Posted on 08/15/2009 6:19:13 AM PDT by kellynla
Caldwell’s new book is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. And, if you don’t quite get the Burkean allusion, his subtitle spells out his real concerns: “Immigration, Islam and the West.” Given my own obsessions in recent years, you’d expect me to be favourably disposed to it. And I am, my enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the instant conventional wisdom that, if you’re only going to buy one Islamophobic Euro-doom-mongering diatribe this summer, Caldwell’s is the sober and respectable one, in striking contrast to certain others we could mention. “Unlike [Oriana] Fallaci and Mark Steyn, Caldwell does not rant or sneer,” writes Matt Carr of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations. Caldwell, says The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, is not a “Steynian hysteric.” Oh, dear. I think I prefer the droll Irish commentator “P O’Neill”: “Someone has to say it,” he smirked. “Caldwell is the thinking man’s Mark Steyn.”
But enough about me. On to the book . . . actually, hold on a minute. One more thing about me. Let us put Islam aside for the moment, as my views have been well aired in these pages, and consider the author’s other theme. As it happens, for all his non-ranting, non-hysterical sobriety, Mr. Caldwell is somewhat more “extreme” than I am on immigration. For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on. On the CBC last year, I was tap dancing around various socio-cultural generalities when the host, George Stroumboulopoulos, leaned in in that way he has and cut to the chase: “You mean [pause and knowing glance to camera] immigration?”
I thought of bolting for the nearest exit, but, at such moments, I usually take refuge in the formulation that a dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness and it would be prudent to address it as such. But in the end my line’s a bit of a dodge. As Christopher Caldwell sees it, no country truly “depends” on mass immigration. Ultimately, it’s a choice, or a fetish, or a fit of absentmindedness for which, in the event that one is called upon to justify it, there is no rationale. Indeed, it’s the defining irrationale of the age: a hitherto all but unknown phenomenon that is now regarded either as inevitable or the essential moral component of an advanced society.
To be sure, the green eyeshade types never cease trying to sell it on more prosaic grounds. “Sober-minded economists reckon that the potential gains from freer global migration are huge,” writes Philippe Legrain in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. “The World Bank reckons that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere three per cent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion.”
$139 billion? From “a mere” 14 million extra immigrants? Wow! As Caldwell writes, “The aggregate gross domestic product of the advanced economies for the year 2008 is estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion.” So an extra $139 billion works out to an extra, er, 0.0035 per cent. He compares M. Legrain to Dr. Evil excitedly holding the world hostage for one million dollars! “Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.”
Okay, forget economic growth. With Europe’s population aging and the worker/retiree ratio shrivelling remorselessly, we need more immigrants to come in and prop up the welfare state. Johnny Frenchman may get a bit tetchy at the end of an agreeable evening with his mistress when he glances out the window just before heading back to the missus and sees une bande de jeunes (in the preferred designation) lighting up his Citroën. But when he’s 53 and retired he’ll be grateful to have those jeunes in the workforce paying in to keep his benefit cheques coming. That, at any rate, is the theory. The reality is encapsulated in this remarkable statistic from the Bundesausländerbeauftragte: between 1971 and 2000, the number of foreign residents in Germany rose from three million to about 7.5 million. Yet the number of foreigners in work stayed more or less exactly the same at about two million. Four decades ago, two-thirds of German immigrants were in the workforce. By the turn of the century, barely a quarter were. These days, Germany’s Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) are heavy on the Gast, ever lighter on the Beiter.
Turks in Germany have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is 50. In the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, where immigrants and their children make up 85 per cent of the population, one-fifth of women in their late 40s collect disability benefits. Foreigners didn’t so much game the system as discover, thanks to family “reunification” and other lollipops, that it demanded nothing of them. Indeed, entire industries were signed up for public subsidy. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. Does M. Legrain set their welfare cheques on the debit side of that spectacular 0.0035 per cent economic growth? Or does that count as valuable long-term investment in the critical economic growth sector of fire-breathing mullahs?
Across the decades, one self-delusion of the political class succeeds another: “temporary workers” are now political “refugees”; the urgent need for mill workers and janitors is now an urgent need for millions of Somali software engineers who’ll help Europe stay competitive in the “high-tech” “knowledge economy.” The policy changes but the traffic is remorseless. Recoiling from the logic of tightly argued books like Caldwell’s, sophisticates protest that “it is hard to generalize about Europe.” And it’s true that, if you take a stamp collector’s approach to immigration issues, there are many fascinating differences: the French blame their immigration woes on the bitter legacy of colonialism; Germans blame theirs on a lack of colonial experience at dealing with these exotic chappies. But, if you’re in some decrepit housing project on the edge of almost any Continental city from Malmö to Marseilles, it makes little difference in practice. “If you understand how immigration, Islam, and native European culture interact in any western European country,” writes Caldwell, “you can predict roughly how they will interact in any other—no matter what its national character, no matter whether it conquered an empire, no matter what its role in World War II, and no matter what the provenance of its Muslim immigrants.”
