Thursday, September 17, 2015

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.


9 comments:


  1. “In place of Christianity, Europeans have embraced a form of therapy culture that has made the individual more important than the group?” It may be a form of therapy culture, but, in addition, is a form of insanity. Islam is a violent, totalitarian creed that seeks the destruction of the non-Islamic world. Yet we see Angela Merkel up there welcoming millions of these culture wreckers into her country. “Come on in all you who hate me and my fellow Germans.” That, my friend, is insanity.

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  2. You seem to equate anti-religion with a bleeding heart mentality. Sam Harris doesn't seem to display that combination.

    What I think you're referring to are moralistic people who have sympathy for the underdog plus some degree of antipathy toward the cultures that, in the past, oppressed them.

    There's nothing necessarily wrong with that either -- and Germany is a prime example -- as long as critical self-examination remains rational.

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  3. It seems the world has gone quite mad: neologisms, redefining words, celebration of the deviant, denouncing heretics, and suicidal.

    Christianity proscribes despair, but there it stands, just outside my door, impatiently waiting.

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  4. On "Sweden as the rape capital of the world", such claims need context (and correction) unless your purpose is to distort perceptions. It does look like Sweden WANTS a high report rate for political reasons, to gain more attention to the problem.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19592372
    --------------
    "In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.

    "So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record - one victim, one type of crime, one record."

    The thing is, the number of reported rapes has been going up in Sweden - it's almost trebled in just the last seven years. In 2003, about 2,200 offences were reported by the police, compared to nearly 6,000 in 2010.

    "But the major explanation is partly that people go to the police more often, but also the fact that in 2005 there has been reform in the sex crime legislation, which made the legal definition of rape much wider than before."

    The change in law meant that cases where the victim was asleep or intoxicated are now included in the figures. Previously they'd been recorded as another category of crime.

    So an on-the-face-of-it international comparison of rape statistics can be misleading.
    ...
    So there's a lot that official statistics don't tell us. They certainly don't reveal the real number of rapes that happen in Sweden, or any other country. And they don't give a clear view of which countries have worse crime rates than others.

    Rape is particularly complex, but you'd think it would be straightforward to analyse murder rates across different countries - just count up the dead bodies, and compare and contrast.

    --------------

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  5. We need to redefine "murder" to include times when someone tells a joke and the response "you kill me" is counted.

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  6. Priss rules, Population is certainly a paradoxical issue, as you say German's population is falling without immigration, while Africa and Asia has prediction of population explosion this year, perhaps reaching 11 billion by the end of the century.
    http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/07/429768917/11-billion-people-by-2100-and-india-will-be-more-populous-than-china

    I have a hard time believing trends can or will continue, and things like contraceptives and improved education for women can slow these trends down, but not stop it.

    If we tried to offer arguments FOR building walls, FOR limiting refugees from entering any given country, then food production is the only real argument that I know. We can consider cultural (or racial) reasons to limit immigrants, but its a harder case, unless you already live in an ethnically pure country that wants to stay that way.

    And it is strange to live in a country with a group like Planned Parenthood being demonized for trying to make sure all children conceived and born are wanted by parents who are ready to be parents, and ready for another child.

    The purity of prolife positions is certainly attractive, but if you want to be prolife in the purest way, it means everyone who wants children should consider adopting BEFORE having their own kids, and using the entire world of neglected and poverty stricken children, before they grow up to find a violent ideology that helps explain their deprivation.

    I'm only half serious, but I just had a conversation with a "reformed liberal" who was accused of having a "hard heart" towards the needs of these refugees, and we agreed the answer is everyone with a "warm heart" should adopt a family and spend their rest of their lives helping to integrate that family into a new culture. And THEN these warm hearted people might have the right to judge those of us who would prefer to raise and protect our own families needs first.

    But it is true, religious beliefs do lead action, and people who are called to help the poor and downcast, they can find religious institutions where they can serve those in greatest needs.

    But short of hopeful integration with western democracies, it does seem like the demands of the future refugees (millions more than we've seen already) will not lead to welcoming by neighboring countries, but the growth of "refugee" communities that start as tents in the wilderness and will grow over time into more solid structure and create their own identities from the bottom up.

    These people are not going to disappear, and they will outnumber the places that will welcome them, so they apparently are going to be come "defiant squatters" grabbing whatever land and shelter they can find, and once that process starts, it seems destiny for them to grow their own political power and organic organization around it. Perhaps such a process will lead to dozens of new "countries" appearing on the map in this century, when groups have autonomy from the governments of the land they squat upon?

    There are very sound reasons every government fears mobs. Every single one of them is dangerous to people in positions of power who don't have the power to meet everyone's wants and needs.

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  8. 1) "...like Planned Parenthood being demonized for trying to make sure all children conceived and born are wanted by parents..."
    Straw man. No one argues that at all. That's PP's self-congratulatory moral high ground blather slapped over the production and selling of fetal parts.

    2) "...if you want to be prolife in the purest way, it means everyone who wants children should..."
    Straw man #2. No one accedes to your reductio ad absurdum definition of 'purity.'

    3) "These people are not going to disappear"
    They can disappear from here however, by refusing them entry and returning them to the hells they created before they recreate them here.

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  9. Ares Olympus, you are a bozo. Write all that to say nothing at all? You must have a lot of time on your hands. Sweden sucks, and Planned Parenthood is a sorority of fetal bounty hunters to feed spare part-peddling subsidiaries. They're demonized because they are demons. Wake up and smell the murder.

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