Stupidity Without Borders — The Alliance of Utopias


The Fjordman Report

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.




The 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have witnessed the most spectacular population growth in human history, most of it in Third World countries. The world’s population, estimated at 6.4 billion in 2006, grows by more than 70 million people per year. In sixty years, Brazil’s population has increased by 318 per cent; Ethiopia’s by 503 per cent. There are now 73 million people in Ethiopia — more than the population of Britain or France.

At the same time, many of the most economically successful countries, both in the East and in the West, have problems with ageing or declining populations. At its peak around 1910, one-quarter of the world’s population lived in Europe or North America. Today the percentage has probably declined to about one-eighth. South Korea’s birthrate has dropped to the point where the average Korean woman is expected to have only one child throughout her life. The U.S. still has a birthrate of more than two, while the U.K. saw births inch up from 1.63 to 1.74 and Germany from 1.34 to 1.37 in the same period. The low birthrate problem in Asia is rooted in women’s rising social and economic standing. Japan’s birthrate was 1.28, comparable to Taiwan’s 1.22, and Hong Kong’s 0.94.

Birth rates in Europe


“Europe and Japan are now facing a population problem that is unprecedented in human history,” said Bill Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau. Countries have lost people because of wars, disease and natural disasters but never because women stopped having enough children. Japan announced that its population had shrunk in 2005 for the first time, and that it was now the world’s most elderly nation. Italy was second. On average, women must have 2.1 children in their lifetimes for a society to replenish itself, accounting for infant mortality and other factors. Only one country in Europe – Muslim Albania – has a fertility rate above 2. Russia’s fertility rate is 1.28.

Writer Spengler in the Asia Times Online commented that demography is destiny: “Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death.” “The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe’s population will relive — in slow motion — that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050.”

It’s numbers like these that have prompted Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to state that “it’s demography, and not democracy, that will be the critical factor shaping growth and security in the 21st century. High rates of births are contributing to the booming populations which are dragging down developing nations. Meanwhile falling birth rates are sapping the growth of developed nations.” “Although migration is one option developed countries are looking at to keep their economies vibrant,” Lee said, “it might not solve all their troubles and might even breed social tensions.” According to him, governments may not be able to afford to keep out of personal issues like sex, marriage and procreation much longer.

Niall FergusonHistorian Niall Ferguson reveals how Islam is winning the numbers game. “If fertility persisted at such low levels, within 50 years Spain’s population would decline by 3-4 million, Italy’s by a fifth. Not even two World Wars had inflicted such an absolute decline in population.” “In 1950 there had been three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995 the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain. By 2050, the population of Iran could be more than 50 per cent larger. At the time of writing, the annual rate of population growth is more than seven times higher in Iran than in Britain.”

Even in developing countries such as fast-evolving China, population growth is falling, and in the Indian subcontinent, Muslims have higher growth rates than Hindus or other non-Muslims. We thus have a situation with an explosive population growth in failed countries, while many of the most economically and technologically advanced nations, Eastern and Western, have stagnating populations. This strange and possibly unprecedented situation, which could perhaps be labelled “survival of the least fit”, will have dramatic consequences for the world. It is already producing the largest migration waves in history, threatening to swamp islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty.

Karl MarxLenin stated that “Marxism is based on internationalism or it is nothing.” “The emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but an international problem,” wrote Marx. Karl Marx has defined the essence of Socialism as abolishing private property. Let’s assume for a moment that a country can be treated as the “property” of its citizens. Its inhabitants are responsible for creating its infrastructure. They have built its roads and communications, its schools, universities and medical facilities. They have created its political institutions and instilled in its people the mental capacities needed for upholding them. Is it then wrong for the citizens of this country to want to enjoy the benefits of what they have themselves created?

According to Marxist logic, yes.

Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.

This is what is happening to the West today. Europe could become a failed continent itself, importing the problems of Africa and the Islamic world. The notion that everybody should be free to move anywhere they want to, and that preventing them from moving into your home is “racism, xenophobia and bigotry,” is the Communism of the 21st century. And it will probably have the same effect, only on an even large scale.

Communism creates poverty because when people don’t own property, they cannot plan for the future. If you and your children cannot enjoy the fruits of your efforts and work, but have to watch others take it away, you will no longer bother to go the extra mile or mobilize your full creativity to generate improvements.

Unrestricted immigration from failed states will eventually destroy global centres of excellence, the same way Communism did. This is definitely bad for the people who will lose what were once functioning countries, but in the long run bad for everybody else, too. It will deprive the inhabitants of Third World countries of the incentives needed to change their own nations if they can simply move somewhere else and refrain from confronting the reasons for their failures.

Many pro-immigrationists use slogans such as “No human is illegal” to argue that immigrants who have entered a country illegally should be allowed to stay. But countries which don’t differentiate between citizens and non-citizens cannot long survive. A favorite quotation in the US is from the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus; a sonnet written in 1883 that is now engraved on a wall in the base of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

It’s a great poem, but it’s just that, a poem. The global population today is 6.5 billion, and will rise to 8, 9 or even 10 billion in the near future. The “poor and wretched” of the earth make up literally billions of people. Should they all move to the USA? How many people can Americans take in before their country falls apart? If enacted, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act from 2006 will allow an estimated 103 million persons to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years. Can any nation possibly assimilate such a large number of people in such as short period of time?

The mantra that “diversity is enriching” does not have any real basis in facts. The logic behind this line of thinking is that receiving impulses and ideas from as many different cultures as possible is to your advantage. First of all, not all “cultural impulses” are equally beneficial, as can be witnessed by the rise in honor killings in the West because of Muslim immigration. And second of all: Why should this be an argument in favor of immigration? We have the Internet, global television and travel around the world much more frequently than ever before. We probably receive more information and “cultural impulses” than we are able to digest.

There are more than 20 member countries in the Arab League. Does “cultural diversity” increase globally if, say, Denmark becomes Arabized due to immigration? You would then get just another Arab country, while the only Denmark in existence would be erased. If “cultural diversity” is our yardstick, today’s Muslim immigration to Europe is a disaster. We are replacing unique cultures developed over centuries with burkas and sharia.

Moreover, many politicians and intellectuals fail to appreciate just how much communication technology has changed the rules of the game. When people praise immigration that took place a hundred or two hundred years ago, they are talking about a world that no longer exists, like generals planning for the last war. Modern technology means that immigrants can live in Western countries as if they never left home, visit their original homeland frequently, watch satellite TV in the language of their parents instead of the language of their adopted country, and stay in touch with their relatives back home through the Internet.

Globalization has made it easier than ever not just to move physically to the other side of the world, but also to live one place physically and on the other side of the world mentally. The full implications of this technological revolution are too complicated to be properly predicted or understood by any one individual, but they are bound to have far-reaching and sometimes unsettling consequences for the nations involved, especially if combined with a deliberate, open-border ideology.

Observer Mac Johnson points out that in the past, admission into America was regarded as a very rare and generous gift. Today, admission into the US or any Western democracy “is regarded by many as something between a civil right and an entitlement. Indeed, many seem to believe that the host population should be grateful to them for having arrived. Many immigrants, therefore, arrive as colonists, wishing only to set up a slightly wealthier version of their homeland.” He also points out that until the mid-20th Century, immigration to America occurred from a very restricted pool of nations. “For all our celebration of the great melting pot, America was mostly melting European peoples in that pot.” “These peoples shared a great deal of cultural inheritance before ever setting foot in America.”

Besides, it is not clear whether experiences from the USA, Canada or Australia can easily be transferred to Europe. The colonization of and immigration to these countries was indeed violent and unacceptable by today’s moral standards. To put it in a brutal way: A country can only become a “successful immigration society” if the indigenous population has been marginalized. In the USA today, only about 3% of the population is made up of Native Americans; the rest are all descendants of immigrants.

It is wrong to compare Europeans with European Americans, Europeans should rather be compared with Native Americans. Europeans are our own Indians. When Europeans dig in the earth to uncover archaeological finds, we are finding traces of our own ancestors. All our folklore, culture and history are intimately tied to the land. Which is why the current immigration could lead to a string of civil wars, as the indigenous Europeans will not in the long run put up with being displaced in their own countries.

British commentator Anthony Browne, author of the book “Do We Need Mass Immigration?,” points out that the migration waves we are witnessing now are unique. “What is happening now is the result of sustained migration pressure the likes of which the world has never seen before.” “The revolution in “human rights” means that as soon as anyone gets past passport control they are pretty much guaranteed to stay. 47,000 illegal immigrants were detected in 2000, but just 6,000 were sent home.” “A hundred years ago, most people in the west rarely moved even to the next village; now whole villages from Bangladesh are relocating to northern England.”

Crowd in BangladeshHe quotes the then president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, who in 2000 was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the country was going to feed, clothe, house and employ the expected doubling of her population by 2050. She replied: “We’ll send them to America. Globalisation will take that problem away, as you free up all factors of production, also labour. There’ll be free movement, country to country. Globalisation in its purest form should not have any boundaries, so small countries with big populations should be able to send population to countries with big boundaries and small populations.”

Browne also confronts the assertion that “mass immigration is normal, irreversible and beneficial to host societies” as a “damaging illusion. Rather, the current experience of developed western countries, faced with huge inflows of people (…) is unprecedented and damaging. The process can and should be stopped, in the interests of the rich diversity of nations it will otherwise crush.” “In 1924, the US government passed legislation that effectively closed the door on European immigration, opening the door to immigration from poor countries with new legislation only in 1965. Australia has shown in recent years that tough policies can reduce illegal immigration to virtually zero.” “Pro-immigration campaigners who tell the people of Europe that ‘mass immigration cannot be stopped’ are adopting the policies of despots through history of quelling opposition by telling opponents that resistance is futile. All that is needed is political will.”

American military historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson talks about how mass immigration is the product of a de facto alliance between the Libertarian Right and the Multicultural Left. The economic Libertarians can be represented by Swedish writer Johan Norberg, author of the book In Defence of Global Capitalism. Norberg can have valuable insights into the flaws of the Scandinavian welfare state model. However, his commitment to a “free market, open border” ideology blinds him to the threat posed by Muslim immigration, an ideological blind spot that is almost as big as the ones we find in Marxists. According to him, “at the moment there is a problem. The right supports one part of globalisation — the free movement of capital and goods — while the left tends to support another part, the free movement of people.”

Norberg believes immigration is already so extensive it would be unwise to halt it. Pointing out there were 15 million Muslims in Europe, he noted in a 2003 article: “If we close the borders, if we alienate this substantial minority, we risk creating resentment between ethnic and religious groups, and only the fundamentalists would gain.” “If people were allowed to cross borders at will, they would take their ideas and their labour and skills with them. This is all part of free trade, and it’s a paradox that many liberals don’t see this.”

Japan has a declining and ageing population, Yemen and Pakistan have booming populations. Does anybody seriously believe that it would be “good” for the Japanese to open their doors to millions of Muslims from Yemen? “Do you have any education?” “Yes, I know the Koran by heart and can say ‘Death to the infidels!’ in ten different ways.” “Splendid, just what we need here in Japan. Can you start tomorrow on developing a new line of plasma TV screens for SONY?”

When it comes to stagnating populations and Muslim immigration, the problems are not nearly as damaging as the cure.

Among political right-wingers, there is frequently a belief that what is good for business interests is good for the country. The problem is, this isn’t always true. There is sometimes a gap between the short-term interests of Big Business for cheap labor from Third World countries, and the long-term interests of the country as a whole. You cannot compete with cheap commodities from Third World countries unless you lower the general wages to Third World levels.

