Are Palestinians the immigrants we want? What would they bring to our society?

Are Palestinians the immigrants we want? What would they bring to our society? By Emile Kirkegaard.

Denmark decided to try it out in 1992 by giving 321 rejected Palestinian asylum seekers extraordinary residence permits, granted directly by parliament by a special law (Danish Wikipedia Palæstinenserloven). These people have been followed since then to see how this experiment went. Here’s the data for the 2019 follow-up written about here:

  • Of the 321 who were given asylum 270 are still residing in Denmark, meaning the rest either left or are dead.
  • Of the 321, 204 (64%) have received a serious fine or jail time for crime, with 71 of them being given jail time. (Definition is fine of 1500+ DKK, traffic law excluded.)
  • A very large proportion of them are receiving some kind of welfare especially the “early pension” (førtidspension) usually given to people with severe physical or mental issues (e.g. handicapped), but also used for immigrants who are basically useless on the job market for whatever reason.
  • Of their 999 children, so far 34% are convicted for serious crime and some large chunk are already on welfare.

Note that some of the numbers are slightly too low because of the ones who have left.

So, into crime and welfare. Is there an underlying reason?

Well, let’s summarize the existing intelligence studies of them. …

  • The Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) was standardized in Palestine in 2011 on a sample of 257 children aged 6.0 to 11.5 years, tested individually. The sample obtained a British IQ of 85. …
  • The Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) was standardized in the Gaza Strip in 2012-13 on a sample of 1677 boys and 1818 girls aged 8 to 18 years. The sample obtained a British IQ of 67.9. …

Various other proxy methods, like studying the Arabs in Israel, also produced values around 85 IQ, so somewhere around 70-85 IQ, but we don’t know exactly where. Let’s optimistically adopt the 85 value. This is about the same IQ as the African Americans.

Insofar as intelligence is the chief cause of social inequality between groups, one should expect them to attain roughly equal outcomes. If we admit that radical Islam and war traumas are additional problems, performance will probably be somewhat lower than African Americans.

In other words, they would be a permanent drain on the country’s resources due to high crime rates and high use of welfare, as they have already been in Denmark since 1992.

Most of the brighter Palestinians probably left Gaza long ago.

UPDATE: Here’s the Scottish leader: