7 ms·

German contest to live in depopulated Soviet-era city proves global hit

41 points by c420 1y ago

pavel_lishin 1y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44339123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44339123
londons_explore 1y ago
> The strength of the anti-migrant, If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...
- RealStickman_ 1y ago
  These right wing sentiments have never been about facts and logic
  - armada651 1y ago
    Being pro-immigration used to be a right-wing sentiment, because it was a good way to get labor costs down. And it used to be the left-wing labor parties that were against immigration for that very reason. True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.
    - Sam6late 1y ago
      Politics is a messy business.Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-door policy faced harsh criticism, but the refugees it welcomed have proven their value. Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. Beyond jobs, some have become entrepreneurs—founding startups that create new employment and bring innovation. One Syrian-founded tech company alone employs 15 people. With over 83,000 granted citizenship last year, these contributions anchor refugees as vital to Germany’s future, turning initial fears into success stories. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-immigrants-are-boosting-germany-s-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-im...
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        > Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed Is the 33% unemployment rate of these Syrians above or below the national unemployment rate average?
      - weweersdfsd 1y ago
        >> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.
      - armada651 1y ago
        That's missing the point. This is not a value judgement about whether the refugees contribute to society. By being employed they are in fact helping to keep wages lower than they would be if there was a lower supply of labor. The point is that the main benefactors of immigration are corporations, not working-class families. Thus traditionally left-wing labor parties have been against immigration. We should be using immigration to shorten the workday for everyone, thus counter-acting its effects of wage suppression and giving people more time to dedicate to relationships, thus recovering the birth rate and reducing the need for immigration. Of course this will never happen, because economic growth is more important than people's well being.
    - gdwatson 1y ago
      This is one of those cases where the left–right spectrum just doesn’t capture the interplay of various economic, social, and cultural positions.
    - jibe 1y ago
      Sanders has shifted from his old view quite a bit, and is pro immigration specifically for filling low wage jobs, and holding wages down. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020-immigration-plan-067204 https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020...
  - mhh__ 1y ago
    "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthink by people who seem to think everything can be broken down into a logical deduction from high modernist axioms (so-called facts and logic are opinionated, everything requires a numeraire)
    - kelnos 1y ago
      > "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way. To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
        bruce511 1y ago
        >> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? So basically right wing Americans?
        dotancohen 1y ago
        I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
      - mhh__ 1y ago
        Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance. That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't). We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all. Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists. Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book). Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness. If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table? I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother. And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
  - t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
    How a person feels is also a fact. I wonder if you are being selective in facts, as I'm not sure it's a politic (ie left/right matter). We could also look at facts on crime, tax contributions/burdens, etc and see a different yet factual perspective. I think the way forward is not increasing factuality (if that's even a word) but increasing people being heard and then reconciling those different perspectives. Looking for facts to entrench ones own opinions thus seems a step backwards to me. Correction: spelling
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Depends a lot on how law-abiding and civic minded the specific immigrants are.
  - tzmudzin 1y ago
    As a law-abiding civic-minded migrant I also feel unwelcome.
  - m3adow 1y ago
    In these regions of Germany it has very little to do with that, as there's hardly any immigrants in Eastern Germany, except Berlin of course. It's about prejudice and xenophobia due to the unknown.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    It really doesn't though. If a society enforces laws (and civic-minded laws are possible, such as fines for littering etc), it shouldn't matter at all. Every group of people has criminals, hard workers, productive members of society, etc.
    - spwa4 1y ago
      Exactly. Enforcing the law costs money and these cities have been saving on that for decades now. So: exactly.
    - BurningFrog 1y ago
      Every group of people has violent criminals, but it makes a big difference if it's 5% or 50%. It also matters if raping unguarded women is considered a crime or a fun hobby in your culture. Law enforcement is important, but it can never catch close to all criminals, especially if it's politically sensitive to punish disproportionate numbers of ethnic groups. The most famous example is the the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, where authorities has mostly ignored the industrial scale raping for decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o
      - 1y ago
- Dig1t 1y ago
  Well some people don’t feel like all humans are perfectly identical interchangeable units. If you magically swapped the population of Ireland with the population Japan, do you think that the Japanese would suddenly behave like Irish people just because they were now living in Ireland? Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European. If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another. It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.
