking about how the same mechanics that make this so frustrating are useful elsewhere; find out or explain why the things are the way they are. We could be uncovering a valid flaw in the system just waiting to be fixed; conclude that things don't have to be this way. Instead, we ask ourselves if we like living in the EU better than in other places. We've lost the plot, so to speak: There is no more insight to be had.
This is what makes a red herring so obnoxious to deal with. It is an easy trap to lay if you don't want to think about something or hinder someone, but takes so much effort to recover from. In the tent-example it is easy to see that we completely derailed and stopped talking about what matters. Unfortunately, reality is much more subtle and not everyone has the same goals in mind. At least on HN I'd like to try and keep discovery in focus and once we reach the stage where it's only about opinions there is nothing more to discover.
That is, it's government had this, as an "inside the room" participant. Power is often exercised by that means; in fact one definition of power is your having the means to sway others. For example, in the 90s the EU was debating whether to "deepen or widen", i e. to become more like a single state, or to admit more members. Germany and France led the faction that wanted to deepen, the UK, along with smaller allies, preferred to widen and admit more members from Eastern Europe. The UK's preference prevailed.
Because this mostly happened in diplomatic negotiations, it's not so well known, the press thought that EU bureurocracy was a better story.
To some extent countries are bound by EU law, but what this means depends on the institutions and legal structure within that country. Although the EU tends to claim they have final say, but how can someone interpreting national law agree with that if the EU goes against the law they are interpreting? Even if the EU is right they can only ask members to acoid contradiction, they lack the force to demand it.
Which makes current model, and federated model impossible and/or prone to crumbling. Problems of Germany are different than one Spain faces, and France, and Poland etc.
It seems like its operating as a government too me, but maybe I am not seeing the whole picture.
The government could also do this for the EU, it's called leaving the EU.
And this makes a lot of sense with rules about food safety, product standards etc. It almost makes sense for privacy protections. It makes very little sense for surveillance laws.
I wouldn't even mind if they would be honest about what they claim (being nationalist), but I don't see any right wing party talking seriously about programs to encourage natality, reduce poverty or improve education. Blaming a generic category for your problems rarely solves said problems.
So, for me the boogeyman is talking about superfluous generic topics rather than solutions to problems I see: education, natality, energy, industry.
In the UK they've switched from attacking immigrants to attacking disability benefits, because the clampdown on immigration was effective (though they obviously are continuing to shout about immigration and immigrants).
So if the "open-door" immigration policy didn't exist, they would have picked something else as the wedge issue. They DGAF about immigration per se, it's just something that will rile up the base and get attention.
They still have 2-3 times the amount of migration they did in the 90's and that is assuming they're not masively underestimating again?
I believe there are more nuances to this, then simply blaming it on immigration policies. There are a lot of variables in place for why far right movements are and have been on the rise in the EU. And I certainly believe the issues could've been handled better by each member state.
Yes, immigration is a serious problem. Especially if member States doesn't increase budgets for handling said immigrants.
After all, why does immigration even happen in the first place? Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.
Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...
You allow onky the highly skilled ones who cannot reach their potential from where they come from.
> Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.
False. No need for outside workers. There are about 500mm europeans, abs not all of them are old. You remove the benefits and all of a sudden you get a few tens of millions of able bodied people looking for work. Problem solved without importing people from other places.
> Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...
Turn on the TV or read a newspaper to see how much crime is caused by wanton unchecked migrants invading Europe.
Even for places where we import migrant workers it does not take long until they start creating drug trafficking rings and resort to violence.
I am not blaming the poor. Europe has plenty of thise too. But at least we have cultural similarities and don’t resort to violence unlike the migrants that wash up on the shores of Europe, which conviniently all have smartphones ready to be used.
I'd also want to go to SV, California, NY, Portland, etc as a better place to live, yet I need to do it legally, which I can't because of how hard getting a US work visa is, so I won't. Migration to the EU should be the same. Only accept people with a legal visa and nobody else. You're not entitled to be allowed to come in any country you want just because you want a better place to live. Those who do think otherwise, please open the doors of your house to everyone who wants to come in for a better place to live and take them in.
> The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to.
From various statistics from various EU governments you can look up, about half the migrants that they get via the open borders system are either unemployed or a general net negative to society, consuming more from the state via welfare than they contributor back via taxes. And that's when you don't even consider per capita crimes where migrants from some nations are overrepresented in jails per capita.
So how many are "hard working entrepreneurial ones" is the EU actually getting and does that offset the societal and lives lost due to migrant crime and terror attacks?
"Sure, your daughter doesn't feel safe alone at night and your wife got run over by a truck attacker, but just think of the GDP growth due to all the entrepreneurs that came with them"
You don't need more budget for migrants, but less budgets for migrants, removing the welfare incentive so they stop coming.
Just be Like Singapore. They don't have a migration problem. It is really that simple. Stop funding NGOs that treat your welfare state like a charity for the entire planet to come and feast one. This is not part of the social contract of the welfare state, nor is it economically sustainable long term.
>Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
Who is this "WE" here? My and many countries in the EU didn't do anything to destabilize the word stage so don't try to pin this "original sin" on me and us. If some EU nations have some guilt they wish to wash due to their colonial past, it should be their consequences alone, but please don't drag everyone down with your sucidian empathy because this is how you guarantee the rise of the far right and how you destroy Europe.
1. My country never colonized any other part if the world.
2. This does not mean that say Germany or France must import millions of “migrants” because their ancestors made some terrible choices in the past.
3. If they want to import “migrants”, they should screen them and only import highly skilled to extrenely skilled ones.
How far do you want to go back?
The illegal migration was an easy target for this since it's indeed the only thing some people are opposed to and it doesn't quite activate a big created class of people that have a migrant background.
You know, not all dictatorships are inherently bad. Look at the Gulf states: they have a high number of immigrants, but at the same time they don't have Germany's or France's problems. You do something there, you're jailed and after you finish your sentence you're on the first plane out. No drama, no years long court fights etc.
Amazingly on TV in Europe (watching 3 countries) I see how many women are killed by their partners (nicely born here), how politicians are (occasionally, mostly rarely) arrested for building mobster like organizations, how large enterprises (own by locals) avoid paying taxes.
The poor don't resort to violence? I wonder what blessed country are you in for the poor to afford to be nice. 30 years ago in the quite poor Eastern Europe (now part of EU, not that poor anymore) there was direct violence (sure, not concentrated like a terrorist attack) like mugging or rapes or just people beating others on the street because they "did not like how you look". All that without immigrants. So yeah, kind of hard for me to blame so much immigrants for all the violence.
And on that, 70s and 80s the was perfectly calm no? No terrorist attack IRA, ETA (found easy a reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks - 829 deaths), Italian mob and the like were "freedom fighters" probably...
I am definitely not for completely open borders. And immigration should be controlled. And some people should be deported. I just do not think it is the "largest" problem that it is presented, and I find discussing it avoiding other thorny, complex issues (energy, climate, education, etc.).