Summary: The West is a small world, as we see our elites simultaneously decide that more immigration will re-shape our societies into forms more pleasing to their needs. Their bold actions risk releasing the dormant forces of populism, with unknown effects. This post provides a playbill to the conflicts, a racing form to help you bet on the winner.
Remaking nations the old-fashioned way
Journalists speaking for the powerful
The greatest use of State power is re-shaping a nation to your needs, as a potter shapes the clay. In human affairs the clay must be persuaded to passivity. So we have these wonderfully candid articles discussing Germany, but preparing America for yet another wave of immigrants. First, the LAT says “For Germany, refugees are a demographic blessing as well as a burden.” Comments added in {red}.
The nation’s population is shrinking at an alarming rate, and it desperately needs skilled, motivated and industrious folks like Alkhamran to replenish its workforce and keep its powerhouse economy humming. In other words, helping to alleviate Europe’s refugee crisis could help defuse Germany’s demographic one. “We need people. We need young people. We need immigrants,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere declared recently. “All of you know that, because we have too few children.”
By 2060, Germany’s population could drop from about 81 million today to as low as 68 million, and would most likely be surpassed by Britain and France, potentially changing the balance of power in Europe. {They have not been asked. A Germany of 68 million would still be crowded by historical standards.}
Although taking in millions of refugees might help Germany stave off one demographic crisis, it could create another: A change in the country’s ethnic and cultural makeup that not everyone is prepared to accept. … “There will be conflicts,” Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned recently. “The more openly we talk about the fact that people are worried, that there’s fear in the country and that there may be conflicts, will … help us deal with this realistically.” {“Realistically” means to accept what elites decide.}
Second, the WaPo echoes the message: “The refugee crisis could actually be a boon for Germany.”
Germany — the region’s economic powerhouse — is also sensing a golden opportunity. {That means an opportunity to make more gold for its elites. “Germany” is its elites.}
This fast-graying nation of 81 million is facing a demographic time bomb. With a morbidly low birthrate and a flat-lining population, hundreds of schools have already been shuttered. Some neighborhoods, particularly in the increasingly vacant east, have become ghost towns. For Germans, it has raised a serious question: Who will build the Volkswagens and Mercedes of tomorrow? {Robots will; causing mass unemployment unless the labor force shrinks.}
Enter a record wave of migrants. Offering some of the most generous terms of asylum, Germany has become by far the biggest host in Europe for those fleeing dangerous and deteriorating conditions, with more than 800,000 applications expected this year alone. With no sign of the crisis abating as war rages in Syria and Iraq, German leaders are saying they “can cope” with 500,000 more newcomers a year for “several years.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, is preparing her public for a period of transformation that may alter the very definition of what it means to be a German. {In a Republic the public doesn’t belong to the rulers (“her public”), nor do rulers prepare the public to obey diktats.}
Some leaders in the region are sounding the alarm over the threat to national identities posed by the mostly Muslim newcomers. But Merkel is cajoling Germans to embrace a new vision of their country that, in the future, may not be as white or Christian as it is today. {But its elites will be as white as they are today; only the color of the underclass will change. The middle class will shrink away.}
Add up the numbers to see a new Germany
Germany took in roughly 200,000 migrants in 2014 (different sources disagree on the numbers; migrants are only one class of immigrants), 800,000 in 2015, and nobody knows how many more in 2016 (source: BBC). Pew Research finds that “Most (72%) are male, and more than half (54%) are ages 18 to 34; men in that age bracket account for fully 43% of asylum applicants.”
The OECD tells us that there were 6.455 million German males 18-34 years of age in 2012 (here are graphics of German’s demographics). Applying those numbers to the 800,000 potential new Germans that arrived in 2015: that’s 344 thousand young male immigrants, a 5.3% increase in one year. A few years of immigration at that level and it will be new Germany, irreversible.
This builds on the Hartz Reforms of 2003-2005 which restructured the German employment market to further favor corporations. Despite these, wages began to rise again in 2015, hence the open doors policy. Combined with automation and there will again be a comfortable “reserve army of the unemployed” to suppress wages.
Look back to see the groundwork laid for these policies
These actions by senior political leaders occur only after years of quiet preparation. For example, see the 2012 BBC story “EU should ‘undermine national homogeneity’“, quoting Peter Sutherland. Sutherland was a Chairman of Goldman Sachs, BP, and the London School of Economics Council — and the UN’s Special Representative for Migration.
He told the House of Lords committee migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states”. An ageing or declining native population in countries like Germany or southern EU states was the “key argument and, I hesitate to the use word because people have attacked it, for the development of multicultural states”, he added.
“It’s impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the other argument can survive because states have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them. Just as the United Kingdom has demonstrated.”
… {we of Europe} still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. “And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”
Also note the number of libertarian economists, loyal servants of the 1%, who advocate open borders to migration.
Looking to the future
Western elites have their needs. Journalists and politicians work to convince us those are our needs as well, even if they are against our wishes and inimical to our interests. The past generation has seen uninterrupted successes for the 1%, as libertarian values have taken hold in society — paralyzing us before the 1%’s concentration of wealth and power, and their dismantling of valuable institutions that took generations to construct (e.g., schools, universities, labor wage and safety regulations, social safety nets).
Now they act more boldly to reshape the very fabric of western nations into forms more pleasing to their interests. This means exploiting their power to take highly visible bold actions, defying public opinion. They assume our passivity and indolence, like that of tame dogs. We will soon see if they are right.
The 1% owns both political parties and the news media. Most of the institutional structures that oppose them have been either dismantled or neutered (e.g. unions). Defying them will require tapping passions long undisturbed in the West, powerful but often dark.
Interesting times lie ahead of us on all roads to the future.
Other posts about the immigration revolution
- Immigration as a reverse election: our leaders get a new people.
- Look at immigration policy to see our government respond to its masters.
- Must our population grow to ensure prosperity? — Spoiler: no!
- The numbers about immigration that fuel Trump’s campaign.
- Stratfor: Why Germany Cannot Stop the Flow of Migrants.
- How to use refugees as geopolitical weapons, brutal but effective.
- How immigration will change German politics, which will change Europe.
For More Information
I don’t share all of Mark Steyn’s values, and his analytical standards are sloppy. But too much of this is accurate to ignore: “It’s Still the Demography, Stupid“, 19 January 2016. This is the rocket fuel for the Trump campaign — and beyond that for the revival of American populism.
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