>But a struggling economy, questionable planning for many years now, the "educated middle class" he mentioned in the post shrinking don't bode well for it. It's a prime breeding ground for scapegoat politics.
I think one of the issues is that for the past 2 decades over here in Belgium as I think in Germany and other places there has been no middle ground left for people who didn't want this to the current extent.
I feel that way even tho i meet lots of people like the blog writer and I meet lots of people who aren't like him too.
I've met the average religious ultraconservative erdogan voting turk in w-europe, the quick money wanabe hoodlum who mostly hangs out with maghrebis but who can be quite friendly if you get to know him well, the Turk who feels integrated but to me always feels like an americanised cosmopolitan. I don't even blame some of them on that front. It's incredibly easy to not surround yourself with locals and local food, experiences, etc.
You have conservative parties who pay lip service but don't really make any effective change on the migration front and other parties who....act like there's no harm at all. Even the leftist framing where most migration leads to some wage supression is starkly absent.
There is no option to say 'you either do it well or do a lot less of it' without getting pushed to the far right.
In the meantime i can go and visit mannheim and feel like i'm in a bad facsimile of germany. It's easier to find turkish food than german food. That one street with all the gathered Turkish wedding shops starkly reminds me of a similar central spot in Istanbul.
In Brussels where my grandparents lived and my dad was born I am routinely the only local at parties. When I walk the streets I routinely feel like a foreigner. Numbers that were called fear mongering a decade or 2 ago are just reality.
My grandmother cried seeing the changes done to the listed buildings she lived in and alongside. The migrants and people left there don't see the significance.
She doesn't go to a specialist anymore because old people get targeted by pickpockets.
And it expands, it can no longer be stopped. Our politics are fragmented, migrants and descendants off don't vote similarly to the local ethnicities and with our fragmented politics the anti migration vote is a lost cause. Since it's a lot smaller than germany's my culture is waiting to die, when you notice it suddenly you start noticing it everywhere and for those that care about it it becomes something that draws single issue voting because all the other important things can be undone with some work but even their single issue voting will be drowned out eventually by the change set in motion.