Germany is blowing up again over migration. The Saxon town of Bautzen has, like dozens of similar places across Germany, a barracks for some of the million or two Middle Eastern migrants who have been streaming across the Mediterranean for the past year-and-a-half. People in Bautzen aren’t used to foreigners, and now groups of young men have taken to congregating in city’s central square, the Kornmarkt. The migrants say they come there for the free internet. This upsets the locals, 80 of whom waged a pitched battle against 20 teenage migrants on Wednesday evening. Alcohol was involved on both sides. To judge from the video at FAZ.com, accounts differ on who is to blame. The Germans say that the young migrants (whom they refer to as UMAs, the German acronym for unaccompanied minors seeking asylum) are harassing women and smashing things. The UMAs, in turn, say the locals (whom they refer to as “Nazis”) accost them every day with shouts of “Foreigners out!”
The confrontations take place against the background of a more general society-wide anger in Germany. Last Saturday, Bautzen’s right-wingers and left-wingers confronted each other on the streets, rather as they did a century ago in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Germany’s defeat in World War I. On Thursday night, following the fights, 350 people, most of them natives, were on the streets again. A cordon of police was required to separate the pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant sides—again, much as they once tried to separate the Communists and anti-Communists. More protests are planned for this weekend.
The anger overflows in all directions. Here is a picture of a kid kicking a TV cameraman. At a European Union summit in Bratislava, German chancellor Angela Merkel, who issued the invitation to the Middle Eastern migrants in the summer of 2015, said the EU was now in a “critical situation.” Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg politician who serves as the EU president, blamed forty years of British “lies” for the union’s problems. Someone tweeted that the summit looked like a funeral from the old Soviet politburo.
Clearly Germans are losing patience with immigration. Why should that be? After careful study, Germany’s elite journalists have concluded that the only possible explanation is a mental problem. Spiegel journalist Klaus Brinkbäumer complained about the drubbing Merkel’s Christian Democrats received at the hands of the hard-right Alternative for Germany party in the state of Mecklenberg/Western Pomerania on September 4: “The vote was essentially a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies,” Brinkbäumer wrote, “yet there are hardly any foreigners living in the state. We have more data and facts available to us than ever before, and yet we have entered a post-fact era.”
Versions of this bizarre argument—essentially, that it is legitimate to oppose immigration only if you live among immigrants—will be familiar to those following the US elections. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has written that Donald Trump has done well “in places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, all of which have relatively small Latino populations.” His explanation is the same as Brinkbäumer’s. Support for immigration is about facts. Opposition to immigration is about phantasms. “That’s not to say that opposition to immigration is absent in places like London or San Diego,” Drum writes. “But these places mostly seem to have adapted to it and figured out that it’s not really all that bad. It’s everywhere else, where immigration is mostly a fear, that anti-immigrant sentiment has the strongest purchase.”
British journalists had a field day with this trope when immigration became the central issue in the successful “Brexit” referendum to pull Britain out of the EU. “Fear of immigration drove the Leave victory—not immigration itself,” was the Rooseveltian note the Guardian‘s headline writers placed over a mostly sensible analysis.”
In fact, there are many reasons why low-immigration parts of the country might be much more enthusiastic about immigration. One is that, in high-immigration areas, immigration is so high that it is largely the immigrants themselves who are asked to pass judgment. In Camden Town, in London, the Brexit vote was 75% to Remain in the EU and 25% to Leave. But Camden Town itself is 42% foreign-born. If one were to gauge the sentiment among the native-born (which is what newspaper articles are structured to imply), the results would have been closer to even. They would still be in favor of remaining in the European Union, of course. The native-born who live in such places are self-selected as being willing to live among a population that is two-fifths migrant.
The assumption of much journalism on the subject of immigration is that it is rational to wish to live among migrants but irrational to wish not to. This is the fallacy called “begging the question” – using a “conclusion” you pretend to be arguing towards as one of the assumptions of your argument. Brinkbäumer holds facts in high esteem. Perhaps it is mere deference that keeps him from doing what journalists have traditionally done with facts, which is to push them into some sort of logical relation.
