I reject the idea that it’s “racist” to want to preserve one’s national culture and character (especially in language), or to favor bona fide citizens for gainful employment…. National boundaries will be defended. Sentimentalists will have to step aside. History is not a bedtime story about bunnies and kittens.
(H/T: Powerline). Problem with the above, our “elites” consider this oh so old fashioned and unenlightened.
It certainly has been quite hard to keep up with what seems to be a massive tsunami of muslim migrants news coming out of Europe. Given the number of NON-Syrian “refugees”, what we are seeing are mostly men looking for a better life without following The Rule of Law – an abstract notion from whence they come so one should be rightly concerned whether or not this vital aspect of Western Liberalism (or should that be “formerly”?) will be inculcated. Along with other Western ideals – which, pretty much, are hated in the muslim world. So what does this portend?
Dunno, but I’m not kosher with the idea of unrestrained influx of people only for the bucks here or there; as Milton Friedman said, you can have open borders or a generous welfare state but not both (and still have a good deal going). Here’s what I’ve been collecting for a bit and to get the full import, go glance at each link for a better idea when put together with all the others – and Friedman’s warning should be ringing in your ears as you roll through these. Emphasis mine, some reformatting, and yes, snippets were picked deliberately
From the same post:
If these were real refugees, where are the women? Where are the elderly people? Where are the weak and the sick? It is increasingly clear that what I have said is true: this is not a refugee crisis. This is a hijrah, a migration to Islamize a new land.
As I have said before, elites want change regardless of what we ordinary people want:
The decision to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees will “change”Germany, Angela Merkel has said, as her government announced a raft of measures to help cope with the migrant crisis.
Merkel even justified the transformation by citing the Adolf Hitler’s socialism-for-Aryans ideology, which sparked World War Two 76 years ago. Becoming a homeland for migrants “is something very valuable, if you look at our history,” she said, as if today’s young Germans must lose their society as penance for their great-grandparents’ actions.
The forced transformation of Germany’s population was accelerated Sept. 8 when her socialist deputy chancellor suggested the country should accept 500,000 migrants a year for several years. “We could surely deal with something in the order of half a million for several years,” said Sigmar Gabriel, who is Germany’s deputy chancellor, economics minister and chairman of the left-wing Social Democratic Party of Germany.
…In fact, the arrival of just 1.5 million young men — even without their wives and children — would also hammer the job-and-income prospects for many of the 10 million German men and women aged between 20 and 29. In turn, the migrants’ economic disruption would also reduce the number of children that displaced German and European youths can afford to raise, worsening Germany’s huge shortage of births.
Because if you are paying higher taxes for migrants, it always means less for your own family.
Merkel and the Socialist Party want to import millions of foreign Muslims even though many young Germans and Europeans are unemployed or underemployed. In July, the region’s unemployment rate was 10.9 percent, including a youth unemployment rate of 20 percent.
Remember that! Elites are willing to sacrifice the well being of their own people? To assuage themselves? Make no mistake – their own children will not being the ones paying this “penalty”. They only have to deal with the macro stuff with lots of layers between themselves and these migrants – it is the ordinary folks that have to deal with the import micro level stuff like here – like walking through your house.
As Mr Orban said: “Nobody wants to stay in Hungary [or] Slovakia, nor Poland, nor Estonia. All want to go to Germany.” And yet his country, and potentially others which have the misfortune to be on the Balkan land route, are being forced to cope with the consequences of this mass movement of peoples. Imagine if you were a poor householder, just managing to keep your financial head above water while you attempted to turn your circumstances around, and a very wealthy neighbour decided to throw open his doors to the needy – and one obvious way that those in need could reach that welcoming haven was by tramping through your house. Might you find yourself inclined to be unhelpful in the hopes of discouraging others from taking the same path?
And actions are louder than words:
“Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom. I have visited nearly 60 countries and lived in the USSR, Russia and the USA, and I have never experienced anything as good as what we have. Only in the Anglosphere countries – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is there anything comparable. I am amazed at how relaxed we are about giving this away. . . . It may not be ideal, but the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living. . . . You really think these crowds of tough young men chanting ‘Germany!’ in the heart of Budapest are ‘asylum-seekers’ or ‘refugees’? Refugees don’t confront the police of the countries in which they seek sanctuary. They don’t chant orchestrated slogans or lie across the train tracks.”