A few decades ago, Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew realized that Singapore could never win the worldwide competition to offer cheap labor. He decided instead that the country was to become a high value-added producer. To Lee, that meant wages had to be high enough to encourage Singapore’s businessmen to invest in labor-saving technology. To raise Singapore’s salaries he had to make sure that local wages wouldn’t be undercut by migrants. Yes, you could pay an unskilled Bangladeshi $400 dollars a month. But in that case you had to pay the state another $400 a month.

In Europe, the one nation that has proved to be most successful in technology, ”Nokia nation” Finland, is also perhaps the one country within the EU that has accepted the least amount of immigration. Today, this small Nordic nation boasts a thriving hi-tech economy ranked the most competitive in the world and the best educated citizenry of all the industrialized countries. Neighboring Sweden, in contrast, with the largest per capita immigration in Europe, is in serious economic decline, and the only thing growing seems to be the crime rates.

Ethnically homogeneous nations enjoy a “trust bonus” which reduces the amount of conflict. There is little evidence that any theoretical “diversity” bonus from immigration will cancel out the loss of this “trust bonus.” South Korea and Japan are among the world leaders in technology. They are both ethnically homogeneous nations. Even China, which does have significant ethnic minorities, could soon be more ethnically homogeneous than many so-called Western nations. There will be no lack of “diversity” in the 21st century, but there could be a lack of functioning, coherent nation states. Maybe the West will “celebrate diversity” until our countries fall apart, and global leadership will be transferred to East Asia.

Yes, it is true that the ability to attract ambitious and talented scientists from other countries has benefited the USA in the past, and given it an edge over Europe. However, it is not without dangers to “celebrate diversity” in a country as diverse as the US. Americans should try celebrating what binds them together instead, or they may wake up one day and discover that they don’t really have a lot in common. What then for the United States?

Anthony Browne notes that Britain “became the largest economic power in the world in the nineteenth century, in the almost complete absence of immigration to these isles. Japan became the world’s second largest economy after the second world war in the almost total absence of immigration.” “Britain can never compete on the basis of low wages with low cost countries such as China for the simple reason that the cost of living is so much higher, and it is a mistake to try. Although cheap labour immigration may have staved off the demise of those industries for a short while, it also compromised them by encouraging them to go down the cheap labour route, and discouraging them from going up the high productivity/value added route.”

The revered former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, stated in a testimony given to the U.S. Senate: “Although discovery of new technologies is to some degree a matter of luck, we know that human activities do respond to economic incentives. A relative shortage of workers should increase the incentives for developing labor-saving technologies and may actually spur technological development.”

Robert Rowthorn, academic economist, criticizes the claim, frequently repeated by Tony Blair’s Labour government since it took office in 1997, that “if we don’t have immigration, we won’t have economic growth.” According to Rowthorn, “if you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it.” There is no evidence “that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative” as unskilled migrants and their families often are net consumers of taxes.

“Immigration can’t solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.” “The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons.” “While Britain has always had immigration, the recent influx is totally without precedent in modern times. Relative to population, the scale of immigration is now much greater than during any period since the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions over a thousand years ago.”

Rowthorn also points out, correctly, that “refugees and others granted special leave to remain under the asylum rules account for only 10 per cent of immigration to Britain. Most permanent immigration consists of people who are economic migrants together with their dependants.” Most of them aren’t people fleeing persecution.

People smuggling has become one of the world’s biggest and most lucrative businesses, with professional smugglers who demand high payments. In one case in Norway, a boy around eight years old said his mother and siblings in Kosovo were dead. An investigation into his case, however, found his parents and siblings living in Greece. Fully 94 percent of would-be refugees arriving in Norway lack valid identification papers. In the last four years, 50% of those who have been refused asylum in Sweden have gone underground and have simply vanished. And of the half who have actually been sent home, a full 20% have come straight back to Sweden to try their luck again.

In Iran, the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign bragged that it was targeting potential suicide bombers in Britain because of the relative ease with which UK passport-holders could enter Israel. “Do you think getting hold of a British passport for an Iranian citizen is hard? Tens of passports are issued for Iranian asylum seekers in Britain every day. There are hundreds of other ways available to us, such as illegal entry [into Britain], fake passports, etc.” One gang is estimated to have smuggled 100,000 illegal immigrants, mainly Turkish Kurds, into Britain. These economic migrants paid between £3,000 and £5,000 to be transported via an elaborate and dangerous route.

Melilla fence“We were just tired of living in the forest,” explained a young man from Guinea-Bissau. “There was nothing to eat, there was nothing to drink.” In mid-September, Africans began assaulting the frontier of Spain’s small enclaves in Africa en masse. Deploying crude ladders made of branches, they used their weight to bring the fences down in places. As one of them put it, “We go in a group and all jump at once. We know that some will get through, that others will be injured and others may die, but we have to get through, whatever the cost.”

Rickard Sandell of the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid predicted that the migration now underway 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.” With its shores only about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the African coast, Spain is in the frontline of the fight against illegal immigration.

José Zapatero, Spain’s Prime Minister, said during a visit to the Canary Islands that his country would “spare no resources” to curb illegal immigration from Africa. However, his Socialist government launched an amnesty for more than 600,000 illegal immigrants the year before, thus greatly encouraging more illegal immigration. Moreover, due to the borderless nature of modern Europe caused by the European Union, once you get into Spain or any other EU country, you are free to move on to others.

The so-called Schengen Agreement, signed by a total of 26 countries, means that border posts and checks have been removed between European countries and common external border controls established. These are not always working very well. Since the pre-political loyalty, as Roger Scruton would have called it, for most people in Europe is with their nation states and not with “Europe,” not all countries care too much about upholding the borders of other nations. There have been reports of Italian police, for instance, releasing illegal immigrants on the border, free to go further north. Not their country, not their problem. So much for a “common European identity.”

