“Migration” by Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
“No nation in history has survived once its borders were destroyed, once its citizenship was rendered
no different from mere residence, and once its neighbors with impunity undermined its sovereignty.”
Victor Davis Hanson (1953-)
Over two and a half million illegal migrants have crossed our southern border this fiscal year. Last week, 10,000 crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, a city of fewer than 30,000. The United States is not alone in being inundated by swarms of migrants. On Italy’s island of Lampedusa, where 6,000 locals reside, 11,000 migrants arrived in five days last week. In the UK’s The Spectator, on the same date, Douglas Murray wrote: “Keep allowing people with no discernible asylum claims to land by the thousands, from a continent with hundreds of millions more to come, and you will be fêted. Stop the law-breaking and you will find yourself prosecuted.” Today, the problem of illegal immigration appears insoluble. It seems to be, as Churchill once said about Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It is neither a mystery nor insoluble. But it is a problem political leaders in Washington and Brussels refuse to address honestly.
On one side, there are those who despair a humanitarian crisis – people living in utter poverty and under dictatorial regimes. These people are willing to accommodate victims (perceived or real) without reserve. On the other side are those willing to exercise any measure to keep out all illegal immigrants – a wall, armed guards, barbed wire, refusals to let over-crowded boats dock. It is a problem in need of the common sense of a Jeeves, when too much of the West is led by well-intentioned, feeble-minded Bertie Woosters.
Migration has been a factor in human evolution for at least 200,000 years – since homo sapiens began leaving Africa. For the first 180,000-190,000 years our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, migrating from one area to another, depending on weather and food availability. They first populated the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Around 15,000 years ago they sailed to Australia, and crossed the Bering Sea to the Americas, Sometime about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago our ancestors began to transition from nomads to farmers, raising crops and animals for food, and around 3,000 BCE city states were created, to satisfy a need for laws to govern society and commerce.
Political and religious persecution, along with economic opportunity, are the principal reasons people leave homelands for other places. But demographics also plays a role. In some places, population growth outstrips food resources. The developed world has the opposite problem – shrinking populations, which can be offset with increased in-migration. In Europe, according to Christopher Caldwell writing in the September 21, 2023 issue of The Spectator, “each native generation is only about two-thirds the size of the last.” The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the European Union is 1.5, while that of sub-Saharan Africa is 4.6. (A TFR of 2.1 is needed to replace the population.) Based on current trends, sub-Saharan Africa’s population would expand ten-fold between 1950 and 2050. (In contrast, the United States’ population grew just over three fold from 1920 to 2020.) With these dynamics – a Europe that eschews child-bearing, an Africa birthing more children than can be accommodated, and a Middle East in turmoil – it is unsurprising that Europe faces a migration crisis. Nor is it surprising that the U.S., with a TFR of 1.6, has need of more immigrants. Political parties on the Continent and in the U.S. must set aside partisan differences and address a reality that cannot be wished away.
Italy, with a TFR of 1.24, has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe. The Italian National Institute of Statistics estimates that the population of Italy by 2070 will have declined by 12 million to 47.7 million, while the median age will have increased from 47 to 54. Have government officials thought about the costs and ramifications of this self-induced crisis, of the ratio of workers to retirees? Is Italy willing to assimilate enough migrants to offset the decline in their native population? How will an influx of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East affect a culture that reaches back more than two thousand years?
The United States processes roughly a million legal immigrants each year. Illegal crossings have been a problem for decades but have grown noticeably worse over the past three years. Illegal border crossings in 2020 were less than 500,000. This year, they will exceed 2.5 million, more than double legal immigration. The border with Mexico extends two thousand miles and intersects with four states – California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Obviously, those states are under the greatest pressure, but with immigrants being bussed out of those states, northern cities are feeling the effects. Before his election in 2021, New York’s Democrat Mayor Eric Adams declared: “We should protect our immigrants. Period. Yes, New York City will remain a sanctuary city under an Adams administration.” Less than two years later, on August 9, 2023, Mr. Adams’ tone changed: “The City is in an unprecedented state of emergency…we are past our breaking point. For each family seeking asylum through the City’s care, we spend an average of $383.00 per night to provide shelter, food, medical care, and social services. With more than 57,300 individuals currently in our care, it amounts to $9.8 million a day…nearly $3.6 billion a year.”
As well, there are humanitarian issues. Traffickers who bring migrants to the southern border extort thousands of dollars from those in their care. Women and children are sexually abused. The amount of fentanyl seized at the border has increased six-fold, but even more has made its way into the country. The number of fentanyl-related deaths in the U.S. have risen five-fold in the past three years. Keep in mind, the precursor chemicals that comprise the essential ingredients of fentanyl come from China. They are shipped to Mexico where they are made into tablets, and then enter the U.S. via drug traffickers.
British Home Secretary Suella Braverman spoke to the American Enterprise Institute this week. In her speech she warned that the threshold for asylum claims under the United Nations Refugee Convention has been lowered, creating huge incentives for illegal immigration – “that simply being gay, a woman, or fearful of discrimination is now effectively enough to qualify for protection and, as a result, as many as 780 million people will be eligible to claim asylum.” Perhaps she exaggerated, but directionally she was correct.
Do western leaders fully comprehend what they have unleashed, as they move toward open borders, even as they deny doing so? In Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker wrote: “The demographic tsunami from the global South, as the North’s population shrinks, is in its early stages, and most people can see clearly what happens when leaders insist on a moral code that suggests our obligations to indigent foreigners are as great as to our own citizens.” There have been times in the past when we should have taken in more asylum seekers than we did. For example, Jews trying to leave Europe in the late 1930s. We failed thousands of them. But that does not mean our borders should be open now.
Flight attendants instruct passengers traveling with small children, in the event of a drop in air pressure, to first secure your own oxygen mask, then the child’s. Similarly, before we let more illegal migrants overwhelm our cities and towns, we must ensure that our citizens are secure, our laws enforced, and that the values that helped mold this Nation remain intact.
We are told that democracy dies in darkness. It does not. It dies in sunlight. It dies with the assumption of power by unelected bureaucrats. It dies when people abandon accountability and responsibility. It dies in the censorship of ideas and opinions that do not accord to an accepted narrative. It dies when mandates replace debate and compromise. It dies when the media equates opinion with news. It dies when we no longer see ourselves as the global standard for individual liberty. It dies when we lose the ability to defend ourselves and freedom-loving people around the world. It dies under the unintended results of foolish and unwise policies. Migration is almost as old as mankind, but the advent of the modern nation-state, after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, limited the freedom to migrate at will. Borders came to mean something. Today, if respect for borders continues to be ignored by political leaders and migrants, we run the risk of unleashing a backlash with potentially devastating consequences.
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