Politico has a long article on it, and it’s hilarious. A border wall longer than Trump and Biden’s. “Return centers” in other countries, because they’re too gutless to say deportation, and so on. Complaining about Russia and Belarus’s immigration warfare (letting refugees thru Russia to get to Europe. Including, er, Afghan refugees.)
Let’s cut thru the bullshit.
The EU is in economic decline and can no longer afford refugees they can’t monetize.
Europe is also responsible for much of the refugee crisis, having enabled the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq (Poland, one biggest criers, was part of the “coalition of the willing.”) Europe, with some honorable exceptions like Ireland and Spain, is behind the Israelis, who are about to institute a flood of Lebanese refugees. Europe, thru the world bank, IMF and various post-colonial policies has worked hard to keep third world nations in poverty, increasing refugee flows.
They have helped destroy or impoverish entire nations, then whine about how migrants come to them begging for safety or a decent life.
In humanitarian terms, and international law terms, what the EU is doing is wrong, but the simple truth is that they can’t afford immigration any more, and that mass immigration has exacerbated the right wing turn. Not that it had to, but if you have large numbers of immigrants into a bad economy, who are competing for jobs and housing and social welfare with the desperate, they will naturally blame the immigrants instead of purging the incompetent and corrupt elites who are managing the economy with eye only to benefit themselves.
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The Ukraine war has made this particularly bad, not just because of all the Ukrainian migrants, but because it has increased the de-industrialization of Europe’s industrial heart, Germany.
This is, again, a self-inflicted wound. If Europe had kept the Minsk accords, or, more long term, treated Russia and its security concerns seriously, there wouldn’t have been a war. If Europe did not insist on being subordinate to America, none of this would have happened.
But Euro elites can’t imagine taking actual responsibility for their own countries and telling the US to bugger off, then following something other than neoliberal politics and economic policies.
Reducing immigration makes some sense, even if it’s inhumane, but it’s very much a “treat the symptoms, not the problems” situation.
Europe’s decline will continue until they decide to take responsibility for themselves and to overthrow an ideology which prioritizes the rich and financial games over the entire population and the real economy.
Immigration is meaningless in comparison.
Wadangala Kaladoota
Overthrow elites with what? Europeans don’t keep real firepower at home
Bill
Very much the same for North America. Something like 80% of the population are immigrants or descendants of immigrants but choose to forget that or as slaves forced to be here.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” [from the Statue of Liberty]
Now the immigrants are coming mostly due to US support of right-wing, anti-worker, anti community and pro-industry climate change policies of the past.
Purple Library Guy
You missed out Libya, also a very big one–not only did Libya’s destruction create a flood of Libyan refugees, there had been a kind of tacit deal where Libya stopped other refugees from further south getting through; when Libya dissolved into nightmare, its operation as a stopper dissolved too. And while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Europeans were basically just saying “yes, boss” to the Americans, they were actively enthusiastic about Libya and pushed for it . . . they bear a lot of the blame for that one. Particularly the French and I think the Italians. I think the French were worried that Gaddhafi’s push for a gold-backed pan-African trading currency would displace the weird African version of the Franc that was still influential in African trade even though the French themselves were on Euros.
Well. This just strengthens the overall thesis of the article. People who don’t want a bunch of refugee immigrants might do well not to go around creating refugees in their area. Go figure.
Feral Finster
“The EU is in economic decline and can no longer afford refugees they can’t monetize.”
European leaders could personally toss refugee children alive and screaming into piranha tanks and nobody would raise a peep, as long as those leaders did not question American hegemony in general or the War On Russia in particular.
marku52
Same in the US. I saw a graph where citizen full time employment was falling, and most new jobs went to “non-citizens”
What do you suppose the result of that would be? Maybe RW politics?
And why are so many immigrants here? Well, the US has wrecked their home countries…..
Oakchair
Europe’s decline will continue until they decide to take responsibility for themselves and to overthrow an ideology which prioritizes the rich and financial games
Immigration is meaningless in comparison.
—–
On the contrary. For the rich and ruling class having everyone raging about immigration instead of the ruling classes blunders, looting and failures is a massive benefit. Even better if the political groups gaining power due to leading the charge against immigration also support economic policies that further entrench and expand the rich and ruling class’s wealth and power.
Those in power need a good distraction
Otherwise there might be a little rebellion
Tc
“And why are so many immigrants here? Well, the US has wrecked their home countries…..”