At the time of the greatest population explosion in the history of the human race on its mainly Muslim southern borders, and when half of all Arab youths express a desire to move to the West, European authorities decide that it’s a brilliant idea to remove as many border controls as possible. And EU bureaucrats are quietly working to extend the “four freedoms of the EU,” including the free movement of people between countries, to include the Arab world.

Just like a scene from The Camp of the Saints, the controversial book by Jean Raspail, thousands of African immigrants have come ashore the Mediterranean island of Malta the past four years, most often making the crossing from Libya in open fishing boats, heading for the European mainland. And the tiny island of Malta feels overwhelmed. “We don’t want a multicultural society,” said Martin Degiorgio, a leader of an anti-immigration group. “Haven’t you seen the problems it has brought to France and Britain?” Scicluna, the government adviser, said that it was “utterly unrealistic to think you can pull up the drawbridge” and that the country needed time to adjust to immigration. “We’ve got to live with it. We’ve got to adapt to it. We have got to make it work,” he said.

Europe has lost, or even deliberately vacated, control of its borders, a situation that cannot be allowed to continue. Dr. Daniel Pipes has taken note of this issue, too: “The illegal immigration of non-Western peoples, I predict, will become an all-consuming issue in every Western country.” “Thus begins the first chapter of what promises to be a long and terrible story.” A bleak outlook, perhaps, but not unwarranted. Massive movements of people have in the past almost always triggered wars. There is little reason to expect our countries to be an exception. Tensions in Europe are already mounting due to immigration.

It is a matter of national security. According to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies, suspected or convicted foreign-born terrorists have routinely exploited federal immigration laws to enter or remain in the United States illegally. The always excellent African-American intellectual Thomas Sowell puts it this way: “We continue to hear about the ‘need’ for immigrants to do jobs that Americans will not do — even though these are all jobs that Americans have done for generations before mass illegal immigration became a way of life. Bombings in London, Madrid and the 9/11 terrorist attacks here are all part of the high price being paid today for decades of importing human time bombs from the Arab world. That in turn has been the fruit of an unwillingness to filter out people according to the countries they come from. (…) Europeans and Americans have for decades been playing Russian roulette with their loose immigration policies. The intelligentsia have told us that it would be wrong, and even racist, to set limits based on where the immigrants come from. There are thousands of Americans who might still be alive if we had banned immigration from Saudi Arabia — and perhaps that might be more important than the rhetoric of the intelligentsia.”

Nearly 200 million people in 2006 lived outside their country of origin. That is a number similar to the entire planet’s population during what we in Western history call the Migration Period, which triggered the downfall of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries. The similarities have not gone unnoticed by everybody.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry, one of Britain’s most senior military strategists, has warned that Western civilization faces a threat on a par with the barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman Empire. “Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned… [the process] acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet.” Third World instability could lick at the edges of the West as pirates attack holidaymakers from fast boats. “At some time in the next 10 years it may not be safe to sail a yacht between Gibraltar and Malta.” The effects will be magnified as borders become more porous and some areas sink beyond effective government control. Parry expected the world population to grow to about 8.4 billion in 2035, with some giant metropolises becoming ungovernable. The subsequent mass population movements, Parry argued, could lead to the “Rome scenario.”

It is strange that those who call for stricter limitations on immigration in general and for an end to Muslim immigration are denounced as “anti-democratic forces” when it is the other way around. No nation, regardless of political system, can survive if it does not uphold its territorial integrity. Democracy has proved to be a superior system in promoting economic progress through liberty. But will democracy also prove strong enough to survive when faced with uncontrolled mass-immigration from failed states?

This is a powerful dilemma for democratic states in the 21st century, one that is not exclusive to Western nations. India, too, has big problems with millions of people crossing into the country illegally from Islamic Bangladesh, which is why the Indians want to build a border fence. Democratic states will either be strict enough to control their own borders, or they will cease to be democratic, perhaps cease to exist at all.

It is sometimes said that trends start in California, and spread to the rest of the world from there. But maybe trends in the 21st century start in Israel. The “trend” of Islamic suicide bombings has to a great extent been pioneered in Israel. Maybe some of the Israeli countermeasures, such as building a security fence to protect yourself against Islamic terrorism and from being demographically overwhelmed by Muslim immigration, will become trendy, too.

In the middle of the massive waves of migration in the 21st century it is suicidal to cling on to ideas of a “borderless world.” Yet in the West, there seems to be an alliance between the anti-national forces of the political Left and the Libertarian ideals and short-term desire for cheap labor of the political Right, who denounce their critics as “racists.” Perhaps we can call it an Alliance of Utopias. What these Western Utopians don’t understand is that there is another, competing Utopia of a borderless world: The Islamic Caliphate. As long as the Islamic world can dump their excess population in infidel countries and Muslims make up a majority – some say 70% — of the world’s refugees, any policies of not maintaining our borders will only pave the way for the Islamization of our lands. And it will happen with the blessing of many of our intellectuals, both right-wing and left-wing.

A plague on both their houses.

35 thoughts on “Stupidity Without Borders — The Alliance of Utopias

  1. Bravo, Fjordman! Talkin’ sense, as usual.

    Part of the irony here, with this ‘reverse colonization’, is that while Europe colonized the planet with technologies developed in Europe, the third world is colonizing us with technologies developed by … us.

    Of course, this wouldn’t be possible if we just slammed the door, put up a fence, and shot everyone that tried to get in. It’s our complacency, as much as our technology, that’s enabling these new barbarian invasions.

  2. If we didnt let people from the 3. world enter. The low birthrates would simply be a huge blessing.

    Imagine the large areas we could have in Europe, just with nature and wildlife, if we where only half as many people.