How does one express one’s, ah, concerns about these issues? Caldwell cites a headline from his own newspaper, the Financial Times: “The Uneasy Cosmopolitan: How Migrants Are Enriching An Ever More Anxious Host.”
The “unease” seems principally on the part of the FT’s sub-editor: as his linguistic tiptoeing suggests, decades of multiculti squeamishness have stripped us even of a language with which to discuss the subject. What benefit is it to France or French taxpayers to fund Islamic welfare imams? To pose the question is to miss the point. If you believe in mass immigration, you do so because it’s a talisman of your own moral virtue. If the economic argument for immigration is reductive even when it’s not plain deluded, the psychological one is not to be disdained. On the one hand, mass immigration is the price posterity levies on old-school imperialists: “They are here because we were there,” as they say in the Netherlands. But, if like Sweden you never had an imperialist bone in your body, they’re still here: “They are poor because we are rich.” And, if you’re a small urbanized nation like the Netherlands, the “challenge” of immigration is just the usual frictions that occur when people from the countryside—in this case, the Moroccan countryside—move to the cities.
So it’s the consequence of your urban planning, or your colonialism, or your wealth, or just plain you. We’ll blame anything rather than confront the central truth—that when an old, relatively unicultural society admits in a short space of time a large, young, fecund population from somewhere else, you are setting in motion a process of transformation. Caldwell asks the obvious question—“Can you have the same Europe with different people?” and gives the obvious answer: no. “Europe is not welcoming its newest residents but making way for them.”
In the end, that coy French euphemism for the, um, rioters of no particular socio-religious persuasion—“youths”—gets to the heart of the matter: youths are youthful, and ethnic Europeans aren’t. In the heavily North African Paris suburb of Montfermeil, the Muslim children from the housing projects pass on their way to school each morning a neighbourhood of detached houses still occupied by French natives: they call it “la ville des vieux”—the old people’s town.
ping
For whatever reason the link page didn’t come up.
Here ya go.http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/08/13/we-can%E2%80%99t-talk-about-immigration/
How is it that most people want illegal immigration ended yet we end up with two candidates who wanted amnesty?
And aside from that, there is zero talk on present insane legal immigration.
Immigration Gumballs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7WJeqxuOfQ
You should post a thread on this video.
Semper Fi,
Kelly
thanks for posting the great article by the brilliant, as usual, Steyn. All scenarios mentioned by Steyn, will be coming soon to the USA. First off, will be healthcare for illegals.. As mentioned by Michael Medved the other day, though not included in the bill, the inclusion for the illegals will be immediately challenged in the courts, by that wonderful agency the ACLU, and most likely won.
Obamacare is D.O.A. in the Senate.
Feel free to do so yourself.
“Mark Steyn: We Can’t Talk About Immigration”
A freeper actually told me that yesterday.....said it was a ‘distraction’ from more important things....like healthcare....
see the chart:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2316652/posts?page=19#12
“How is it that most people want illegal immigration ended yet we end up with two candidates who wanted amnesty?
And aside from that, there is zero talk on present insane legal immigration.”
Because the powers of the GOP (cheap labor), DNC (voters), media (useful idiots) don’t want it talked about. That’s what we get when we let the media pick our candidates. People do not realize that we allow between 2 to 4 million LEGAL entrants per year.
According the the US Government.......Add them up.....legal entries are over 2 million every year.(this does not account for approx 2 million more of asylum and work and student visa entries!) The Obama Administration wants MORE legal immigrants and wants to amnesty 12 to 20 million more illegal aliens plus another ‘guest worker program!)
http://uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/DayinLife_050629.pdf
Some of the DAILY work of USCIS according to their own document:
* Conduct 135,000 national security background checks
* process 30,000 applications for immigrant benefits
* Issue 7,000 permanent resident cards (green cards -PER DAY)
* Welcome 2100 new citizens. PER DAY
* Welcome 3500 new permanent residents. PER DAY
More than 1 million people became citizens in 2008, with 780,000 taking the oath of allegiance in the first 10 months, according to preliminary figures from the Department of Homeland Security. In 2007, 660,477 people were granted U.S. citizenship.
Leading countries of birth of new citizens were:
Mexico (122,258), India (46,871), Philippines (38,830), China (33,134) and Vietnam (27,921)
Largest number of people naturalizing lived in:
California (181,684), New York (73,676) and Florida (54,563).
