Generally I do not support the positions of Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party. Actually, I find his party’s success in popular polls and the June 4 election for European Parliament quite nauseating. But I do not object to the Freedom Party’s request to outline the costs and benefits of immigration. It may in fact help to improve current integration policies. After all, meten is weten.
It’s not a very elegant analogy, but one reason crime rates in New York City are down so spectacularly is because the NYPD started to collect detailed statistics on the crime rates per neighborhood on a weekly basis. Maps of crime trends help the police department decide how, when and where to deploy its officers.
The bottom-line is that immigration can be beneficial to society, as long as you help immigrants to make best use of their talents. New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg calls immigrants “the lifeblood” of the City and their contribution “beyond measure”. New York’s immigrant community has very little unemployment and very low crime, particularly the undocumented (illegal) immigrants.
Mike Bloomberg knows best. After all, the mayor is a smart business man. In 1981 he founded Bloomberg LP, a 25 billion dollar financial news organization that employs more than 10,000 people in over 135 offices around the world. Bloomberg’s personal net worth is an estimated 16 billion dollar, according to the most recent Forbes 400 ranking. That makes him the richest man of New York City and the eighth-richest American.
So don’t trust my word on immigration. Trust Mike Bloomberg’s.
I do agree on the “meten is weten” part. However, to my opinion, there is a difference between measuring per geographical unit (city, town, neighborhood) in order to (re)deploy the police force, and doing a full cost-benefit-analysis based on ethnicity, as that is what PVV tries to do…
What would be interesting to know, then, is the cost-benefit-ratio of members/voters of political parties (e.g. PVV
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comment posted on 24/07/09 03:42