    The low birthrates are a blessing thats being turned on us to become a curse.

  3. Increasing the birthrate in Europe would not work. The pool of fertile women is too small. It would take two generations to increase plus to bring the cannon fodder to adulthood would take another fifteen years. Increasing the birthrate is the wishful thinking of a pioneering mentality. The problem of illegal immigration needs to be addressed now. Policing of borders plus air force and navy surveillance of those countries with foreign shorelines, returning criminals to their countries of origin (and making illegal immigration a criminal offence) are two things which could be done immediately. Those who cry racism regarding these two things(‘Wenn Ich Kultur hore…entsichere ich meinen Browning)should be given the opportunity to return with the criminals (this includes lawyers and politicians) i.e. put up or shut up. Let the muslim and African countries implode on their own. Don’t give comfortable European retirement to tyrants with Swiss bank accounts. Keeping them in their own countries forever should be incentive enough for them to take their jobs seriously. Stop letting Israel do the dirty work then condemning her for it. Oh, and put Fjordman in charge of the UN.

  4. Again, gripping stuff. I can’t help thinking that the one thing we cherish most in our societies has contributed to the falling birth rate. We gave women equal rights to the working market, and they took them to their hearts. It is difficult to have to choose between a career or motherhood. The one will always hinder the other. But our society now is built in such a way, that it demands that both husband and wife work to pay the bills and the high taxes. A one income family here is a poor family unless one is a top CEO or has an independant money supply.

  5. Fjordman put his finger on the most
    important issue of our time.

    A few discrete observations.

    In my lifetime Lebanon has changed
    from a majority Christian nation to
    a majority Muslim one. In 1960 70%
    or so was of Christian heritage and
    30% Muslim, today the figures have
    sommersaulted. During the 1970s a
    civil war erupted just as the flip
    occured. Then Lebanon was a satrapy
    of France and was often referred to
    as the Switzerland of the Mid East.
    Today it is a satrapy of Syria and
    Iran and a breeding ground for
    terrorism. This was not an ‘ethnic’
    shift btw, just a religio-cultural
    one.

    As to Exiles excellant point as to
    the economic imperatives middle
    class couples face let me commment
    here on Dr. Rashbrook, the 62 year
    old British lady who recently had a
    baby. While Dr. Rashbrook may have
    been pushing the outer envelope of
    age for women to consider modern
    fertility technology to conceive, I
    think we have to consider modifying
    our biological ‘clocks’ in light of
    the demands of modern life. Women
    might consider freezing their eggs
    while young for the day when they
    have the time and resources to have
    children.Governments may even want
    to make such conception services
    for post menopausal women a part of
    their national health care plans.
    Afterall a with age comes wisdom
    and a mature mom maybe the better
    mom.

    To those who argue a 50 year old
    woman is too old to have children
    I say why? A fifty year old woman
    in America or Europe remaining life
    expectancy is at least what is was
    in the 19th century for a 25 year
    old mom and maybe greater than what
    it is for a African mother of any
    age today! To those who say having
    a 16 year old boy when you are in
    your late sixties or seventies will
    be too much of a burden I say it
    could be a blessing and be a lot
    cheaper than hiring a maid or a
    nurse to do those tasks one can no
    longer do by yourself. Does anyone
    think less of their grandparents
    because they are old? Finally there
    are benefits to the child of having
    older parents. They will inherit
    their parents estates at the very
    time they are forming their own
    families not when they themselves
    are heading into retirement. Thus
    they will be better able to have
    children themselves at an earlier
    age than their parents were.

  6. The Left and Libertarian open borders types are creating a “Perfect Storm” of social policy.

    We had such a perfect storm in American history when social conservatives and progressives teamed up to give us: Prohibition. We all know how well that worked out.

  7. The essay wrote: This strange and possibly unprecedented situation, which could perhaps be labelled “survival of the least fit”, will have dramatic consequences for the world. It is already producing the largest migration waves in history, threatening to swamp islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty. This is a misunderstanding of the scientific content of Darwin’s observations. Fitness, for Darwin, means fit to survive and multiply. Nothing more, nothing less. By definition, then, we never, ever, ever have survival of the least fit. Whichever people are fruitful and multiply, unless calamity overtakes them somehow or other, are “the fittest”. Whoever dies off, whether through war, pestilence, or simply indifference to marriage and family, is “less fit”.

  8. Rather than survival of the fittest
    which has always been something of
    a tautology lets say there is a
    dysgenic effect where those who are
    less successful in life produce
    more children.

    Whether it international vagrants
    sneaking into developed nations or
    the welfare moms indigenous to the
    developed nations modern liberal
    welfare states have stood Darwin
    on his head.

    Whereas, in times past, as the left
    is fond of noticing, aristocratic
    privilege meant that, to some
    extent, well born imbeciles and
    ne’er do wells could pass on their
    genes to future generations they
    were, by definition small in number.

    In recent times however the bottom
    of the pyramid are procreating in
    disproportionate numbers. Whereas
    in earlier times poverty and high
    infant mortality limited the number
    of surviving children from this
    cohort today most all survive and
    go on to create more of themselves.

    It is perverse. While adolescent
    pregnancy is discouraged amongst
    the middle class and as education
    and career pressures push back the
    age at which these women begin to
    have children no such pressures
    exist at the bottom of the pyramid
    and, thanks to welfare programs,
    these babies are able to survive
    in almost the same proportion as
    those of the middleclass.

    Since IQ is largely an inherited
    quality should we be surprised that
    educational levels are beginning to
    slip.

    Even immigration, in its current
    form, adds to this dysgenic effect.
    We are very stingy in our granting
    of visas to immigrants with proven
    skill sets and abilities but allow
    almost unfettered immigration to
    Latin American, inter alia, surplus
    populations. You aren’t likely to
    get too many top of the line IQs
    running across the border to take
    a job as a dishwasher or lawnmower.
    They can find a better position at
    home, even in Mexico or Honduras.