  - willvarfar 1y ago
    do you have any sources for the church for mosque replacement theory?
    - Dig1t 1y ago
      There is no officially published number by the government, but 3 signs you can look at: 1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well. 2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples: > 500 CHURCHES TURNED INTO MOSQUES IN A CITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY >How 100's of Churches are transforming into Mosques! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY 3. You can find videos from UK Christians lamenting the conversion of their churches. One such example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY You can also just go and look up the number of mosques in the UK increasing over time: https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php The most popular baby name in the UK has been Mohamed for the last two years. That's also a pretty good sign.
- rayiner 1y ago
  > If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants... Do you prefer a slow death of your culture, or a catastrophic end to it?
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    False dichotomy.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      Nope. See, e.g., Hamtramck. In contrast, at least rural Japan is still Japan.
- mlinhares 1y ago
  Being anti immigrant isn’t about being sensible, it’s about having a bogeyman to blame for all problems people face. It’s much easier to say “brown people took your life away” than to face reality many small and large decisions made by the government and the people have led to the current outcome. For instance: > A palpable sense of decline has spurred support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won nearly 40% of local votes in the February general election. People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place to live given the circumstances, which is going to make those with many options to never consider a place like this. What will be left? Not much, the rust belt in the US is a good example of towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders. A friend, that’s a neurologist, moved to a small town in the Midwest, him and another dude were the two only neurologists in many and many miles, the supermarket cashier asked for his ID and if he was in the country legally and isn’t even brown, just cos of his accent. Couple of months later he moved to a large city that had no shortage of neurologists and will never come back to the countryside. These people will destroy whatever is left before they accept others, so that’s what what will be.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    There are several very different types of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. They differ by region and they also differ from the feelings in Europe. 1. Basic, racist, "this person is a different skin color". 2. "We're not racist, but they're willing to work cheaper and take our jobs". 3. "They want to keep their own culture and not integrate with ours." The third one is far less prevalent in the US than it is in Europe. I think this is for several reasons, but chief among them is that immigrants to the US do actually want to integrate into their new society, whereas immigrants to Europe generally do not. Unlike Europe, the US offers the possibility for immigrants to become as "American" as anyone else, regardless of their race or religion. Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French". This is mutually reinforcing - the French won't let them become "French", and the immigrants naturally react by not wanting to. Even if they do support liberal French cultural values without excessive judgment, which many do not, that is rarely their main reason to move there except in some political cases. The aim of immigrants to the US is not just economic prosperity, but to join the society and to be American (speaking for my own mixed Latin, Arabic and Jewish immigrant family). This leaves a situation in the US where only (1) and (2) are arguments that have any traction, and those only have traction with a backwards and racist part of the population, aka MAGA. (3) is a much more difficult question, and it would have more traction here if it were true that immigrants to the US were similar to immigrants to Europe, in only seeking economic gains and choosing to remain separate from the societal mainstream. You seem to be conflating (3) with the previous two. And maybe for some right-wing European nationalists it is. But I'm not a European white man, and myself and my Filipina partner have heard from some of those right-wing Europeans that as long as we want to learn their culture, they have no problem with us. When JD Vance goes to Europe and scorns their immigration policy, he is using #3 to their faces, but he is appealing to racist voters who claim #1 and #2 at home. Conversely, when a European tells Americans that all anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe falls into the 1 and 2 categories, you are not honestly telling them about #3. It's the same in Saudi Arabia, isn't it? You can't go get a job in an oil field and go around waving a bible and drinking bourbon. The fact that the West tolerates a lot of different beliefs and ways of life is a good thing, it adds to our diversity and that is our strength. But that tolerance for others has to also be a foundational understanding for newer arrivals who come here. And if it's not, and if they enter into open hostilities with the country that received them, then I don't think all of that can be laid at the feet of ignorant skin-color-based racism.
- deleted 1y ago
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- laughing_man 1y ago
  What if you live in a town with a shrinking population with a jobs shortage?
- anovikov 1y ago
  Almost as if in America, people vote rationally! One town where 66% of population is on medicaid and life expectancy is 10 years under the national average, just voted 88% for Trump. Sure enough, in Germany the highest anti-migrant vote is in areas where there are no migrants at all.
deleted 1y ago
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usr1106 1y ago
