Quote of the Day:
Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.
–Victor Davis Hanson in an article headlined "The Art of National Suicide"
Victor Davis Hanson warns that only if we take action now can America can avoid sharing Europe's fate with regard to an unassimilated population within the country. Spoiler alert: I don't think by action he means merely incendiary speechifying. But the U.S. still has time not to get into a self-defeating posture. European countries may be beyond saving themselves.
I feel certain that, though there are shades of thought about immigration here at IWF, my colleagues would be united in a belief in the promise of immigration and want the United States to welcome newcomers with open arms. But the current problems in Europe force us to ask some difficult questions about immigration and show us that we must also be concerned that our western values–which include respect for women–are upheld. Carrie raised the question in a column headlined "Does Immigration without Assimilation Put Women's Equality–and Safety–at Risk?"
Europe's newcomers are often hostile to westerb values and Europe seems helpless to confront this issue. Hanson writes:
After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations.
As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology.
Europeans, Hanson notes, seem helpless in the face of an onslaught of newcomers different from themselves–and they do not have the belief in their own (former) values to impose them on the new arrivals:
Europeans are unable to understand why a young Libyan came to Europe in the first place, and why apparently under no circumstances does he wish to return home. Specifically, Europeans — for a variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any concrete and positive fashion.
The result is that Europe cannot impose on a would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run like Sharia courts.
It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently rejected. I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that terrorists might just as well be Christians.
Impoverished immigrants also become "political tools" of the Left, which cites their poverty as proof that it must have more of other people's money to address this problem. The American Left is doing the same thing:
The same phenomenon is with us in the United States. Without open borders, the Democrats would have had to explain to Americans how and why more taxes, larger government, more subsidies, less personal freedom, racial separatism, ethnic chauvinism, and a smaller military make them more prosperous and secure. Yet importing the poor and the uneducated expands the Democratic constituency.
The Democrats logically fear measured, meritocratic, and racially and religiously blind legal immigration of those who want to come to America to seek freedom from statism. If a poor Oaxacan, who crossed into the U.S. three years ago — without education, legality, or knowledge of English — does not have a good car, adequate living space, and federalized health care, then the Koch brothers, Wall Street, Fox News, or the Chamber of Commerce — fill in the blank — is to blame, and legions of progressives are available to be hired out to redress such social injustice.
The Western therapeutic mindset, which maintains that impoverished immigrants should instantly have what their hosts have always had, trumps the tragic view: that it is risky, dangerous, and sometimes unwise to leave one’s home for a completely alien world, in which sacrifice and self-reliance alone can make the gamble worthwhile — usually for a second generation not yet born.
To paraphrase Emma Lazarus, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and I will turn them into a redistributionist voting block loyal to one political party.
The federal government, with its disrespect for individual states and with an Obama immigration policy by fiat, is taking us where Europe is now.