The
AmericanInterest
Europe’s
Waning Welcome
by
by
Football
hooligans rampaged through the Stockholm train station on Friday
evening targeting immigrants. The Local.se reports:
A
gang of up to a hundred black-clad masked men marched in central Stockholm on
Friday evening, singling out and beating up immigrants, and handing out
leaflets threatening further violent attacks against unaccompanied refugee
youth. [ . . . ]
According to Aftonbladet
newspaper, men were distributing leaflets on Friday evening with the slogan
“It’s enough now!” which threatened to give “the North African street children
who are roaming around” the “punishment they deserve.”
The mood in Europe is
starting to sour on immigration almost by the day. So far, thankfully, this
kind of organized violence has been relatively rare. But even responsible
political leaders are starting to make it clear that immigrants are no longer
so welcome. Sweden,
Finland,
and Germany
have all taken action in the last week to accelerate deportations and deter
further immigration; now Austria is joining in. Reuters reports:
.
. .The government announced this month that it would cap the number of asylum
claims at 127,500, or 1.5 percent of the country’s population, over the next
four years.
Now the government has decided to carry out
at least 50,000 deportations in the same period. . .
Stories like these
are an indication of how badly the European elite has lost its way over the
last few years. Making grandiose statements about the right of asylum,
lecturing citizens for their prejudice and narrow-mindedness, and pursuing
open borders in the face of unprecedented demographic pressure: It was
never going to last. And now, Stein’s Law seems to be kicking into action: Trends
that can’t continue, won’t.
The
problems of migrants and refugees are real, and the desperation of people
fleeing war in their homelands is something to which no good human being can be
indifferent. Yet it is also true that the only thing that makes legal rights
possible is a human community bound by law and solidarity. In modern Europe,
that is the nation-state. Europe spent the last few hundred years sorting
itself into polities that were relatively ethnically homogenous, in a process
that led to stable communities with the protection of laws—but at the cost of
unprecedented bloodshed. And those states—like all human
communities—are both enabled and limited by the ideas, associations,
culture, and history of those who compose them.
However
much the idea appeals to cosmopolitan utopians, it is not possible for such
human communities to accommodate levels of migration beyond some ceiling.
That ceiling is variable, and when there are large cultural and religious
differences between the native population and newcomers, the ceiling drops.
The
European elite’s
reckless disregard for the very real limits on the Continent’s political and
psychological ability to receive migrants, and the shortsightedness of
arrogant policymakers who charged on without an understanding of public
sentiment, is going to cost Europe—and migrants—dear.
The U.S. is also heading for this kind of reckoning: Immigration and
refugee policy have become detached from public sentiment and the backlash
is gathering force. In both the U.S. and the EU, there is a rising
sentiment in public opinion that elites are deliberately and consciously
taking steps that will change the demographic and cultural balance of the
countries they oversee. This is the kind of soil in which poisonous plants
grow well, and one can watch them growing on both sides of the Atlantic.
Both
the U.S. and the EU need new conversations about migration and immigration, and
elites are going to have to dial back their enthusiasm for policies that
rest on an increasingly frail basis of public support. Spouting liberal
clichés and accusing one’s opponents of racism won’t help. Rather, elites
must listen much more carefully to the message that many in the U.S.
and the EU are trying to convey.
