Willful Ignorance and Luxury Beliefs: The Immigration Debate
So-called “luxury beliefs” often create a blind spot among many people from the middle and upper classes when it comes to acknowledging political issues. One of them is immigration.
A commentary on “Berliner Feuerwehr und Polizei schockiert von ‘massiven Angriffen’ in der Silvesternacht” (published in Tagesspiegel on January 1, 2023)
A few years ago, the American graduate student Rob Henderson developed the concept of luxury beliefs: the theory that certain “ideas and opinions […] confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” Luxury beliefs especially refer to those beliefs which highlight a person’s own virtue and morality, according to what is currently en vogue. However, it is mostly those who already have a certain socioeconomic status that can actually afford to have these beliefs, whereas those of lower socioeconomic status can often not afford to have them and therefore don’t share them.
A simple example for a luxury belief is the opinion that you should only buy organic produce and organic meat to save the environment and protect animals. People from well-off milieus can afford to have this luxury belief since it doesn’t matter to them if they have to pay double the price for a pound of organic tomatoes or organic beef. Their belief (“Only buy organic food!”) immediately confers status on them as it demonstrates that they are taking the moral high ground and therefore distance themselves from people with less resources who cannot afford this luxury belief because they often don’t even know how to put food on their tables. So if German Federal Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir presses for higher food prices for instance, the intention behind this demand – a fair pay for farmers as well as environment and animal protection – might be noble, but it completely disregards the financial reality of the lower classes.
Another luxury belief is the Defund the Police movement in the United States, which gained traction after the death of George Floyd at the hands of two police officers in 2020: Defund the Police basically demands to cut funds from police departments and use them instead for other ways of community support in order to reduce racially motivated police violence and discrimination, especially against African Americans. However, those who support the movement are not predominantly African American. It is indeed White and Asian American citizens, especially those who are affluent and well-educated, who call for defunding the police. It makes sense: Those who live in a secure single-family home in a nice neighborhood can easily support Defund the Police; those, however, who might live in a dilapidated one-room apartment in a dangerous drug-ridden neighborhood, will welcome every police officer who tries to make their life a little safer. Statistically, working-class African Americans “bear an increasingly large share of the harm from crime” and they would suffer most from reduced police presence.
Once you have understood the concept of luxury beliefs, you suddenly start to see it everywhere: Green climate activists who rage against nuclear energy and driving a car, while being the ones who are least affected by rising energy and gas prices; pharisaic moralists who preach about lockdown measures and mask mandates, but who can comfortably work from home, while people from the lower class are sitting in small apartments and have to wear masks at work eight hours a day; gender activists who advocate for Self-ID laws while one of the most vulnerable groups of society – inmates in female prisons – have to face the fact that they might have to share a cell with a trans-identified sexual offender in the name of “transgender rights”.
Similar to the way luxury goods used to work back in the days, luxury beliefs serve to signal superiority, to thereby gain status and to distance oneself from people one considers socially, financially and morally “inferior”. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t truly convinced by their luxury beliefs, quite the contrary: Somebody who demonstrates against climate change does so wholeheartedly; somebody who promotes mask mandates as well. In fact, self-righteousness plays a huge role in this because people tend to view their luxury belief as the only valid truth and will declare everyone else a sinner. That’s why many of these debates are so morally charged: You must clearly distinguish yourself from the plebs. So, you buy an electric vehicle and wear FFP2 masks while shouting an accusatory “You’re driving a diesel!” or “You’re an anti-masker!” at the plebs. While the middle and upper classes gain social status thanks to their luxury beliefs, it’s especially the lower classes that will be affected by possible drawbacks of these beliefs. The different classes therefore live in their own bubbles: Well-situated and affluent people often tend to ignore or embellish reality because they don’t need to fear possible consequences; people from lower-income households, however, are aware of reality because they experience it firsthand.
A topic which I think is interesting to contemplate using the lens of Henderson’s luxury beliefs is the issue of immigration in Germany. To my mind, the prevalent luxury belief here is a kind of blissful ignorance claiming that immigration issues simply don’t exist.
The unfortunate occasion for addressing the immigration debate are the events that took place in Berlin on New Year’s Eve 2022, where massive riots caused havoc in the streets of the German capital. People were rampaging in the streets, fireworks were shot into vehicles and pedestrians, police and firefighters on duty were attacked by firecrackers and rockets. According to Achtung, Reichelt! “the police and fire department turned out 4000 times that night, 15 firefighters and 18 police officers were hurt.” In total, 145 people were arrested, of whom one in five were minors, the vast majority men, with 18 different nationalities.
