Terror in Manchester: Open door asylum policies can lead to terror, by Douglas Murray.
In the aftermath of an attack such as Monday’s, a divide grows and becomes ever-more visible. It is the same divide that grows wider across Europe with every attack. …
The first is the response of all politicians, bureaucrats and a near entirety of the commentating classes. This response focuses on the secure-o-crat details. Who did Abedi know? Who were his associates? How did he get in and out of Libya recently without attracting more attention? …
But there is another response underneath this one: the same response that Britain’s neighbours in France, Belgium, Germany and everywhere else across Europe are mulling over. What if none of this works? What if this is the future? What if the immigration and integration policies of consecutive governments of every political stripe have set up our societies for an endless disaster they can now do little to avert? …
This author has been studying this for quite a while:
Unlike many of the NGO workers and people who — for all their good intentions — demand that we bring in the world’s poor and needy, I have followed this story all the way up and across our continent. …
The numbers are important. In the key year of the crisis — 2015, when Angela Merkel unilaterally flung open the doors of our continent to anybody who could get here and made illegal entrance legal — up to 1.5 million people entered Germany alone. The country took in an additional 1 per cent to 2 per cent of its population in a single year.
To the north, Sweden took in a similar ratio of migrants per head of population. Elsewhere in Europe, hundreds of thousands of people crossed the continent. The external borders of Europe had been opened and the internal borders of Europe — under the Schengen Agreement — had been taken down already. It was the perfect storm.
Politicians decried as “racist” anyone who objected. Some people asked, “What if some of the people who arrive do not like us?” They were dismissed as “smearing” all the arrivals. And then Paris happened. And Cologne, and Ansbach, and Wurzburg and Nice — and people started to realise that if all the arrivals were not terrorists, then neither were they all saints.
But by then it was too late. The doors had been opened, and any barbarians that were about were already inside the gates. …
Australia faced a version of this crisis, but Australia — despite huge domestic and international pressure — did not fail before it. The Australian government held the line between legal and illegal. Europe did not. And Europe will suffer for this failure. …
The open borders people haven’t thought it through:
At no stage — as I lay out at length in my book The Strange Death of Europe — did the European leaders ask themselves, or discuss before their public, the fundamental questions they should have asked. Questions such as: Who is Europe for? Is it for the world? Can it be the home for everyone in the world who wants a better life?
There are those from the “open borders” movement who believe the answer to these questions is “yes” — that we should open our home to the world. They argue that borders are racist. That saying Europe is the home of the Europeans is racist. They suggest that we in Europe owe the world. That we should be punished for colonialism. Or the Holocaust.
They imply that we are slightly boring societies with something lacking at our heart. As though the culture of Goethe and Bach, Rousseau, Voltaire and Dante could do with some sprucing up.
Incidentally, nobody ever argues for the reverse. No one ever says Pakistan or Eritrea are boring and could do with an injection of millions of French or British people. Well, they did once. But we had a word for that, and we don’t regard it as a term of flattery now. …
Even if it were the case that we needed more young labour, why import the next generation of Germans from sub-Saharan Africa? Sweden — to take one example — has zero need for unskilled labour. And especially zero need for unskilled labourers who don’t speak Swedish.
All the time nobody, but nobody, asks why, if such jobs exist, the 25 per cent to 50 per cent of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Greek youth who are unemployed cannot be encouraged to fill them first. …
The dead hand of political correctness is the cause:
As in the case of Australia and (to a lesser extent) the US, Europeans have been persuaded that we are bad societies, weighed down by a historical guilt and therefore worthy — finally — of cultural extirpation. We, the least racist countries in the world, are told that we are the most racist and that we should annihilate ourselves as a consequence.
Again, this is a one-way argument, levelled only at those suspected of being of European origin. One of the largest empires in human history was the Ottoman Empire. Who has ever heard anyone argue that as punishment for that the Turkish people must accept immigration they cannot digest until their country’s culture disappears? What other societies are told they should become — at best — staging posts for the world? …
During my travels across the continent’s camps and chancelleries, I came to fear that Europe was committing suicide. Or at least that our leaders have decided to commit suicide. …
In the last census, carried out in 2011, people who identified as “white British” had become a minority in 23 out of the 33 boroughs in the capital city of London. …
Europe is on a very dangerous road. The same road Australia is on. This is going to require more thinking — and deeper thinking — than we have managed to date. Because stupid and shallow thinking is what has brought us to this pass.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
