Europe’s post-national progressive governing elite is competing to display its supposed horror over the rapidly rising number of migrants’ corpses now being washed up on Mediterranean beaches.
But those self-regarding progressives deserve much of the blame for the multi-thousand toll of migrants suffering egregious conditions trying to enter Europe, say U.S. immigration experts.
This, they argue, is because the progressives want to ignore the lessons of other migration crises — including the now-ended 2013 Pacific rush into Australia — and want to use the picture of dead migrants to break open their continent’s backdoor to huge migrations from the developing world. So far, they have opened the door wide enough to attract millions of people eager to make the risky migration around the safe-but-closed legal entrance to Europe’s placid and very civil society.
“The migrants are mainly responsible for making these decisions, and the smugglers are criminals, but the [European] governments share the responsibility,” for casualties along the risky route, said Mark Krikorian, director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies. “By not enforcing [immigration] rules, they are thereby communicating to potential migrants that [the dangerous trip] is worth the risk.” Many of the migrants are getting through the back door into Europe, so their trail of dead is a rational price for entry into Europe, Krikorian said.
“Unless [European governments] are going to allow hundreds of millions of people to come over legally into Europe, there’s no [smaller] number they could chose that would ensure more people won’t come” via the risky sea passage, said Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA.
“There’s no way to create [narrow] legal channels that stop the dying,” he said, adding the only feasible fix is to create “well-funded, well-run international refugees camps, as close to the home countries are you can, so it is easy for the migrants to to go home.” His group advocates to reduce the annual legal inflow of roughly 1.5 million people into the United States. In comparison, 4 million Americans are born each year.
The risky migration is also a safer option for many Syrian migrants, who would otherwise have to fight the Islamic State’s expanding jihadi army. It is also means that Europe’s progressive governments can discard the uncomfortable strategic option of recruiting eligible migrants into a Syrian army that can defeat ISIS.
The progressive hand-wringing about the migration has reached a new peak following the garish display of a picture showing a small drowned child, face-down on a Mediterranean beach.
The dead child, along with his two dead siblings and mother, was trying to reach Greece but sank into the sea. Two accompanying smugglers grabbed the only two lifejackets and floated back to shore.
Some progressives are using this photo as an argument to further open the door to more migrants. The New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, posted similar images on their websites Sept. 3. The dead child was used to fill the entire Sept. 2 frontpage of London’s leading progressive daily, The Independent.
“The Independent has taken the decision to publish these images because, among the often glib words about the ‘ongoing migrant crisis,’ it is all too easy to forget the reality of the desperate situation facing many refugees,” the editors intoned. “The pictures, and the tragedy they convey, are hard to ignore, and now senior politicians are calling on [Prime Minister David] Cameron to do more to tackle the crisis,” they claimed.
Most progressive European leaders want more migration and want the resulting chaotic diversity that would be managed by big governments.
Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, repealed the nation’s law against illegal migration, and declared in June that strong borders will wreck progressives’ political plans. “We want to fight for a set of values, for civility and peace… If we ignore the [migrants] now, while the Mediterranean seethes, and children drown, it is Europe itself that we lose.”
France’s socialist government has also announced intentions to allow migrants to stay in the country, and Germany’s government has announced it will accept all the migrants from Syrian who can survive the trek through Turkey and Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary. Roughly 800,00 migrants are expected this year. That’s equivalent to 3 million migrants crossing over the Texas border in one year.
Europe’s governments are cautious compared to United Nations officials. “As mobility is increasing with globalization, instead of resisting it, we should organize it,” claimed François Crépeau, the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. “That means opening legal channels [worldwide] for people to be able to come and look for work” in developed countries, he insisted.
Such statements are causing a rising howl of protest from ordinary Europeans, and are prompting other countries to rebuild the border controls that were abolished after the prior effort by German socialists to set policy for Europe from 1939 to 1945.
The U.K.’s government wants to exclude nearly all non-European migrants. Holland’s government has announced plans to expel economic migrants. Slovakia won’t take any Muslims. Hungary is stopping trains and is building a razor-wire wall to block the migrants.
The Independent’s editors are disgusted by this popular uprising against elite preferences. “While images of desperate refugees emerge almost every day, the attitude of Europe’s policymakers and much of the public have continued to harden,” they complained.
But by late Sept. 2, only 12,500 people had signed the petition by the Independent calling on the nation’s prime minister to accept the U.K.’s “share” of Muslim migrants. The newspaper did not say what the U.K.’s share would be of the perhaps 500 million people who might trying to reach Europe, and the minuscule number of people who signed the Independent’s petition shows the progressives’ political isolation.
In the United States, American media progressives are also displaying their virtue by bewailing the reluctance of ordinary Europeans — and also Americans — to extinguish their own cultures under a tsunami of foreign migrants.
But those progressives in Europe and the United States are also choosing to ignore the lesson from Australia, where a naval shield has entirely stopped the huge wave of migrants who sailed south from Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippines and other countries in 2013 and 2014.
“Today we celebrate that we have not had a successful people smuggling venture in a year, and that over the course of the last 18 months or so we have turned back 20 boats and stopped 633 people from arriving in our country,” announced the nation’s migration minister, Peter Dutton.
He is part of a conservative government that was elected to power in 2013 after the prior progressive government deployed a force of billable-hour immigration lawyers to process the ever-increasing flood of Asian migrants.
Unsurprisingly, the lawyers only attracted more migrants, and the stream became a flood and then a tidal wave.
More than 1,200 migrants drowned policy changed to prohibit further migration. That’s roughly 1 dead man, woman or child for every 10 people who have signed the Independent’s petition so far.
In contrast, the Italian navy is being used to escort or transport law-breaking migrants from Africa into Italian ports, cities, town and villages — and so the flood of migrants grows each month.
“The Australians are showing tough love,” said Krikorian. “People thought [Australia’s naval barrier] might be too strict, but in the longer term, which is, by the way, a year, it turns out to be the more compassionate decision.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.