Thoughts on the Great Migrant Invasion

Germans, David Goldman suggests, have been suffering from a replacement gap. Fewer of them are having fewer children, and they are not having enough children to replace those who are dying off. It makes sense for them to want to import people from foreign countries. They did it before, but without great success.

Goldman writes:

It makes no sense to take in barely-educated Arabs, a fifth of whom are illiterate, as Clemens Wergin argued in Die Welt Sept. 5: “It was a mistake to bring unskilled workers from culturally backward Mediterranean countries during the ‘economic miracle’ years [of the 1960s]…that was as true for workers from the south of Italy as from Anatolia. The jobs they took were the first to fall victim to automation and to outsourcing to low-wage countries. Often a poorly-educated welfare-state proletariat was left behind…Muslim immigrants to Europe have experienced a tradition backlash that mirrors the experience of Muslim societies in the Middle East. That not only raises the hurdle for integration into European society, but has created a serious security problem.”

People from overpopulated developing countries have been invading underpopulated developed countries. They have not been assimilating, have not been contributing, but have brought change to the host countries. When Sweden decided, for multicultural reasons, to allow a goodly number of Muslims to immigrate, it became the rape capital of the world. As happened in Norway, another country where rape has become a serious problem, the crimes were all committed by people from one ethnic group.

Joel Kotkin points out that it has been happening in America, though Mexican and Central American immigrants share a common Christian culture with Americans. Nevertheless, as the current political debate suggests, these immigrants have not been assimilating and have been bringing social pathologies with them… like a drug problem and gang violence. Until recently, the American protest has been muted, because anyone who says anything is immediately tarred as racist.

Kotkin explains:

Some may prefer to ignore the long-term impacts of huge migration from the often-chaotic developing world – where 99 percent of the world’s population growth will be taking place – to the more orderly, prosperous and low-fertility richer countries. Separated from the daily drama, the human movement from Syria, the rest of the Middle East and Africa can be seen as potentially changing European society forever by breaking its already-weak Christian foundations and threatening the future of Europe’s elaborate welfare states.

Like Goldman, Kotkin looks first to a demographic cause:

In the high-income societies, the liberation of women, the decline of religion and the elevation of individualism over family culture has created, not surprisingly, a growing demographic deficit. In some countries, including Russia, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Italy, as well as much of Eastern Europe, birth- rates have been low enough for long enough to put these societies on the road to rapid population declines.

People who believe that the most important thing in life is individual self-satisfaction are less apt to make the sacrifices needed to bring up children.

Not wanting to be completely negative about it, Kotkin also brings up the possibility that the new immigrants can help solve the demographic problem:

On the positive side, the immigrants could help Europe overcome the looming demographic deficit that threatens growth. Germany, for example, faces a chronic labor shortage. Its workforce is expected to decline by 7 million by 2030, leaving the country with annual deficits of upward of 400,000 skilled workers.

However, like Goldman, he sees that these immigrants, being unable to contribute to their host nations’ economies, will import the social and cultural pathologies that they have kept their home countries underdeveloped:

Yet many of the migrants headed to Germany do not have the skills to participate in that country’s high-end economy. They also threaten to inject many of their homelands’ maladies, ranging from jihadism to street crime, into what had been fairly prosperous and peaceful societies.

In some ways, the current invasion is the outcome of efforts to degrade traditional European culture, especially Europe’s Christian culture. Culture warriors have succeeded in replacing it with a form of secular humanism. The Pied Pipers of atheism can tout this as one of their successes, but they should recognize that their replacement culture has left Europe vulnerable to attack by the current migrant invasion:

This new migration comes at a time of profound weakness of European culture. If one thing has united Europe in the past, it was a common Christian heritage. Small minorities were sometimes tolerated, although clearly not always, as the Jews can attest. But Christianity did provide a set of values and a common approach to the past that was useful in bridging national cultures.

But today’s Europe is experiencing something close to a collapse of religiosity, with church attendance rates among the lowest on Earth. In the Czech Republic, for example, it is widely claimed that more people believe in UFOs than in God.

Overall, Europe is rapidly becoming “post-Christian,” inserting in its place a religion of good intentions. This could well, as the saying goes, lead to a hellish outcome.

In place of Christianity, Europeans have embraced a form of therapy culture that has made the individual more important than the group. It cares about good intentions and especially about one's feelings. One understands that this secular humanism is a form of therapy culture, thus that people adopt it, not only because it is trendy, but  because it is supposed to be healthy:

Certainly, vague humanitarian sentiments may not be much of a match for the beliefs of a much stronger religious community, with powerful and ancient values, and still with a strong attachment to family. Previous waves of immigrants – including those of the 1960s – entered a confident society with strong values and a decent birthrate. Today, they confront a European society that does not much believe in anything but a post-modernist faith in their own emotions.

Multiculturalism is on the rise because very few people understand what it means. They think that it involves tolerance for different cultures. In truth, it says that we must accept all cultures as equally valid. Thus, it rationalizes the failure of some groups to assimilate into their new cultures and stokes their resentment by telling them that the fault lies in the host culture… for being racist and Islamophobic.

Kotkin writes:

 Germany, which may take 800,000 refugees this year, recently suggested it could accept an additional 500,000 annually for the next several years. In the process, the cultural life of the continent likely becomes more “multicultural” and global, and ever less European. Its lodestar is no longer its own past or its common European dream, but a future determined by affairs elsewhere, and by people who, in many cases, are largely indifferent toward the continent’s historical legacy – including some who wish to demolish it.

Keep in mind that Mohamed Atta was an Egyptian who had gone to Germany to study architecture. He was radicalized at a mosque in Hamburg. He and other members of the Hamburg cell were recruited to be core members of the group that attacked America on 9/11.