Depopulated sounds like nobody is living there, something like Pripyat. This town is said to have lost over 50% of its former 53,000 so still over 25,000 left. And apartments in GDR were rather small. Not a native speaker, but is depopulated really the right word here or just clickbait? At least I was expecting something else. Heavily shrunk of course.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  I guess the difference between "unpopulated" and "depopulated" is the former means no one at all, while the latter just means the population had a (meaningfully significant) decrease.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  Does decaffeinated coffee have zero caffeine? Do deboned fish have zero bones? Does debugged software have zero bugs?
  - usr1106 1y ago
    Not zero, but an only insignificant residual because zero is hard to achieve in real life. Also Pripyat has some illegal inhabitants. (I don't think debugged software is a commonly used term, so no need to discuss the meaning) Edit: Genuine question: Would native speakers call Detroit depopulated? The shrinkage seems to be about the same ratio.
    - weregiraffe 1y ago
      Does detroit contain zero troits?
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        I don't speak French, but I think that Detroit contains one big troit (strait), hence the city's name. But that's certainly less troits than bones in a deboned fish!
    - 1y ago
niemandhier 1y ago
It’s good that they try new ways to attract people. Very few people want to live in these areas. An example to illustrate how dire this situation is: I was contacted multiple times by small East German universities that literally told me, I could immediately start a professorships there. Apparently the selection process is at the moment almost a formality, since they just don’t have any applicants for the positions..
- schoen 1y ago
  Did you have a PhD or prior experience as a professor? Or was this just like "you're a smart and knowledgeable person, so you're welcome to come be a professor at our institution"? The second is culturally hard for me to imagine in Germany, but if so, that could show even more strongly how extreme the situation is!
  - anovikov 1y ago
    It most certainly means that "under a normal run of things it's a huge competition from qualified PhDs to become a full tenured professor so it means years on poorly paid intermediate positions, here there are <1.0 candidates per position so you are automatically approved".
  - benterix 1y ago
    No, the second would be both absurd and illegal, not the parent but we're talking about lack of competition here, not the end of civilization.
    - schoen 1y ago
      I think it's a striking example of the German culture in question that bypassing credential rules for professorships is "absurd and illegal". In other countries, academic labor unions might be mad about it, but it's theoretically possible that some universities might occasionally choose to grant academic teaching positions to people with unusual backgrounds. One of my great teachers at UC Berkeley was Brian Harvey, who had a PhD in education (not computer science) and only a master's degree in computer science. He was made a "lecturer with security of employment" (he could design and run courses, including courses that were mandatory for the computer science major, and give grades). David D. Friedman was a law professor at Santa Clara University and had a physics PhD and no law degree of any kind. These aren't quite the examples I want, because both of these people do have PhDs, just not in the subjects that they taught. Wikipedia gives seven examples of famous U.S. professors who in fact had no doctoral degree, and in a few cases no postgraduate education at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_States#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State... This is called "exceptional" there, and it's clearly very rare (although all of the people mentioned are quite famous, and there are presumably less famous examples); I just mean to make the cultural point that outside of Germany people tend to believe that universities are in principle allowed to make such exceptions. (There are also tertiary education institutions like community colleges that more routinely allow people without PhDs to teach, but these probably aren't relevant here because they're mostly not called universities and mostly can't issue bachelor's or higher degrees.)
rayiner 1y ago
This place looks so cute.
cyberax 1y ago
And at the same time, Berlin is struggling with skyrocketing housing costs. I wonder why people can't put two and two together and keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.
- jansan 1y ago
  People of Berlin made a particularly stupid decision when they voted against any construction on the vast empty area known as the Tempelhofer Feld. They could have had anything they wanted, like car free residential area with lots of green, but they decided that no new housing is what they want.
  - schoen 1y ago
    To be fair, they use it quite a lot for exercise and recreation, so it's not like a completely disused open space. Other very expensive cities also have relatively huge parks (like Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco). I've heard people try to estimate the real estate value of Central Park, which may be somewhere around $1,000,000,000,000. The size of Tempelhofer Feld is apparently almost exactly the same as that of Central Park, although it's probably much less used compared to Central Park. It looks like Central Park might get somewhere around four times as many visits.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    > They could have had anything they wanted, like car free residential area with lots of green, but they decided that no new housing is what they want. And the people of Berlin actually made a smart decision not to dig the hole faster.
edg5000 1y ago
I live in the Netherlands and got lucky with my housing situation, but given the prices here and the fact that I work mostly remove, I would have seriously considered moving to East Germany. I saw apartments for sale for 25k there. What I read everywhere is that there aren't many jobs available locally and the area is relatively sparsely populated, never really recovering from the damage done during the war and the years under Soviet rule.
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
Here is the jobs board for those interested... https://www.fachkraefteportal-brandenburg.de/eisenhuettenstadt-stellengebote https://www.fachkraefteportal-brandenburg.de/eisenhuettensta...
noduerme 1y ago
Turns out they didn't need all that lebensraum after all?
crises-luff-6b 1y ago
[dead]