And assimilation & finances should be the FIRST considerations – not “hope for” ones either:
It’s practically an article of faith in the United States in 2015 that “diversity is our strength” (I voiced skepticism here), and that we have to respect all world cultures and have a certain understanding of them. But at the same time, we still gloss over cultural differences, and are too willing to resort to platitudes like “no culture is better than any other” or imagine that “culture” is limited to special foods or music or dance or celebrations, or perhaps recognize differences such as whether it’s polite to be on time or an hour later than the specified commencement of an event, but ignore the way culture is a mindset at a much deeper level.
If Germany admits 800,000 Syrians, or 8,000,000 Syrians, or some similarly huge number, this year or the next, or cumulatively over time, on top of Turks and other Muslims already living in the country, there is a very real issue of assimilation — and already-resident Turks are for the most part already poorly assimilated. It’s not about their being Muslim, per se, if they were as indifferently Muslim as most Germans are indifferently Christian. It’s about the sudden arrival of very large numbers of (mostly male) migrants who don’t speak the language and are by and large poorly educated in any language, and who, even if they learn German and become educated (and that alone is a huge task, much bigger than the simple provision of funds and social services), are unlikely to share in German culture.
It’s about more than sharing the wealth, though that’s part of it, as resettlement assistance risks overwhelming German finances. Especially considering how low Germany’s birth rate is (a steady 1.4 TFR for the past generation), a high rate of immigration (via asylum-seekers or otherwise) will change Germany, and it risks becoming merely a place name, without the culture that built up its economic power. Should this happen, the migrants who sought prosperity will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
Ummah much? Not if you are the $2 Trillion/year Gulf States, el zippo:
Whenever Britain or America or Israel do have any involvement in any Islamic country we hear a very great deal about the ‘Ummah’. The OIC and the Arab League, for instance, never miss an opportunity to talk about the brotherhood and unity of the Islamic nation and how much any ‘hurt’ or offence to any part of this entity hurts and offends the whole.
Well Iran and Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and almost every other Muslim country in the Middle East have been involving themselves in the Syrian civil war for four years now. Many have sent fully-equipped armies of their own to fight intra-Islamic rivalries in the homeland of the Syrian peoples. And yet it is Europeans who are falling for the idea that because of this, it is our responsibility – not theirs – to pay for the mess they have created.
…Well it seems to me that at the very least we should ask these countries ‘Where is your “Ummah” now?’ Sure, Jordan and Lebanon are grudgingly having to cope with plenty of refugees from Syria. But not one of the Gulf States – not one – has a resettlement programme for a single Syrian refugee. And while the Iranian President lectures the Hungarians and other Europeans on our ‘shortcomings’ in this regard, how many Syrians has Iran let in? How many Syrians has Saudi Arabia given Saudi citizenship to? Neither country being uninvolved in Syria’s descent into madness…
There is much to be mulled over in all of this. But one thing I think we can all take away is that the ‘Ummah’ is a crock. There’s no such thing. It’s just a trick to beat Americans and Brits and Israelis with as and when it suits.
And to watch this “Muslim youth” threaten violent death to a country that has taken him in, well, is anyone surprised?
And some in Europe are starting to re-consider:
Officials in Cyprus and a French town came out this week against taking in Muslim refugees, joining the position of Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Even in Australia, the debate has been underway over what kind of asylum seekers to accept. Cypriot Interior Minister Socrates Hasikos said Monday that of the 300 refugees Cyprus is willing to accept, the European island nation would prefer them to be Christian.
“We would seek for them to be Orthodox Christians,” Hasikos told state radio. “It’s not an issue of being inhuman or not helping if we are called upon, but to be honest, yes, that’s what we would prefer.” He argued that Christians would “integrate better.”
And then it starts – I was unaware of the Schengen agreement was the name of the EU treaty that allowed for free movement within the EU once a person got INTO the EU – and we see what happens when theory hits worst case reality:
This time the crisis is over one of Europe’s most cherished icons: the Schengen visa-free/passport-free zone, which has given the European project arguably its strongest evidence yet that a larger and ultimately “pan-European” community would emerge from the nation-states bound by the treaty and the ideals behind it.