  9. I’d love to know what a multiculturalist leftist would say about this text… hmm, he’d probably use the “biased right wing propaganda” argument, that timeless classic. Or maybe he wouldn’t even say anything about the writing, maybe he’d just move straight to ad hominems (“Islamophobe!”).

    I used to visit a few forums that were populated by rabid leftists, and I now know every imaginable response they can formulate.

  10. One of the big problems of modern society is the inbalance between what it takes to be successful in an economic sense, and what is most likely to be successful in a genetic sense. This is unprecedented, but it isn’t necessarily surprising. Memetic theory actually predicts it; when you have two competing kinds of replicator (genes and memes) their interests won’t always coincide. Modern, high-technology society is mostly meme-driven: more specifically, it is very friendly towards the horizontal transmission of memes (the internet, television, books, global travel, etc etc allow a lot of memetic replication between unrelated individuals); compare this to more traditional societies, where the vast majority of memes were passed on vertically (parent to child.)

    I think memes will win in the end, by finding ways around biological limitations. Scott already suggested the idea that women freeze their eggs and reproduce later in life. Another idea is to make ‘baby factories’, which definately has icky Brave New World connotations but at the same time, undeniably allows a very high rate of reproduction, while still allowing people to pursue their work full-time and not worry about families.

    At any rate, allowing massive levels of immigration from backwards societies, especially Muslim ones, is a recipe for disaster. In the long run it would lead to the fragmentation of nation states, with civilized peoples retreating inside heavily armed gated communities surrounded by barbarians with whom they’re more or less constantly at war.

  11. To the lethal point, as usual, Fjordman-

    May I suggest to Europe a new phrase: “The Hazelton Effect“. Coined in honor of a small town (named Hazelton) in America- coincidentally my grandfather was a legal immigrant and lifelong coalminer in this mountain town- where the mayor of this burg, just last night (while wearing a bulletproof vest) passed a law banning illegal immigrants from benefiting from the social service largesse of the city that has drawn so many moochers and leeches to this land. And he also mandated an end to dual languages used for government publications and will immediatly levy fines against employers and landlords who hire or house illegal aliens. And finally he invited these law-breaking parasitic infiltrators to go home and try it through the legal route.

    Europe -and the rest of America- needs to emulate the “Hazelton Effect” fast, before the Soft Islamic Invasion turns hard.

    My friends on the Continent are getting quieter and quieter as their homelands become more and more alien to them.

    The need to raise more noise. And raise statues to Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh. And worry about their childrens’ future and less about absurd appearances of “bigotry”, “racism” or other deceptive, cunningly-calculated nonsense used to confuse, intimidate and play them for supine suckers.

    Keep up the information-versus-the disinformation campaign!

    And Freedom-versus-Islamic Imperialism!

    Or Europe will look like Somalia in two generations.

    Sharia Law, theocratic Terror and a New Dark Ages.

    Under than shadow of the sword.

  12. Hi All I’m a new poster long time reader of the Gates. I would Just like to mention a problem I have witnissed at our local imigration dept here in Sydney Australia. I have some Friends who recently emigrated from the Czech Rep in Europe, I went with them when they were requesting permission to stay in this country and to my horror behind the imigration dept counter all I saw was nothing but the very people that are being discussed in Fjordmans essay the imigrants and who do you suppose they were letting into the country and who were they not.

  13. Before anyone mistakes me for a racist and all that. I would like to point out the even though you all might think as mentioned in Fjordmans essay that in Australia we have a tough imigration policy. it’s really dependent on who you are, if white and of European descent then you will be the most unlikely candidate to be accepted into the country, but if on the other hand you are muslim (Religion not race although most people seem to think that islam is a race)or black from Africa or Asian then the doors are wide open. I belive this is the same problem Sweden now has (Reverse Racism)White educated people are unwanted scum but the masses of uneducated (but with a unique culture that will spice up our own crap culture) are more then welcome.

  14. Infancy’s the tender fountain,
    Power may with beauty flow,
    Mother’s first to guide the streamlets,
    From them souls unresting grow–
    Grow on for the good or evil,
    Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;
    For the hand that rocks the cradle
    Is the hand that rules the world.
    –William Ross Wallace

    Today, the hand that rocks the cradle is no longer a western hand. Most western women are either no longer having children (Europe)or having fewer children (or only one) later in life (US).

    Later in life is not necessarily a time when women have “more time and resources.” Women who forgo motherhood for the sake of a career may have more money, but they often have less time and energy due to the demands of their career. In her younger years, a woman will usually have less responsibilities in her job (and in her life, in general)than a woman who has worked for 10, 15 or in some cases 20 years before having a child.

    Older women, again, will have more money than younger women with less time in the workplace. But, here is where the problem lies. A woman with an advanced career will most likely put her child in day care in order to keep her higher position.

    More than IQ is passed down from parent to child. A child is enculturated by the people he spends the majority of his time with. If spent in a day care facility, he will likely spend most of his time with other children in an environment suited to the needs of a large group of children. If he spends his time at home with his mother, he will be spending his time in *her* environment which, if she is a good mother, she will adapt to his needs (and his siblings, should he have them). He will receive more direct contact and stimulation than a child in a large group will. His mother will pass on to him love, security, and a set of beliefs dear to her – her culture.

    With more women working and having fewer children and placing those children in day cares instead of raising and forming them, America’s culture is dying and is being replaced by whatever comes along, good or bad.

    The reason the Islamic culture continues to survive and thrive is that the families have more children for one thing, the mothers raise the children themselves and the children are then educated according to the families’ beliefs (enculturation).