41 points by c420 1y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44339123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44339123

> The strength of the anti-migrant, If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...

RealStickman_ 1y ago
These right wing sentiments have never been about facts and logic
- armada651 1y ago
  Being pro-immigration used to be a right-wing sentiment, because it was a good way to get labor costs down. And it used to be the left-wing labor parties that were against immigration for that very reason. True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.
  - Sam6late 1y ago
    Politics is a messy business.Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-door policy faced harsh criticism, but the refugees it welcomed have proven their value. Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. Beyond jobs, some have become entrepreneurs—founding startups that create new employment and bring innovation. One Syrian-founded tech company alone employs 15 people. With over 83,000 granted citizenship last year, these contributions anchor refugees as vital to Germany’s future, turning initial fears into success stories. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-immigrants-are-boosting-germany-s-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-im...
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      > Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed Is the 33% unemployment rate of these Syrians above or below the national unemployment rate average?
    - weweersdfsd 1y ago
      >> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.
    - armada651 1y ago
      That's missing the point. This is not a value judgement about whether the refugees contribute to society. By being employed they are in fact helping to keep wages lower than they would be if there was a lower supply of labor. The point is that the main benefactors of immigration are corporations, not working-class families. Thus traditionally left-wing labor parties have been against immigration. We should be using immigration to shorten the workday for everyone, thus counter-acting its effects of wage suppression and giving people more time to dedicate to relationships, thus recovering the birth rate and reducing the need for immigration. Of course this will never happen, because economic growth is more important than people's well being.
  - gdwatson 1y ago
    This is one of those cases where the left–right spectrum just doesn’t capture the interplay of various economic, social, and cultural positions.
  - jibe 1y ago
    Sanders has shifted from his old view quite a bit, and is pro immigration specifically for filling low wage jobs, and holding wages down. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020-immigration-plan-067204 https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020...
- mhh__ 1y ago
  "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthink by people who seem to think everything can be broken down into a logical deduction from high modernist axioms (so-called facts and logic are opinionated, everything requires a numeraire)
  - kelnos 1y ago
    > "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way. To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
      - bruce511 1y ago
        >> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? So basically right wing Americans?
        dotancohen 1y ago
        I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
    - mhh__ 1y ago
      Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance. That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't). We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all. Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists. Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book). Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness. If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table? I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother. And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  How a person feels is also a fact. I wonder if you are being selective in facts, as I'm not sure it's a politic (ie left/right matter). We could also look at facts on crime, tax contributions/burdens, etc and see a different yet factual perspective. I think the way forward is not increasing factuality (if that's even a word) but increasing people being heard and then reconciling those different perspectives. Looking for facts to entrench ones own opinions thus seems a step backwards to me. Correction: spelling
BurningFrog 1y ago
Depends a lot on how law-abiding and civic minded the specific immigrants are.
- tzmudzin 1y ago
  As a law-abiding civic-minded migrant I also feel unwelcome.
- m3adow 1y ago
  In these regions of Germany it has very little to do with that, as there's hardly any immigrants in Eastern Germany, except Berlin of course. It's about prejudice and xenophobia due to the unknown.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  It really doesn't though. If a society enforces laws (and civic-minded laws are possible, such as fines for littering etc), it shouldn't matter at all. Every group of people has criminals, hard workers, productive members of society, etc.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    Exactly. Enforcing the law costs money and these cities have been saving on that for decades now. So: exactly.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    Every group of people has violent criminals, but it makes a big difference if it's 5% or 50%. It also matters if raping unguarded women is considered a crime or a fun hobby in your culture. Law enforcement is important, but it can never catch close to all criminals, especially if it's politically sensitive to punish disproportionate numbers of ethnic groups. The most famous example is the the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, where authorities has mostly ignored the industrial scale raping for decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o
    - 1y ago
Dig1t 1y ago
