Rob wrote:jonny5 wrote:Rob, apparently there are about 5000 Muslims in all of Alaska, out of your 700,000 some odd state population.
I never said it was a huge, overwhelming swarm - I'm saying they are here, as you seemed to believe there were none. Also,
there doesn't need to be a lot of Muslims for there to be a Muslim problem. You know the guy who flew down to Florida and
shot up an airport in January? He was from here (Anchorage, Alaska).
and yet our crime rates are much lower than US cities, even ones much smaller than us. Why is that?
"According to the 2006 Census by Statistics Canada, 783,795 Canadians identified as black, constituting 2.5% of the entire Canadian population."
No, this doesn't mean I think blacks
have it comin' while they're sitting peacefully in church or whatever cartoon imagining is undoubtedly coming next. It means I can look at crime statistics.
I think Canadians might be just a tad naive, since you haven't had to experience the race problems that America has.
That's all of Canada, and a stat from 2006. Something to realize is most of the ethnic populations are in our major cities, like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, as is most of population density - 17% of the Canadian population is in Toronto - things are pretty thin and spread out outside of the major cities, more so as you go north. According to the stats I can find from 2011, Toronto has an 8.5% black population, some of the surrounding suburbs as high as 16%. 6.4 million people in the Greater Toronto Area, 4th largest city in North America by population and half that is people not born here. So why no trouble for us?
Us not having the same race issues you seem to have has pretty much nothing to do with naivete, and everything to do with how we treat immigrants and minorities, not to mention our vastly different gun laws - people are not armed to the degree they are in the US and handguns are not common or easy to get(legally) with a lot of licensing hoops to jump through and strict rules around them. We also have mostly 'free' healthcare here, for all, it's paid for by our taxes, which are way higher than most states - I paid 42% in income tax last year, and pay 13% sales tax on basically anything I buy that isnt staples like groceries and other things like that. We do not expect newcomers to 'assimilate', whatever that means in a country made up of a multitude of races - they come, they learn our language if they haven't already, they follow our laws, and they are free to live their lives however they see fit. We all pay taxes, we all co-exist. Were all Canadian.
That's not to say we dont have terrorist issues here, we dont have hate issues here, but it is not the same as what is going on in the US at all. Remember, we get all of your media here, we hear all about what is going on in the US, but you guys generally have no clue about what is happening up here, as your news doesn't report it. It's always surprised me, even people in the US who live close to the border often have very funny ideas about what goes on up here or what we are about.
So ya, take it from a white dude who has lived his whole life surrounded by people from all over the world, they are not the problem. I almost took a picture on the bus to work this morning to post, just to show you what I see around me. Our differences are what make us great as a country and our belief in equality and respect for your fellow man are what has earned us the respect of the rest of the world
in our own dispossession. Whenever a hostile invader makes a demand, we need to ask what else we can do.