    In America, we pay others to raise our children and then send them off to schools which are increasingly unable to educate anyone. Why should immigrant children learn English? It will be practically useless in the future if America continues neglecting the cultural education of its own children.

  15. “Maybe some of the Israeli countermeasures, such as building a security fence to protect yourself against Islamic terrorism and from being demographically overwhelmed by Muslim immigration, will become trendy, too.”
    For once you are late on picking up this trend 😉 – both the Indian fences on the Pakistan and Bangladesh border are being built with a lot of help from Israel.

    “But will democracy also prove strong enough to survive when faced with uncontrolled mass-immigration from failed states?” I am very scared to think of the answer to this question – the more I think about it the more I dislike the conclusion I am reaching. On my better days I think that there are two cases here
    1. homogeneous ethnic countries which for some reason did not start down the sliding slope like Japan, Korea, Finland etc. where democracy has prevented mass immigration.
    2. Countries which were diverse to start with (India) or became diverse through some accident of history (colonial history – France) or one generation of leaders screwing up and making incorrect decisions. In such countries there is now already a “minority” whose votes both the leading parties want (since the swing vote percentage is very very tiny – any small minority could easily screw any political party – so both parties are reluctant to act against the illegal immigrants) – hence the current democratic system has a built in feature (bug?) which acts against the majority – I do not have any answers for how to solve this democratically.

    One more case – if there are 2 villages next to each other with 150 people each. Now suppose that 80 (40 males and 40 females) are of marriageable age in each. One Village A allows one man to marry four women, whereas the other is built on 1-1 marriage. In Village A 10 males marry off the 40 marriageable females. The remaining 30 males in Village have to now go around hunting in Village B (or other neighboring communities) for their mates. This behaviour repeated over time sets up a pattern of behaviour where the descendendants of people of Village A are always poaching for women from those they percieve as the “other”.

    factotum,
    I agree with your general point about mothers passing on the culture to the children. Just one issue – I remember reading somewhere that in all other religions the religion is taught to the child by the mother, whereas in Islam the religion is passed on to the child by the father/father figures (imams/mullahs etc.) – sorry I do not have any links for it – do correct me if I am wrong. also “Islamic culture” continues to survive BUT NOT thrive.

  16. hmm, the theme is strange, but worth to discuss. the point is, that nothing is more bad than an ever growing population with dwindling resources. at somepoint the the society as a whole will colapse into itself to a very low level. that has happend often on island, see easter island (loosing their religion) ,tasmania (a little more like animals, they don’t even know to bild ships) and the great maya society.

    when you watch the media, one mayor reason for the inability to develop a country is overpopulation, or you have much money. the population of the near east began to growth with a rapid speed with beginning of the oil age, because through oil you could adapt a higher technic level even if the society is as caotic as the islamic ones are. before that you to bild trains and canals to improve the transportsystems, so that local varieties in the harvest could be leveled.

    the west and the far east are still overpopulated and the drop in birthrath is one of the reason for the development of this regions – as you could see this in the africa and latinamerica too. so a drop in population in the near future is not bad, it is good, so that extensive agriculture we be not needed as much as jet. this is important, because of the (http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200607/s1682899.htm) beginning peak oil, the whole system will get instabile, so that free resources are needed for adaption for the new sourrounding. because of the high population and the shorting of good farming ground, in the near future, the islamic world will need to import food from the west. so that in 40 to 50 years the situation begin to shift again. they are depending more on us, than we on them, but because of the oil thing, we hold back – it’s stupid business.

    but backt to immigration, with the shortining of oil, such things will be seen in otherway. when the price of one barral oil have broken through the 1000 $ mark, people think about many thing in other way and this goes fast. so the whole will change in five years redically, it’s like a shift. through the shift, immigration will cost more as the social systems. it will be more like a big hangover, more like a lost war! where there not great population displacements after great war in history?

  17. Justtwo notes:
    Spengler of the Asia Times also notes that if you check the population tables,the fertility rate of Islamic countries is plummeting…so demographically the Islamic world has only a limited time to “conquer” Europe before it, too, depopulates itself.

    An interesting “aside” about Japan is that they have recruited Japanese ethnic workers from South America to return there to work, to insure ethnic purity.

    Of course, a third way to get around all of this is to “…(get rid of) their leaders and convert them to Christianity”…but then Anne Coulter was always such a joker. The anaemic Chrisitians left in Europe would never bother to try to preach the gospel…

  18. ….strange that those who call for stricter limitations on immigration in general and for an end to Muslim immigration are denounced as “anti-democratic forces”…

    Not really. Liberalism PC-inspired newspeak has hijacked the word “democracy”, turing it from a process of electing government to a crypto-religious commandment.

    One of the big problems of modern society is the inbalance between what it takes to be successful in an economic sense, and what is most likely to be successful in a genetic sense. Due to the liberal world order …. in a harsher world western technical supremacy would effortlessly overcome any hordes. But while persists a liberal world order, where breeding is a human right, and the victim is king, where all civilians are sacrosanct, offensive demographics is untrumpable. Serbia lost Kosovo thus. They tried to reverse the loss the old fashioned way, and the West went to war to stop them doing so.

  19. “In the USA today, only about 3% of the population is made up of Native Americans; the rest are all descendants of immigrants.” Uhm perhaps you should lay down the pen and pick up a history book. The original populous from which America was created was from Native Americans, Europeans and Africans (who later became African Americans, a population created from the mixture of the above three populations). However your insistence that everyone in America is either Native American or immigrant is factually wrong. People of African descent, whose roots are as deep as long as any European American in the US were not immigrants to this country. A quick history lesson would easily point out that those forced into slavery and brought to the Americas don’t qualify or neatly fit into the category of immigrant. You cannot immigrant with chains shackled around your neck arms and feet. This is not PC just a fact that might help you with your next missive. America was not solely made great or “american” by the European but by the tried of European, Native American and African. Once you see those elements you see a fuller deeper picture of the genesis of AMerica.