Well some people don’t feel like all humans are perfectly identical interchangeable units. If you magically swapped the population of Ireland with the population Japan, do you think that the Japanese would suddenly behave like Irish people just because they were now living in Ireland? Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European. If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another. It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.
- willvarfar 1y ago
  do you have any sources for the church for mosque replacement theory?
  - Dig1t 1y ago
    There is no officially published number by the government, but 3 signs you can look at: 1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well. 2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples: > 500 CHURCHES TURNED INTO MOSQUES IN A CITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY >How 100's of Churches are transforming into Mosques! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY 3. You can find videos from UK Christians lamenting the conversion of their churches. One such example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY You can also just go and look up the number of mosques in the UK increasing over time: https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php The most popular baby name in the UK has been Mohamed for the last two years. That's also a pretty good sign.
rayiner 1y ago
> If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants... Do you prefer a slow death of your culture, or a catastrophic end to it?
- jacquesm 1y ago
  False dichotomy.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Nope. See, e.g., Hamtramck. In contrast, at least rural Japan is still Japan.
mlinhares 1y ago
Being anti immigrant isn’t about being sensible, it’s about having a bogeyman to blame for all problems people face. It’s much easier to say “brown people took your life away” than to face reality many small and large decisions made by the government and the people have led to the current outcome. For instance: > A palpable sense of decline has spurred support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won nearly 40% of local votes in the February general election. People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place to live given the circumstances, which is going to make those with many options to never consider a place like this. What will be left? Not much, the rust belt in the US is a good example of towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders. A friend, that’s a neurologist, moved to a small town in the Midwest, him and another dude were the two only neurologists in many and many miles, the supermarket cashier asked for his ID and if he was in the country legally and isn’t even brown, just cos of his accent. Couple of months later he moved to a large city that had no shortage of neurologists and will never come back to the countryside. These people will destroy whatever is left before they accept others, so that’s what what will be.
- noduerme 1y ago
  There are several very different types of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. They differ by region and they also differ from the feelings in Europe. 1. Basic, racist, "this person is a different skin color". 2. "We're not racist, but they're willing to work cheaper and take our jobs". 3. "They want to keep their own culture and not integrate with ours." The third one is far less prevalent in the US than it is in Europe. I think this is for several reasons, but chief among them is that immigrants to the US do actually want to integrate into their new society, whereas immigrants to Europe generally do not. Unlike Europe, the US offers the possibility for immigrants to become as "American" as anyone else, regardless of their race or religion. Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French". This is mutually reinforcing - the French won't let them become "French", and the immigrants naturally react by not wanting to. Even if they do support liberal French cultural values without excessive judgment, which many do not, that is rarely their main reason to move there except in some political cases. The aim of immigrants to the US is not just economic prosperity, but to join the society and to be American (speaking for my own mixed Latin, Arabic and Jewish immigrant family). This leaves a situation in the US where only (1) and (2) are arguments that have any traction, and those only have traction with a backwards and racist part of the population, aka MAGA. (3) is a much more difficult question, and it would have more traction here if it were true that immigrants to the US were similar to immigrants to Europe, in only seeking economic gains and choosing to remain separate from the societal mainstream. You seem to be conflating (3) with the previous two. And maybe for some right-wing European nationalists it is. But I'm not a European white man, and myself and my Filipina partner have heard from some of those right-wing Europeans that as long as we want to learn their culture, they have no problem with us. When JD Vance goes to Europe and scorns their immigration policy, he is using #3 to their faces, but he is appealing to racist voters who claim #1 and #2 at home. Conversely, when a European tells Americans that all anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe falls into the 1 and 2 categories, you are not honestly telling them about #3. It's the same in Saudi Arabia, isn't it? You can't go get a job in an oil field and go around waving a bible and drinking bourbon. The fact that the West tolerates a lot of different beliefs and ways of life is a good thing, it adds to our diversity and that is our strength. But that tolerance for others has to also be a foundational understanding for newer arrivals who come here. And if it's not, and if they enter into open hostilities with the country that received them, then I don't think all of that can be laid at the feet of ignorant skin-color-based racism.
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laughing_man 1y ago
What if you live in a town with a shrinking population with a jobs shortage?
anovikov 1y ago
Almost as if in America, people vote rationally! One town where 66% of population is on medicaid and life expectancy is 10 years under the national average, just voted 88% for Trump. Sure enough, in Germany the highest anti-migrant vote is in areas where there are no migrants at all.