Since the beginning of 2023, the country has been trying to understand the cause for this massive eruption of violence. Who or what is to blame? This question is particularly delicate in a country such as Germany because when watching video recordings of that night and listening to witness reports, the reason actually becomes quite clear. A firefighter who was on duty that night gave the following statement: “I’m not going to beat around the bush: The people who threw things at us that night, all those crackers and bottles, those weren’t radical leftists who have a problem with the system. Those were young people, the majority of whom immigrant youth. And I say this as someone who comes from an immigrant background! My whole life I’ve been fighting against prejudice. But what can I say?”1
Beating around the bush, that is exactly what most German politicians and media outlets have been doing since New Year’s Eve. The fear of being accused of racism is everywhere and those who speak frankly, like Achtung, Reichelt! for instance, are immediately branded as radically right-wing. Meanwhile, the media’s attempt to find an explanation for the New Year’s Eve riots in the German capital border on the satirical. Tagesschau commentator Thomas Rostek stumbled so clumsily through his various attempts at giving a pseudo-explanation that it was rather pitiful. According to him, it was “difficult” to talk about the perpetrators. Instead, Rostek stuttered his way through a vague explanation of how “processes of group dynamics” and “huge societal pressure […] after two years of pandemic emergency” were the reason for the riots because it was “easy to get hold of pyrotechnic articles.” Of course, he doesn’t mention the fact that in Germany, for as long as anyone can remember (with the exception of the last two years), supermarkets have sold pyrotechnic articles in the days prior to New Year’s Eve because it’s German tradition for people to shoot firecrackers into the sky on December 31.
Even more ludicrous was Eva Quadbeck’s evaluation of events. The deputy editor-in-chief of Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland claimed in all seriousness that video games were the reason for the New Year’s Eve riots in Berlin. According to her, it was “especially young men who sit in front of these games and kill and hunt others”, so that it wasn’t surprising that these young men sometimes “didn’t see reality anymore when they go out on the streets and then attack either police or firefighters.” But it was an article in the German Tagesspiegel which probably gave the most absurd explanation by postulating: “It was warm, up to 18 degrees Celsius were recorded on New Year’s Eve in Berlin. High temperatures probably encouraged the tendency for riots.” In case of doubt, blame it on climate change.
Another strategy that was used by several German politicians were diversionary tactics. These tactics were eagerly deployed by Berlin’s mayor Franziska Giffey for example who was desperate to divert attention from her own failure to govern the capital where the riots had happened. Few days after the New Year’s Eve riots, she proclaimed her outrage at some radical right-wing riots that had allegedly happened on New Year’s Eve in Borna in the state of Saxony. It was reported that 200 neo-Nazis had rampaged the town and had even shouted Nazi slogans such as “Sieg Heil”. But a few days later, it turned out that these radical right-wing riots had never happened. The news report was based on rumors as the left-wing newspaper ZEIT confirmed.
Last but not least, the Deutschlandfunk resorted to using downplay tactics and published an article citing the Tagesspiegel, in which the violence of the New Year’s Eve riots was described as “less severe than had been assumed so far”, thus completely downplaying the whole incident. The article claimed that the “readiness for violence this New Year’s Eve was comparable to before the pandemic.” When comparing the news from January 1, 2003 and 2023, however, it becomes clear that this claim is far-fetched at best. Testimonies given by police officers also give rise to doubt about whether this is true.
This overview of the press coverage of the Berlin New Year’s Eve riots serves to show what happens in Germany whenever the immigration debate comes into focus: People beat around the bush, stories are invented, events are downplayed or embellished, the blame is put on absolutely everyone and everything – except the failure of German immigration and integration politics. The immigration debate has become an anathema. Those who claim that the integration of young male immigrants from a certain cultural background is posing a serious problem in Germany will be declared right-wing populists, racists or even worse, neo-Nazis. Reem Alabali-Radovan, the German government’s commissioner for integration stated that it was impossible to “discuss such topics” in Germany “without falling back on racist ressentiments.” The accusation of racism can be levelled at you at all times, threatening you to be excommunicated at the slightest criticism of immigration events. And so a willful ignorance is reigning among the media and the majority of German society, who would rather blame climate change for this unprecedented kind of violence instead of confronting reality.
My claim is that this willful ignorance concerning immigration issues, especially among members of the upper middle class and upper class, and especially among the group of moralising academics and intellectuals, is nothing but a luxury belief. You ignore a problem to keep your bubble intact. This is clear virtue signalling (“I’m not racist, but all of you are!”) that confers status on you and helps you distance yourself from people who are differently minded. Of course, these other people are all seen as full-on racists because in today’s Manichean way of thinking there are only full-on racists and non-racists. And of course, nobody wants to come under the slightest suspicion of racism. Especially – and this is very important in this particular debate – not in Germany where the historical collective guilt is still crushing, even 80 years later. The fear of being called a racist is ubiquitous. It feeds the belief that there are no immigration issues in Germany and that everybody is perfectly integrated because any other way of seeing it would be racist.