  20. “Once you see those elements you see a fuller deeper picture of the genesis of AMerica.”

    Since you brought up the subject, please tell me how early immigration benifited Native Americans?

  21. This is getting to be an unfortunate habit, but I’ve got a more detailed version of my earlier post relating birth-rates and memetics over at Cracks in the Sanitarium. It seems to happen a lot that I read something here, post a hasty comment, and then think about it a lot more and waste a bunch of time elaborating. Curse you, Fjordman, for being so thought-provoking!

    Ariuvist: The west is overpopulated? Huh. Coulda fooled me. I could swear there was a whole bunch of empty real-estate in Canada, last time I checked. Seriously, though, the whole ‘overpopulation’ meme is so twentieth century. Even if the global population were to triple over the next fifty years, society would make out fine: all those extra brains would find far more efficient ways of using resources. The only societies that have ever been done in by overpopulation are the ones that didn’t advance their technology fast enough. Not an issue with us.

    our money staff: Um, come again? So lots of blacks were brought over against their will, and this has anything at all to do with the argument that overpowering levels of (okay, I’ll humor you and not say ‘immigration’) migration weren’t absolutely disastrous for the previous occupants? Not that I’m arguing it wasn’t ultimately beneficial (at least from my standpoint as a white male) but then, there’s a big difference between displacement by a more complex civilization and being invaded by barbarians who haven’t contribted a thing to the human species in the past eight hundred years (heck, muslims didn’t even invent suicide bombing.) Seriously guy, I think you managed to miss the entire thrust of the post and the ensuing discussion.

  22. sad applause to Fjordman!, applause for this exellent piece of recherche´and text (to a probably not large enough audience?), and sad for the hopeless stance of our free world..

  23. If there are still failed states in another 100 years, the normal, accepted response in civilized countries will be to wall the borders with radioactive waste, periodically nuke population centers in the barbaricum, and deport or kill barbarians found within the walls.

    Not saying I like it — I don’t. But countries that don’t do this sort of thing won’t survive.

  24. It used to be said that the entire population of the world could fit on the isle of wight, standing shoulder to shoulder. This isn’t true. Only half of them could fit at low tide; the rest would have to stand on the isle of mann.

    But, having said that, this should put things in to perspective. Assuming a world population of 6 billion, the entire population of the world, standing together with enough room to shrug, would take up about 900 square km, or about 300 square miles in total. Even taking in to account mountains, natural requirements, agricultural land requirements and the need for people to have a bit of space there’s enough room on the planet to give everyone a couple of acres of land, and still leave room for more to be born. The only reason it feels crowded is because people tend to bunch together in cities. Go to Iowa or Oklahoma some time and you’ll see how crowded the planet really is.

    Now, individual countries are crowded. The United Kingdom, for instance, probably only has reasonable room for 40 to 50 million people, but there are more living here already. It feels crwoded when you come to this island. We could have a lot more if we were to depend on other countries for our food, of course, because all that prime farmland could be turned in to urban sprawl instead. But that’s nothing compared to the low countrie. Parts of germany are even more crowded than London.

    As I said before, people assume that the world is crowded because they live in crowded areas and don’t know much about food production. We’re feeding more people today on less land that we used in the 1970s. The US actually produces more grain than it needs, partly because of subsidies (And resulting in massive dumping some yreas, which is a shame, but at least the fishies get fed). Given suitable market arrangements it woudl be possibel for the US to feed a goodly portion of the entire world, but there are certain barried erected to that by international bodies and, sadly, the US itself. The EU too, produces more food than it can consume via subsidised farmingb, and it dumps it on foreign markets at artificially low prices, driving local produers out of the market and leaving those areas vulnerable to fluctuating prices. The point of this is that the technology exists the feed the entire world on a fraction of the land actually used, but protectionist policies prevent that from happening. And protectionism is usually a sign of left-wing thinking…

  25. Fjordman-

    Steven is doing a “worst case scenario” projection, which may be the only thing that will galvanize some of the somnambulistic members of the Great State of Denial out of their comfy p.c. beds.

    All war planning has to take into account every imaginable angle.

    Let’s hope we in the U.S. and Europe can get our borders under control -within this current generation- or these chilling scenarios will be getting grimmer, year after bloody year.

  26. John,
    Which Native Americans? The first Melanesians? The later Europeans, or the latest two waves from Siberia?

    The Thule seemed to benefit from the Norse, FWIW.

    If one believes that Christianity is true, then all benefit eternally, which is a long, long time. . .

    Being from Iowa, I know that the land is all in use – too much of it, really, for the long-term benefit of the soil.

    I also know that farms are considerably further apart than they were in my childhood, due to government policies, and that is a pity.

    But humans cannot well endure over-crowding, any more than rats can. Certain behavioral changes are typical, and harmful. Young males tend to run in packs/gangs instead of standing by the family, for instance.

    Overproduction of grain is not due to subsidies, but due to the exceedingly small profit margin. Both that, and the subsidies are part of the FDA’s cheap food program, presumably designed to help incumbents, not farmers.

    End property taxes and estate taxes, break up the grain monopoly, end government regulation of what you can grow, and when and where, and you will see more, and smaller, farms.

    Our republic was designed for small farms and family owned-and-operated businesses, where the people had an internal moral gyroscope resulting from Christianity. It doesn’t work well for anything else.

  27. Great piece, if only these 3rd class countries could improve, less people would want to immigrate to the West.

    absurd thought –
    God of the Universe says
    your country is not your own

    it belongs to others
    who are guests in your backyard
    .

  28. There is a misunderstood here.

    The population that is growing fast in Albania is the Christian one, that now are around 40% of the population!

    The real threat comes from Turkey, that later could join the EU

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