You mean we SAVED them from unions and indigenous rights and many other forms of COMMUNISM! We gave them capitalist paradises! And they turn their noses up at them and decide to come here to share their squalor and powerlessness with red-blooded Americans.
Ill never forgive Europe for not saying a peep about Buscheney stealing the 2000 election, then fêting and legitimizing that theft with state dinners for Dubya, then falling over themselves to endorse the patent lies leading to the forever wars. They were very busy sowing this bumper crop of refugees.
bruce wilder
The governing classes of Europe are made up of public and business bureaucrats and their enormously wealthy business and financial patrons. The governing classes want immigration because it enhances their power and do not want immigration when the rebellion from below threatens their power.
Asking the governing classes to overthrow an ideology which prioritizes the rich and financial games over the entire population and the real economy when embracing that ideology is what made them the governing classes in the first place, seems a bit of a forlorn hope.
That the effective revolt against neoliberalism comes almost entirely from the Right requires more explanation. The political problem is binding an elite leadership class to the interests of the hoi polloi, of the generality. It seems to me that the neoliberal center is resisting mightily, with increasing repressive measures designed to prevent an outbreak of democracy. There is no “left” in a sense I would recognize — a left that would represent working class interests. There is scarcely a liberal willing to defend liberal principles of free speech, etc.
It seems to me that modern liberals and leftists are afraid of nationalism, but have no alternative organizing principle to bind leaders to “a people”. They imagine commitment to vague abstractions and are surprised when that works out as corruption.
different clue
@Tc,
France was a strong exception to the widespread EUropean support for the Cheney(bush*) invasion of Iraq.
( that ‘ * ‘ was first added to a caricature of “President” (bush*) by Gary Trudeau in his Doonesbury strip, in honor of a strictly Republicanservative Supreme Court installing Cheney(bush*) into office.) –> here is an image of that ‘ * ‘ next to a floating empty Roman war helmet standing for “President” (bush*).
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwriqtrW4BJn3EQApuJXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=doonesbury+president+bush*+image&fr=sfp#id=27&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Flanguagelog.ldc.upenn.edu%2Fmyl%2Fllog%2FDoonesburyInOtherWords2.gif&action=click
As to Europeans taking responsibility to halt their speeding decline, if European democracies still function electorally speaking, Hard Nationalist parties are the only vehicles that Europeans have for voting to change direction. If they can’t do it electorally, I doubt they can do it at all, because they don’t have the hundreds of millions of personal firearms needed to have even the slenderest hope of being able to assassinate their ruling classes into submission or extinction.
mago
Interesting, isn’t it?
The trend is south to north, the undeveloped to the so called developed.
Climate refugees, war refugees fleeing horrors inflicted by their “betters”. (That’s sarc btw.)
However, Mexico might need to build a wall soon to keep out those southbound gringos running away from el Norte madness.
Inverted polarities, ironic disparities.
Nobody wins, everybody loses.
Going down down down. . .
KT Chong
“Europe is also responsible for much of the refugee crisis, having enabled the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq…”
… most importantly, the destruction of Libya.
When Gaddafi was alive and in charge of Libya, the country served as a floodgate that contained and held back millions of North African migrants who would have made their way into Europe. When NATO got rid of Gaddafi and destroyed Libya, Europe also destroyed that floodgate.
How Libya holds the key to solving Europe’s migration crisis:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44709974
Post-Gaddafi chaos in Libya fuels EU migrant crisis :
https://www.france24.com/en/20150420-chaos-militias-gaddafi-libya-fuels-eu-migrant-crisis
Inside Libya, the mafia state driving Europe’s migrant crisis:
https://www.thetimes.com/world/africa/article/murder-of-people-smuggler-exposes-the-reality-of-a-mafia-state-kd7gjbtbp
Europe deserves to be flooded by migrants: “You break it, you buy it.” There has to be some consequence to every action.
Purple Library Guy
@bruce wilder So I agree that inherently, crisis should be driving people to both left and right wing radicalism for solutions. And, everywhere in the developed world except France, we’re not seeing that. But I think it’s a mistake to find the reason mainly in the nature of contemporary left wing movements themselves. Oh, no doubt there are some issues there, but it’s not like the contemporary right wing is this amazing construction of tactical genius.
