You Think Immigration is Bad Now?
You Think Immigration is Bad Now?
Daniel Pipes paints a bleak picture of the future:
The illegal immigration of non-Western peoples, I predict, will become an all-consuming issue in every Western country.
As Western birth rates plummet, as communication and transportation networks improve, and as radical Islam increasingly rears its aggressive head, Europeans, Americans, and others worry about their economic standards and the continuity of their cultures. After ignoring this issue for decades, reactions in Europe especially have sharpened of late.
* The French lower house of parliament passed a tough new immigration law.
* Austria’s interior minister, Liese Prokop, has asserted publicly that 45% of her country’s Muslim immigrants “cannot be integrated,” and admonished them to “choose another country” in which to live.
* The Dutch minister of immigration, Rita Verdonk, has withdrawn citizenship from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim-born immigrant who became renowned as a critic of Islam.
But the most dramatic, agonizing, and consequential developments for immigration to the West are taking place along the remote west coast of Africa. The area has emerged as a main springboard for would-be emigrants to access the riches of Spain and then all Europe.
West Africa’s role is a new one. Until late 2005, emigrants gravitated to Morocco, in part because, separated by the Straits of Gibraltar, it is a mere eight miles away from Europe. Also, they could easily sneak into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. At worst, they could reach the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory 70 miles off the coast of West Africa. All of these served equally well as a gateway to all of Europe….
Rickard Sandell of the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid has predicted that the migration now under way could signal the prospect of an African “mass exodus” and armed conflict. What one sees today “is only the beginning of an immigration phenomenon that could evolve into one of the largest in history. … the mass assault on Spain’s African border may just be a first warning of what to expect of the future.”
Thus begins the first chapter of what promises to be a long and terrible story.
This isn’t immigration; this is a mass refugee movement. And the world isn’t ready for it.