Oopsies! Theory – out of many disparate countries, we will force it to act as one. Then reality hit and the national self-interest started to kick in as the magnitude of what was happening was finally being assessed correctly by elites who are seeing their ox about being gored:
The current wave is fast invalidating all earlier numerical projections: Germany is looking at about 800,000 asylum applications this year; in July alone more than 100,000 people entered Europe, mainly through Greece and Italy. Reportedly, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will now call for the member countries to resettle the 160,000 people who have reached Greece, Italy, and Hungary—a fourfold increase relative to two months ago. This is the “Schengen wave” of immigration; now reaching the point of entry places one within striking distance of Europe’s interior.
The size and distribution of the resettlement quota within the EU has become an intra-family squabble, with Britain resisting and Germany and Italy asking for higher quota commitments from other countries, especially from the reluctant “new members.” Here Hungary has led the way in its opposition to the plan, building a barbed wire fence along the Serbian border and pushing enabling legislation through the parliament that would reassert national control. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called the immigration wave a “German problem.”
So it now will come to this: Germany’s Angela Merkel will insist that increasing resettlement quotas for all is inevitable, making it a litmus test of intra-EU solidarity.
Solidarity – yeah, we’ll see how long that lasts (hint: keep reading). NH’s own Mark Steyn make this observation:
Here’s the question for “Fortress Europe”: What’s to stop that vast “caravan of humanity” just walking in and taking it the way Robert Mugabe’s thugs took any Zimbabwean farm that tickled their fancy? The Camp of the Saints is looking more prophetic every day.
Four-and-a-half years on, they’re “walking in and taking it” – and Angela Merkel can’t even see it.
Oh, but they’re refugees! From the Syrian civil war!
According to the United Nations, 49 per cent are non-Syrian. As to whether they’re refugees, well, usually, refugees flees as families. Yet here, from those UN statistics, is the breakdown of those “refugees”:
13 per cent children
12 per cent women
75 per cent menThat’s not the demographic distribution of fleeing refugees, but of an invading army.
But notwithstanding specious arguments and sanguine expectations, Europe faces an existential alien threat. From Charles Martel to the Siege of Vienna, it has resisted invaders and would-be conquerers from Africa and the East. In 2015 it is doing the opposite.
Just because they aren’t carrying the typical weapons of war doesn’t mean it isn’t one. After all, that’s how the Muslim Brotherhood have been operating for decades. And Europe has its collective heads in the sand thinking “hey, this isn’t the Middle Ages still, right” – all the time forgetting that muslims ARE still fighting those same wars from so long ago.
And then steps in the religious “organizations” that are arguing for even more brought here to the US:
Religious groups in the United States have urged the White House to step up its response to the Syrian refugee crisis, with one on Tuesday calling Washington’s efforts so far “disappointing.” Church World Service, a global humanitarian organization that represents 37 Christian denominations, has called on the government to take in 100,000 Syrians over the next year, said Jen Smyers, who works on the group’s immigration and refugee program. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and the Jewish refugee assistance agency HIAS along with secular groups have also backed that figure.
And know this – their religious concern is only of surface value – as I’ve been writing for years, charities like this are nothing but captive by the Government – totally dependent on tax monies. Go ahead – ask them THE most basic question of all – why aren’t you personally acting like the Good Samaritan? Why aren’t you opening your OWN door, your own home? Why are you forcing others to carry the responsibility and cost just to salve your own hearts? I’ve written about these folks before – they won’t.
And already, the US is among the most generous on a continuous basis:
We also are the only country that routinely hands out citizenship docs to migrants (while giving it automatically to their children). Consider: 1 in 4 U.S. residents is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. 1 in 5 global migrants lives inside the United States (even though only 1 in 20 people in the world live inside the United States). The size of our foreign-born population – 42 million – is larger than most countries. We are the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world. We have one of the largest expatriate Muslim populations in the world. In addition to our refugee programs for poor migrants, we also dispense 9 in 10 green cards to poor countries in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. No welfare test is applied. Half of our immigrant population is on welfare. In CA, half of the state has immigrant parents. In NYC, nearly 4 in 10 residents were born outside the U.S. We accept more refugees each year than any other country, accept more permanent immigrants each year than any other country, and more illegals than any other country (2.5 million alone since Obama came into office). Etc., etc.