No, the main reason is quite simple. The powers of the status quo are still very great, and they systematically and quite effectively suppress left wing radicalism but not right wing radicalism, and a wing of the establishment actively promote right wing radicalism with a lot of money, but obviously there is no similar money spigot for left wing radicalism. That makes a difference. Let’s say back a few decades you were an aspiring and catchy left wing radio person who wanted to have a show. Nobody would give you a huge platform a la Rush Limbaugh. You’d find some little squirreled away place and have an audience in the thousands while Rush had an audience in the tens of millions. Things have been working like that ever since. Look at this blog–somewhere out there is someone putting near-equivalent skill, albeit not intelligence or wisdom, into some right wing blog, and algorithms are shoving them up in masses of people’s faces on Facebook, Google search is not avoiding them, someone has paid for a bunch of bots to like and promote them, and they have 100 times the viewership this does.
We all know this with part of our minds, but we still tend to discount it–we still think of left-vs-right as a symmetrical thing and so if the right is winning and the left is losing, it must be because of characteristics of the left and right AS MOVEMENTS. But in reality, any given left wing organization or movement has to be like five times better at it than the right in order to have a hope in hell.
The reality is, people do not have access to left wing ideas, for the most part. Whenever someone manages to break through and give people access to even moderately left ideas, they tend to be quite popular . . . if the British media, INCLUDING THE GUARDIAN, hadn’t done an all-hands-on-deck emergency pull-all-the-stops-out slagging on Corbyn right down to the spurious antisemitism card, he would have become prime minister in a walk.
I think places like Latin America more often see left wing breakthroughs just because it takes money, infrastructure to propagandize people; where the system is broken down or never completely existed in the first place, that includes the system to feed people what the bosses want them to believe.
Forecasting Intelligence
Don’t fully agree with you there.
I would say the main hostility is migration from the MENA world, Europeans don’t mind non-Muslim migrants, particularly from Christian countries like Ukraine, Mexico etc.
Even in Poland, supposedly so anti-migrant, even nationalistic voters are ok with migration from preferably white and Christian backgrounds, or even non-white and non-Christian backgrounds as long as they aren’t Muslim.
Egoculexegonos
«Europe, with some honorable exceptions like Ireland and Spain, is behind the Israelis, … »
———
Sadly, I’d expunge “Spain” from that quotation.
I don’t really know much about Eire but I’d certainly strike out my country from that sentence. The current Spanish government is masterful in verbal hypocresy and the mainstream media keep it cosy and warm. The Spanish government recently decided to recognize Palestine as an state when it was nothing but a late, vacuous token.
Also, words by president Sánchez don’t match his government surreptitious acts. In theory, Spain stopped selling weapons to Israel shortly after the genocide started but the reports by El Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau (Delàs Centre Of Studies For Peace), show that Spain went on sending weapons in mid-October and November, when the genocide was a full thing. No contracts were rescinded even though there are governmental ways available to do it anytime. In December, January, February, March and April all the weapons sent there were re-exported from Israel to The Philipines… i.e. lucrative business didn’t stopped for both sides. At the same time Israel is still exporting military equipment to the Spanish Army (1,027 million euros worth so far since Oct 7, 2023). In April, President Pedro Sánchez stated that Spain wasn’t having any weaponry business with Israel any longer: that was a plain lie that was never openly refuted by the main media outlets here even though the info was available from La Cámara de Comercio (Chamber of Commerce) records. Whenever they reported about it (they actually did), the fact didn’t effectively transcended to the general public in a meaningful way. Masters of dodgy semantics and effective manipulation they are.
And yes, it’s true that Mr Sánchez has been publicly affronted and insulted several times by Israeli politicians but with no real consequences for any of the sides; just playing to the gallery. In Spanish we have a saying, “échame pan y llámame perro” (give me bread and call me ‘dog’).
In the last month, out of the blue, immigration has reached one of the top positions in the polls about the main concerns of the population in Spain. Nothing significantly extraordinary has happened except the mainstream media feeding us a sudden, concerted, massive extra ration of immigration panic. In Spain, the only parties clearly vocal and standing against apartheidful, genocidal Israel and the increasingly draconian anti-immigration laws here are Podemos and a few other minority or regional parties of the left. Podemos and its coalitions managed to meaningfully grow some years ago but a mix of targeted lawfare coupled with intense mediafare and internal fights succeeded in fragmenting it and almost dissolve it. Fortunately, the core embers are still red hot and alive among the ashes in key places.
Thank you so much for all your work, efforts and posts, Ian. They are really informative and helpful in many ways.