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usr1106 1y ago

Depopulated sounds like nobody is living there, something like Pripyat. This town is said to have lost over 50% of its former 53,000 so still over 25,000 left. And apartments in GDR were rather small. Not a native speaker, but is depopulated really the right word here or just clickbait? At least I was expecting something else. Heavily shrunk of course.

DaSHacka 1y ago
I guess the difference between "unpopulated" and "depopulated" is the former means no one at all, while the latter just means the population had a (meaningfully significant) decrease.
dotancohen 1y ago
Does decaffeinated coffee have zero caffeine? Do deboned fish have zero bones? Does debugged software have zero bugs?
- usr1106 1y ago
  Not zero, but an only insignificant residual because zero is hard to achieve in real life. Also Pripyat has some illegal inhabitants. (I don't think debugged software is a commonly used term, so no need to discuss the meaning) Edit: Genuine question: Would native speakers call Detroit depopulated? The shrinkage seems to be about the same ratio.
  - weregiraffe 1y ago
    Does detroit contain zero troits?
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      I don't speak French, but I think that Detroit contains one big troit (strait), hence the city's name. But that's certainly less troits than bones in a deboned fish!
  - 1y ago

niemandhier 1y ago

It’s good that they try new ways to attract people. Very few people want to live in these areas. An example to illustrate how dire this situation is: I was contacted multiple times by small East German universities that literally told me, I could immediately start a professorships there. Apparently the selection process is at the moment almost a formality, since they just don’t have any applicants for the positions..

schoen 1y ago
Did you have a PhD or prior experience as a professor? Or was this just like "you're a smart and knowledgeable person, so you're welcome to come be a professor at our institution"? The second is culturally hard for me to imagine in Germany, but if so, that could show even more strongly how extreme the situation is!
- anovikov 1y ago
  It most certainly means that "under a normal run of things it's a huge competition from qualified PhDs to become a full tenured professor so it means years on poorly paid intermediate positions, here there are <1.0 candidates per position so you are automatically approved".
- benterix 1y ago
  No, the second would be both absurd and illegal, not the parent but we're talking about lack of competition here, not the end of civilization.
  - schoen 1y ago
    I think it's a striking example of the German culture in question that bypassing credential rules for professorships is "absurd and illegal". In other countries, academic labor unions might be mad about it, but it's theoretically possible that some universities might occasionally choose to grant academic teaching positions to people with unusual backgrounds. One of my great teachers at UC Berkeley was Brian Harvey, who had a PhD in education (not computer science) and only a master's degree in computer science. He was made a "lecturer with security of employment" (he could design and run courses, including courses that were mandatory for the computer science major, and give grades). David D. Friedman was a law professor at Santa Clara University and had a physics PhD and no law degree of any kind. These aren't quite the examples I want, because both of these people do have PhDs, just not in the subjects that they taught. Wikipedia gives seven examples of famous U.S. professors who in fact had no doctoral degree, and in a few cases no postgraduate education at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_States#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State... This is called "exceptional" there, and it's clearly very rare (although all of the people mentioned are quite famous, and there are presumably less famous examples); I just mean to make the cultural point that outside of Germany people tend to believe that universities are in principle allowed to make such exceptions. (There are also tertiary education institutions like community colleges that more routinely allow people without PhDs to teach, but these probably aren't relevant here because they're mostly not called universities and mostly can't issue bachelor's or higher degrees.)

rayiner 1y ago

This place looks so cute.

cyberax 1y ago

And at the same time, Berlin is struggling with skyrocketing housing costs. I wonder why people can't put two and two together and keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.

jansan 1y ago
People of Berlin made a particularly stupid decision when they voted against any construction on the vast empty area known as the Tempelhofer Feld. They could have had anything they wanted, like car free residential area with lots of green, but they decided that no new housing is what they want.
- schoen 1y ago
  To be fair, they use it quite a lot for exercise and recreation, so it's not like a completely disused open space. Other very expensive cities also have relatively huge parks (like Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco). I've heard people try to estimate the real estate value of Central Park, which may be somewhere around $1,000,000,000,000. The size of Tempelhofer Feld is apparently almost exactly the same as that of Central Park, although it's probably much less used compared to Central Park. It looks like Central Park might get somewhere around four times as many visits.
- cyberax 1y ago
  > They could have had anything they wanted, like car free residential area with lots of green, but they decided that no new housing is what they want. And the people of Berlin actually made a smart decision not to dig the hole faster.

edg5000 1y ago

I live in the Netherlands and got lucky with my housing situation, but given the prices here and the fact that I work mostly remove, I would have seriously considered moving to East Germany. I saw apartments for sale for 25k there. What I read everywhere is that there aren't many jobs available locally and the area is relatively sparsely populated, never really recovering from the damage done during the war and the years under Soviet rule.

ludicrousdispla 1y ago

Here is the jobs board for those interested... https://www.fachkraefteportal-brandenburg.de/eisenhuettenstadt-stellengebote https://www.fachkraefteportal-brandenburg.de/eisenhuettensta...

noduerme 1y ago

Turns out they didn't need all that lebensraum after all?

crises-luff-6b 1y ago

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