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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Ok, but that's not answering the question of what Meloni's course of action should be. If Africa is the only place with a booming population, then that's where the immigrants are going to come from.

If even a quasi-fascist like her did the numbers and saw this as the only option, what alternatives do you recommend?

I mean offering citizenship to Hong Kong or even Chinese citizens would be prefereble to sub Saharan African migration. You could even just move Taiwan to Italy (which would solve some geopolitical issues). Those places do have the city-state vibes of the renaissance.

Those are people capable of maintaining Italy as something.

Of course boosting native births would be preferable.

You could even just move Taiwan to Italy

While we're engaging in this level of fantasy, why not just import a bunch Numenoreans instead? They're importing Africans because they're the ones with excess population to spare and high fertility rates.

Again, I'll ask why you think a right-wing, nativist government isn't considering all these alternatives you guys are coming up with.

If even a quasi-fascist like her did the numbers and saw this as the only option, what alternatives do you recommend?

If the continuum for number of African migrants accepted is just a heuristic for "fascist", then I guess I would say that "quasi-fascist" isn't far enough on the continuum.

Perhaps the actual situation is that "fascism" (real or imagined) isn't really the determining factor for immigration policies though.

In 1992, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by former followers of Italian fascism. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), a post-fascist party that became the MSI's legal successor in 1995 and moved towards national conservatism.

If it's a continuum, she's a little further along it than those who don't happen to find themselves in fascist movements.

what alternatives do you recommend?

Some problems cannot be solved but only managed. I don't have any good (realistic) solutions - if we define solution as actually solving the issue once and for all. But that isn't an excuse for passivity and resigned fatalism. There are certainly things that can and should be done to manage the issue, e.g. making citizenship harder and akin to the Gulf model, rewriting asylum laws and possibly removing asylum courts. Making controversial practices such as pushbacks legal. Ban certain NGOs who engage in smuggling. And so on.

These things would make matters better but they would not fundamentally solve the underlying issue, which you alluded to (demographic disparities, who are only getting wider). People want easy solutions but I don't see any here, but at the same time it seems to me that the old very generous asylum model has to end.

Having a two-tiered society where the ones shut out of everything are much younger and increasingly more numerous is a recipe for disaster. You ironically need the Roman model, where the peoples subsumed by Rome came to view themselves as Roman.

You ironically need the Roman model, where the peoples subsumed by Rome came to view themselves as Roman.

This has been the standard policy for the past 50 years and I don't think it has worked well. It may be different in the US since most immigrants either come from a Westernised background (Latinx America) or are from the upper elites of Third World countries, which tend also to be fairly Westernised. Europe gets neither.

I agree that a two-tiered system is probably untenable in the long run, but this goes to my point about some problems not being able to be solved but merely managed. Besides, it also depends on the willingness of natives to enforce it. Gulf Arabs do it just fine, but I suspect Europeans are too soft. OTOH, the current status quo is a massive failure too. No easy answer here.