And think again – it has been the fundamentalist strains of Islam that is causing much of this – and this finger points directly to Saudi Arabia. Sure thing sport, let’s build more mosques that say “kill the West and its infidels?”. Can we see this as “we sent our troops, now send them the bases from which to operate”?
Saudi Arabia has reportedly responded to the growing number of people fleeing the Middle East for western Europe – by offering to build 200 mosques in Germany…. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which quoted a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al Diyar, Saudi Arabia would build one mosque for every 100 refugees who entered Germany in extraordinary numbers last weekend.
If true, this offer should be flung back in the face of the Saudi regime (accompanied, perhaps, by an offer to build 200 churches in Saudi Arabia). When the Saudis fund mosques, they spread their own poisonous (Wahhabist) brand of Islam at the expense of less extreme varieties.
As I keep reminding Doug Scamman (he who says that Republicans should stay out of social stuff), all social issues have fiscal costs – and taking in “refugees” is no different:
REPORT: OBAMA’S PLAN TO IMPORT 10,000 REFUGEES WOULD COST TAXPAYERS $6.5 BILLION
President Obama’s plan to import 10,000 Syrian refugees would cost U.S. tax payers $130 million per year, according to projections from Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector.
Extended out over the next 50 years, these additional 10,000 migrants would cost U.S. taxpayers $6.5 billion over the course of the migrants’ lifetime.On Sept. 10, a White House spokesman said President Barack Obama would grant residence to 10,000 additional Syrians in 2016, along with the routine inflow of 70,000 refugees and 1 million new immigrants. Many establishment Republican presidential candidates such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Jeb Bush, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), say it’s the United States’ duty to import these economic migrants from predominantly poor and Muslim countries.
Yeah, these same folks will not be absorbing the costs…or the other real costs as Michelle Malkin reminds us about th Boston Marathon Bombers:
There’s no need to hypothesize. Our nation remains utterly incapable of screening out legitimate dreamers from destroyers, liberty-seekers from liberty-stiflers. Indiscriminate asylum and refugee policies rob the truly deserving of an opportunity for freedom — and threaten our national security.
It’s shameful that our leaders in Washington, sworn to uphold and defend our Constitution and our people, suffer chronic amnesia about the fatal consequences of open borders. I’ll keep reprinting my reminders. Maybe someday someone in a position of power will pay heed, throw political correctness out the window, and stop hitting the snooze button.
Have you forgotten? Boston jihadist brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev received dubious asylum status through their parents thanks to lax vetting. After entering on short-term tourist visas, their mother and father (an ethnic Chechen Muslim) won asylum and acquired U.S. citizenship. Next, younger son Dzhokhar obtained U.S. citizenship. Older son Tamerlan, whose naturalization application was pending, traveled freely between the U.S. and the jihad recruitment zone of Dagestan, Russia, a year before executing their Boston Marathon massacre. Though they had convinced the U.S. that they faced deadly persecution, the Tsarnaevs’ parents both had returned to their native land and were there when their sons perpetrated their bloody terror rampage.
Ah yes, the days of living totally on the taxpayer dime ended – and indeed, that’s how they lived here.
So what do you say when your “innocent migrants” amass in such numbers and bring their old beefs to bear in their “new homelands”? Do we call this “assimilation” when Germany has to call out its ARMY?
WATCH: MIGRANT TURKS AND KURDS BATTLE ON FRANKFURT STREETS, GERMAN ARMY CALLED IN
At least five arrests were made in Frankfurt on Thursday night after a march by supporters of Turkish nationalism descended into bloody violence when they clashed with rival Kurd separatists.
Video of the riot has emerged on the same day Germany announced it will place 4,000 soldiers on standby over the weekend to help with a new wave of up to 40,000 refugees arriving in the country.