SOURCE: Office of Immigration Statistics, Department of Homeland Security
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/WestVolusia/wvlHEAD03WEST012209.htm
Europe has more capital per person than most of the world. Those who work there can therefore earn more than workers in most of the world, utilizing that capital. If the income of that capital is indirectly made available to a host of people who do nothing, it will not be maintained. There is no question movement of peoples and welfare state economics do not mix. But then welfare state economics do not work on their own, either. Steyn is implicitly trying to appeal to a native solidarity that does not exist and has no economic basis, since huge portions of his natives do not bother to work.
The true dividing line is productive and not productive. And that does not coincide with immigrant and native. Steyn is just making things easier on himself by ducking that inconvenient little fact.
“The true dividing line is productive and not productive. And that does not coincide with immigrant and native. Steyn is just making things easier on himself by ducking that inconvenient little fact.”
That inconvenient little fact doesn’t matter to the argument one bit, really. Put another way, would America still be America if Americans are marginalized in favor of other cultures?
“Yes it would be, has been, and is - as long as the newcomers work.”
This nation is just not some economic zone. It is a nation held together by shared history. Our past immigration waves are not comparable to what is happening now. There is no assimilation into that shared culture.
“Americans who don’t work and only want to lounge in a welfare hammock may be as native and American as you please, but don’t contribute a damn thing to this country.”
Just what do 40-50 million illegal aliens who have CONTEMPT for this country do for it?
Welcome to FR. I've been enjoying your posts. All of them!
sw
“Welcome to FR. I’ve been enjoying your posts. All of them!”
Thanks. I appreciate that.
Regards,
Favor Center
I have no solidarity with defeatist in foreign policy, economic socialists and welfare state leeches who were born here, and I have no problem at all with legal immigrants who work for a living and support themselves. I know which of these things is morally important, and there partial overlap does not confuse me into excusing a welfare-hammock mentality in "natives". I don't support anyone claiming to live off the labor of others, full stop. And I don't give a damn what native anything he appeals to when crying about it.
The ACLU won’t bother. Most states have laws, like California’s, that no agency can inquire about citizenship status when services are requested. The Democrats will make it a federal law.
“One, there aren’t that many, two, you have more contempt for this country than easily half of them, three who is talking about illegals, we were talking about all immigrants, four, plenty of our “shared history” divides (cold war and 60s anyone?), five I’d much rather have anogther working foreigner who believes in capitalism and is grateful for freedom than another lieabout grievance-monger from Detroit whining about how unfair the country is not to support him forever for the accomplishment of being born here.”
(1) yes, there are that many - possibly more.
(2) I’m not the one thinking America would still be America without Americans, so shove your contempt charge.
(3) illegals are the biggest tip of the iceberg. LEGAL immigration is also to high for assimilation.
(4) For every believer in capitalism, there are at least 2 immigrants here for the benefits. Immigrants of all kinds are a higher drain on social services than citizens.
“I don’t support anyone claiming to live off the labor of others, full stop. And I don’t give a damn what native anything he appeals to when crying about it.”
I touched a nerve, didn’t I? You just view this place as some sort of economic region, not a nation with a shared history. One of the money-uber-alles Republicans, right? You certainly aren’t espousing a conservative viewpoint, since you don’t think culture matters a damn. I’m sure you’ll enjoy living in the socialist paradise that is being made here by all those foreign-born voters - legal and illegal.....
On two, you have no idea what an American is, and wouldn't recognize American culture if it bit you. You are not alone in this; plenty of people born here have no real understanding of the place.
On three, you are the one who changed the subject to illegals, Steyn and I were both talking about immigration. Why the dodge, if immigration is what you actually are concerned about?
On four, already addressed. For every immigrant deadbeat there are a half dozen native deadbeats. And you are defending their right to be deadbeats as long as they are born here. I'm calling them what they actually are.
For the final paragraph, you are beating straw men you are making up and imagine you have arguments against, not the man in front of you. Both you and Steyn are trying to pretend that every native born American or European is an upstanding virtuous conservative supporting himself, and it is flat nonsense.
You are pretending that pretending this can make every native born citizen an ally, when he in fact half of them vote for welfare hammocks and the left all day long, know nothing of your conservatism and could care less about your "culture", if you have any. You are not willing to face the patent fact that huge numbers of native born American (or European) citizens are your political enemies and that they fully support confiscatory taxation to support handouts to themselves for doing nothing.
If you think it is "conservative" to defend a giant welfare hammock for deadbeats provided they are born on the right side of a line on a map, then you simply have no idea what the word means.
My point throughout has been and remains that welfare state economics are indefensible full stop. When you argue against that proposition you are defending welfare state economics full stop.
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