Karl
1yr ago
Frankly, I'm deeply pessimistic on the migration question. Yes, the overton window has moved to the right in the sense that it is now possible to harshly criticize mass migration in public now, but anything that would actually solve it is still completely politically impossible. What would be the bare minimum a serious program intending to stop Europe's demographic shift look like? Step 1 would obviously be to stop new arrivals, i.e a complete halt of non-EU migration, or at the very least African and Middle Eastern migration.
The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore. Even if a far-right party can take power in any given European country, and even if they sincerely want to halt migration, there is an entire European judiciary that has decided that the right of muslims to come here en masse is a human right, but Europeans not having their cities being made unlivable by them and their progeny is not a human right. As such, any serious attempt to stop migration is stillborn. To actually solve the issue, you would need either a very throughout rework or abolition of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. But even admitting this out loud is still completely outside of the overton window. It is a political impossibility.
It is tragic, but the well-intended reaction to world war 2 will prove to be Western Europe's doom.
Karl
1yr ago
I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.
Unfortunately it does not have a handy chart showing the net cost per place of orgin like this Dutch study has on page 76, but I imagine the numbers would look even worse here for non-EU migrants, since our welfare state is infamously easy to just leech of for life if you can't be bothered to work. The EU migrant numbers would probably look better due to all the highly paid eurocrats in Brussels.
Especially MENA and subsaharan African migrants are notorious for being a massive cost sink in pretty much every western european country they settle in en masse. I find it hard to believe that the UK alone has somehow managed to turn say Morrocans into something resembling a desireable citizen, given their horrendous performance in the rest of Europe. Mind you, then we haven't even gotten into the other problems importing an underclass from the third world brings with it. Of our prison population, 48% flat out doesn't even have belgian citizenship. I would not at all be surprised if >80% of our prison population had a migrant background. Then we also have the terrorism issue, but credit where credit is due that has improved in the last couple of years, we haven't had a serious attack with mass casualties in a while now. Either our secret service has seriously stepped its game up or the defeat of ISIS has made comitting an attack a less attractive prospect. Perhaps both, hard to say.
Karl
2yr ago
For many places national identity is useful precisely as a form of resistance to overweening state power . This is obvious in colonial regions. Even "nations" without states use this; Quebec has won concessions due to the unity that they've managed to cobble together in the name of their "nation". Meanwhile French-Canadians elsewhere? Shit out of luck. Move to Quebec or assimilate.
You can also see this pattern in my native Belgium. When the Belgian revolution happened the Francophone elite envisioned a unitary monolangual French country. In the south they succeeded in exterminating the Walloon language, almost nobody speaks it today and I haven't heard of any serious movement to revive it. Here in the north the Flemish movement was largely succesful in fighting back against this, and we've managed to perserve our language and wrestle back certain political competences from the central state. Education for example is fully in the hands of the liguistic communities.
Have they though? I know the socdems there have been making a lot of noise about halting mass migration, but to which extent have the actually succeeded? Mind, I'm not trying to say you're wrong here, I'm genuinely curious. if this site is to be believed, the Denmark's net migration rate has barely budged since 2019, but net migration rate isn't the stat I'm interested in as it includes inter-EU migration.
If they've succeeded, what's been their secret sauce? How have they managed to get out of getting flooded with refugees without getting slapped down by some EU court? Is what they've been doing scalable to the rest of the EU, or are they basically just pushing the problem to other EU countries?
More options
Context Copy link