Hmmm, peaceful migrants….video at that link.
Tagging onto Michelle’s post – how can you even do “lax vetting” when these “migrants” won’t give the necessary info with which to do so?
A THIRD OF MIGRANTS TO ITALY REFUSING IDENTIFICATION MEASURES
More than 40,000 migrants who arrived in Italy this year have refused to be identified. Italian police say many choose to remain unknown hoping to move on to other EU member states.
Of the 122,000 migrants who have arrived in Italy so far this year, figures released by the Servizio di Polizia Scientifica (SPS) show only about 81,000 have agreed to be identified. Italy’s ANSA news agency reports that those refusing to undergo identification processes are mainly Eritreans, Somalis and Syrians according to SPS director Daniela Stradiotto. She explained:“It’s technically impossible to force them to undergo photo and fingerprint identification.”
So you want to keep them….where? So, ok, back to the widening gap between the leadership and Joe Sixpack on this crisis:
But here is a problem with Europe’s decision-makers, and it connects to decision-makers in America.
Damning “the elites” is often a mindless, phony and manipulative game. Malice and delusion combine to produce the refrains: “Those fancy people in their Georgetown cocktail parties,” “Those left-wing poseurs in their apartments in Brussels.” This is social resentment parading as insight, envy posing as authenticity.
But in this crisis talk of “the elites” is pertinent. The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.
Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.
The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.
People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.
Perhaps the elites should be made to feel less safe.
And this is the kind of inequality that is not discussed – but discussed it will be even if not with words of things get worse. And these may be part of the problem on both sides of the issues:
What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.
The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Great Wave of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is crashing into a continent beset with its own problems:
In Europe and the West, the crisis is quieter but no less profound. Europe today often doesn’t seem to know where it is going, what Western civilization is for, or even whether or how it can or should be defended. Increasingly, the contemporary version of Enlightenment liberalism sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the religious, political and economic foundations of Western society. Liberal values such as free expression, individual self-determination and a broad array of human rights have become detached in the minds of many from the institutional and civilizational context that shaped them.
Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.
Europe’s approach to the migration crisis brings these failures into sharp relief. The European Union bureaucracy in Brussels has erected a set of legal doctrines stated in terms of absolute right and has tried to build policy on this basis. Taking its cue from the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other ambitious declarations and treaties, the EU holds that qualified applicants have an absolute human right to asylum. European bureaucrats tend to see asylum as a legal question, not a political one, and they expect political authorities to implement the legal mandate, not quibble with it or constrain it.
Elites who fundamentally don’t believe in the nations they govern cannot govern well.
And it has become increasingly clear that many of them don’t – always observe their actions and not their words. In this, they are living in their own bubble of denial. LIke what has our own refugee experiment brought in the Land of Lakes?
Before Welcoming Thousands of Syrian Refugees, We Should Consider What Somali Immigrants Have Brought the U.S.
…Thanks to American refugee-resettlement and family-reunification policies, Minneapolis has the dubious distinction of hosting the largest concentration of Somalis in the United States — some 30,000, according to census records, though Somali leaders say that underestimates the population by tens of thousands.
…Between 1983 and 2004, the United States resettled just over 55,000 Somali refugees, 13,000 of them in 2004 alone. After a dip in the mid-2000s, Somali refugee resettlement picked back up: 27,000 Somalis entered the U.S. from 2008 to 2013, making the country the fourth-largest source of refugees in that period, behind only Burma, Iraq, and Bhutan.
The number of Somali adults and children who participated in the state’s family cash assistance program jumped 34 percent from 2008 to 2013, to 5,950. At the same time, food assistance participation increased 98 percent, to 17,300 adults and children, which does not include U.S.-born Somalis.
Shelters, food banks, and local charities serve thousands of Somalis annually.
And there is the terror problem. To date, more than 60 young Somali men and women have left Minnesota to join al-Shabaab, the Islamic State, and other Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East and Africa. Others have been stopped at local airports attempting to make the journey, and prosecutions for sending money to terrorist outfits abroad are not uncommon. The FBI has begun to monitor the community, and it is the target of a federal pilot program to counter violent extremism. That program will focus especially on Minneapolis’s Cedar Riverside neighborhood — or, as locals call it, “Little Mogadishu.”