But this luxury belief – or luxury ignorance – can only be upheld by the socioeconomic (and, of course, political) elite who doesn’t live in neighborhoods like Berlin-Neukölln, Duisburg-Marxloh or the Dortmunder Nordstadt where rates of clan and street crime caused by certain immigrant clan families are so high that the police won’t set foot there and women cannot go home alone safely at night. It’s an elite who has never been to a class room at certain public schools where 90 percent of students have an immigrant background, where there aren’t enough teaching staff and resources, where verbal abuse is a daily reality and where teachers have to deal with children who don’t speak German, whose parents don’t care about school and who don’t show any respect.2 An elite whose car wasn’t burnt down on the streets of Berlin on New Year’s Eve because it’s parked in a garage in the suburbs and who were drinking cold champagne in their warm living rooms while rescue forces were risking their lives on the streets.
The luxury belief that has been prevalent in the German immigration debate is this: It’s the naïve conviction of a certain group of affluent middle and upper class people that there are no immigration issues in Germany because these issues aren’t supposed to exist in their bubble. In case problems do actually come to light, like on New Year’s Eve of 2022, then people try to find a plausible explanation that doesn’t have anything to do with migration. Because the affluent middle-class citizen wants to show how virtuous and liberal-minded he is. Under no circumstances will he think or say anything that could be interpreted as xenophobic. Therefore, he zealously condemns anyone who even talks about possible immigration issues to make sure that nobody will think he is racist and to distance himself from anyone who might potentially be racist. The best way to do that is to accuse other people of racism. A good example of that is “non-binary” council member Maurice Conrad of Mainz who immediately condemned people protesting against the construction of an asylum seeker hostel as “openly right-wing extremists”, instead of asking himself whether the protestors’ concern might actually be valid in the light of recent events such as the fatal stabbing of a 14-year-old girl by an Eritrean asylum seeker in Illerkirchberg in December 2022. Or Robert Fietzke, president of the Magdeburg division of the German Left Party who laments that “racism is oozing out of every nook and cranny in this country”:
How long will people be able to afford to cling to this luxury belief and deny the real-life problems that it entails? That remains to be seen. Another aspect is that the Fietzkes and Conrads of this country are not only living in an echo chamber, but they are also wearing blinders and seem to only be aware of the situation in Germany. They are obviously ignorant of the fact that other European countries are also facing massive problems with violent riots which are usually initiated by a certain kind of male migrant clientele: One is reminded of the shocking mass riot of North African youth in Peschiera del Garda in Italy, of the violent riots of Moroccan soccer fans in Brussels, of similar pictures of burning cars in Paris, or of destructive immigrant youth at the Barcelona city festival last year, just to name a few examples. Is racism oozing out of every nook and cranny in Germany’s neighboring countries, too? Or are we rather facing a very complex sociopolitical and cultural problem which requires a thoughtful, consequent and courageous immigration and integration policy which tosses its luxury beliefs overboard and instead tries to both better integrate immigrants into our society and defend its democratic core values?
The immigration debate needs to be had and it needs to be done without censoring certain discourses and without cancelling people and calling them racists for simply stating facts.3 It isn’t racist to state facts. If we don’t state facts, if we don’t debate, if we cling to the luxury belief of “There are no integration issues!”, then we will create the opposite of what everybody wants to avoid: There will be more resentment and more racism – on both sides. The average citizen who cannot afford to virtue signal, whose car might have been set fire to, whose helpfulness might have been exploited or whose daughter might have been stabbed, just as it happened in Illerkirchberg, this citizen is being ignored. His worries are not seen and he is abandoned both by the state and by society. And this is the point where he will become radicalized. As Reinhard Müller expressed it in his op-ed for the German newspaper FAZ: “Everyday racism is also fueled by political blindness.” But turning a blind eye is a luxury we cannot afford anymore if we really want the best for the German population as whole, no matter if they have immigrant background or not.
About the author: Born 1987, with roots in Germany and the Philippines, living in Spain. Constantly curious and eager to learn new things. Freedom > safety. Your own opinion > groupthink. Coffee > tea. Recommended article on the topic: “Ahmad Mansour antwortet Behzad K. Khani: ‘Die Gewalt darf nicht beschönigt werden’”, published in Berliner Zeitung on January 17, 2023.
Die deutsche Version des Artikels findet sich hier:
The same firefighter was also featured in Germany’s most important public service news broadcast on ARD: However, his comment about “immigrant youth” was simply cut from the original.
Jan Fleischhauer has written very good column for Focus about the situation at public schools: “‘Kleine Paschas’: Große Teile der Medien blenden die Realität einfach aus”