zondag 14 november 2010

Better life, no crime


“Better life. No Crime. This is what everybody wants. ... We sometimes waste money on people that don’t belong here.” The party ‘Better Life, No Crime’ is stating in these previous quotations that all the problems of crime are actually caused by immigrants or ‘people who don’t belong here’. I fully disagree with this statement. Who are the ones that don’t belong here? Do they have anything to do with crime at all?
On the 6th of November in the dutch debating television show, ‘Het Lagerhuis’, mr. Verhagen, author of ‘Hoe zo mislukt’ (‘Why unsuccesful’), claimed  that the crimes in the Netherlands are not an intergration problem but a socio-economic issue. The problem lies with the youngsters and not the immigrants. Although we’re talking here about an issue which occurs in the Netherlands I think this concerns America too. Those in financially less favorable positions are more likely to commit a crime. It won’t make any difference if we tighten the rules in the immigration policy. The amount of crime among youngsters will not reduce.
At last, America is a ‘melting pot’, a land of plural races and ethnicities, with a multicultural context. Just a little walk in the city of New York or Chicago, for example, would make any foreigner realize the presence of people of various races walking down the street: probably Caucasians, Hispanics, African, Americans, Asian, and so on. Who are ‘the ones that don’t belong here? The britisch who colonized the Americas in the late 16th century? The ones who I think only belong in America are the Indians. We can not claim that the british are the ones that ‘belong’ in the United States of America. Africans, for example, are the direct descendants of captive Africans who survived the slavery era within the boundaries of the present United States. African-American history starts in the 17th century. These are american citizens too. Or do the African-American not belong in the United States?
African, Hispanics, Caucasians, ‘Americans’ they all belong in the United States of America, because the United States of America is a melting pot. We can not blaim the immigrants for the crimes that some immigrants and citizens commit. We can not solve crime by reducing the ammount of immigrants. This is a serious socio-economic issue and not an integration issue.  

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