…But, as the Somali experiment makes clear, it is not just the short-term consequences that are worrisome. Notably, the terror threat from the Somali-American community comes not from refugees, but from their children — American-born Somalis who have never been to Africa. Setting aside the near-certainty that at least some Syrian refugees will be connected to the Islamic State, refugee resettlement is sure to incubate national-security threats that will not manifest themselves for 20 years.
So, how’s Sweden’s experiment with accepting Muslim immigrants going again?
Not so well, says Tino Sanandaji. Mr. Sanandaji is himself an immigrant, a Kurdish-Swedish economist who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden when he was 10. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and specializes in immigration issues. This week I spoke with him by Skype.
“There has been a lack of integration among non-European refugees,” he told me. Forty-eight per cent of immigrants of working age don’t work, he said. Even after 15 years in Sweden, their employment rates reach only about 60 per cent. Sweden has the biggest employment gap in Europe between natives and non-natives.
From Davos to Brussels, the conventional wisdom is that a massive influx of immigrants is needed to prop up Europe’s welfare states. Unexplained is how the unemployed are meant to pay for the pensions of the retired.
In Sweden, where equality is revered, inequality is now entrenched. Forty-two per cent of the long-term unemployed are immigrants, Mr. Sanandaji said. Fifty-eight per cent of welfare payments go to immigrants…..
It’s not for lack of trying. Sweden is tops in Europe for its immigration efforts. Nor is it the newcomers’ fault. Sweden’s labour market is highly skills-intensive, and even low-skilled Swedes can’t get work. “So what chance is there for a 40-year-old woman from Africa?” Mr. Sandaji wondered.
Sweden’s fantasy is that if you socialize the children of immigrants and refugees correctly, they’ll grow up to be just like native Swedes. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Much of the second generation lives in nice Swedish welfare ghettos. The social strains – white flight, a general decline in trust – are growing worse. The immigrant-heavy city of Malmo, just across the bridge from Denmark, is an economic and social basket case.
Sweden’s generosity costs a fortune, at a time when economic growth is stagnant. The country now spends about $4-billion a year on settling new refugees – up from $1-billion a few years ago, Mr. Sanandaji said. And they keep coming…
At some point, that which is unsustainable will fail. Remember Germany Prime Minister Merkel’s boast of taking in so many “migrants”? Yeah, that lasted long:
Berlin (AFP) – German authorities warned Sunday they were stretched to capacity to welcome refugees arriving en masse, as Europe scrambled to hold emergency talks on the unprecedented crisis….Germany has become the destination of choice for many refugees, particularly for Syrians after Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to relax asylum rules for citizens of the war-torn country.
However, with some 450,000 people arriving in Europe’s biggest economy so far this year, local authorities are buckling under the sudden surge. “Given the numbers from yesterday, it is very clear that we have reached the upper limit of our capacity,” said a Munich police spokesman.
…Federal transport minister Alexander Dobrindt also weighed in, saying “effective measures are necessary now to stop the influx”.
…Germany is to reintroduce some form of controls on its border with Germany to cope with the influx of migrants, German and Austrian media report. It is not clear what measures would be introduced. More than 13,000 migrants arrived into Munich alone on Saturday. Germany’s vice-chancellor said the country was “at the limit of its capabilities”.
Germany’s Bild newspaper and Austria’s Kronen Zeitung said controls would be in place on the Bavaria-Austria border.
If confirmed that would represent a temporary suspension of “Schengen”, the arrangement under which the EU scrapped most internal border controls, a bad idea then, a worse idea now. It should be scrapped, not suspended.
Reality. And a last observation for tonite:
Two thoughts: First, when you tell people from poor countries that the doors are open to rich countries, a lot more will show up than you expect. Second, when your foreign policy is dominated by virtue-signaling and conspicuous displays of “compassion,” it will end badly.
Free is an important and powerful motivator – if you offer it, they will come.
We should be using this as an example not just for immigration policy but for our welfare system.
With the mess there, and the mess we have here in the US the last few years, it seems like we should be forcing our elites and leaders to go seek asylum somewhere else….
