Palestinians in your country: what to expect?
With a war looming and probably lots of Palestinian refugee applications on the horizon, I thought it would be wise to summarize what we have so far about them. The horrors of war aside, how good immigrants are the Palestinians? 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:
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Of the 321 who were given asylum 270 are still residing in Denmark, meaning the rest either left or are dead.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
Why so bad outcomes? Well, let's summarize the existing intelligence studies of them.
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BAKHIET, Salaheldin Farah Attallah et LYNN, Richard. A study of the IQ in Palestine. Intelligence, 2014, vol. 47, p. 10-11.
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.
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Hammad's (2012) study also gives data for a sample of 654 boys and 604 girls aged 5.5 to 11.5 years attending representa- tive elementary schools in Gaza, of whom 1001 tested in groups as well as the 257 children tested individually. The results are given in Table 2. This shows, reading from left to right, the ages of the children, their scores on the CPM, the British Percentiles in the 2007 British standardization given in Raven (2008), and the British IQ equivalents. The mean of the IQs of the 13 age groups is 74.8.
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