It feels so, so good to be back. And, as usually happens upon returning from a brief internet break, there is no end of things to write about.
The main thing is the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, just nine weeks after the first. A very strange man named Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly hid in the bushes with a rifle while the 45th President was playing golf in West Palm Beach yesterday afternoon. He was spotted by the Secret Service who “engaged” him. He later fled and was arrested. There will obviously be much more to say about this in the coming days.
A secondary, more amusing matter, is the resignation of that enormously irritating EU Commissioner Thierry Breton. This is the man best known for the threats he sent to Elon Musk last month, after Musk dared to organise a Twitter space with Trump. As I noted earlier, Breton has long been loathed even within the Eurocracy as an egotistical self-promoter. His resignation comes after Ursula von der Leyen asked Emmanuel Macron to nominate somebody else for his post. The most hilarious thing is that Breton posted his resignation directly to Twitter – the website that he believes is a grave threat to European democracy, but from which he cannot disentangle himself, because it is also such a great source of attention for mediocre losers like him.
There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.
For nearly 10 years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.
Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.
The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises it is up against the limits of its ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise its understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.
In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore taboo thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.
Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-Right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever ‘the extreme Right’ is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.
To understand what is happening and what is at stake, we must review the dynamics of mass migration to Europe. They go something like this:
First, the European Union cannot effectively stop migrants from the developing world at its own borders. The reasons – whether the Eurocrats can’t, or they won’t, or they don’t care, or they don’t know how, or they haven’t been sufficiently incentivised – don’t really matter.
What does matter is the fact that the failure of of the Eurocracy to limit migration is gradually undermining the credibility of the EU itself. This is because nation states are much better at border security than international bureaucratic behemoths. Should a major EU member state decide that it has had enough of mass migration and elect to close its borders, the migrant pressure on other EU states would increase.
These other states would then have a powerful motivation to take a similarly hard line, and there would be a chain reaction – a race to the bottom, in which EU nations strive to outcompete each other in disincentivising migration and sealing their borders against asylees. A sufficiently fierce reaction could substantially undermine the authority of the EU itself, and would certainly spell the end of the Schengen Arrangement.
Germany, despite all its recent crises and setbacks, is still the dominant industrial nation of the EU, and also its most populous state. By keeping its borders open and enticing migrants with generous benefits, Germany hopes to reduce migrant pressure on its neighbours and prevent the anti-migration chain reaction from getting off the ground. This is why German politicians are so quick to equate any flavour of migration restrictionism with hostility to the EU. Smaller countries like Denmark and Hungary can shut their doors to migrants, because the added pressure on the rest of Europe is minimal. Germany, however, is different; the structural integrity of the entire system depends on German borders remaining open.
The problem is that the snake has begun to eat its own tail. The energy crisis and the lunatic anti-nuclear and anti-carbon radicalism of the Greens have taken a huge bite out of German prosperity. Open borders have lost their appeal, Alternative für Deutschland is pounding at the door and no amount of staged public freakouts about ‘the extreme Right’ can restore the balance.
Look at the polls: fully 82% of West Germans and 84% of East Germans believe the state should limit migration. A majority across almost every major party, including 55% of Green voters, agree that migration must be restricted. Huge majorities of East and West Germans support deporting criminal migrants, reducing the benefits of asylees whose applications have been rejected, weakening family reunification provisions and cutting down the potential pool of asylees by increasing the number of those nations designated as secure countries of origin. On many of these issues you see a general convergence of opinion, with West Germans gradually adopting the anti-migration views of their supposedly backward and anti-democratic East German counterparts, who in this area as in many others are simply less prosperous, less insulated from geopolitical trends and therefore more likely to be at the forward edge of political opinion.
In the end, it was the Islamist knife attack at the ‘Diversity Festival’ in Solingen that became the tipping point. The attacker, a Syrian asylum seeker named Issa al Hassan, was supposed to have been deported to Bulgaria, because that is the country where he first set foot on EU soil. Al Hassan, however, managed to avoid deportation by refusing to answer his door for a few months; our police, after all, had no particular interest in deporting him or anybody else. As a result, three people are dead. In the wake of AfD success in the Thuringian and Saxon elections, al Hassan has become a powerful signal of failed migration policy in Germany more generally. Suddenly a lot of people want to know why people like al Hassan are even here, why they can’t be deported and whose fault this entire mess may be.
Today, Germany begins spot-checking for illegal migration across all national borders. Our Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, announced the policy in a direct response to the Solingen scandal. She justified this emergency measure last Monday in a letter to the EU Commission, stating that Germany’s resources are “nearly exhausted” and that the present refugee burden has brought the state “to the limits of what it can afford”.
“The provision of additional accommodation is not possible without limits,” Faeser wrote… “No state in the world can receive an unlimited number of refugees.” She added that the migratory pressure is expected to “remain unrelentingly high”.
“In addition to the dangers posed by Islamist terrorism, recent incidents of knife crime and other violent crime by refugees have led to a massive impairment of the sense of security and inner peace,” Faeser continued. She also criticised “the increasing dysfunctionality” of the so-called Dublin System in Europe – the agreement that refugees must apply for asylum in the country where they first set foot on European soil. The minister called on Brussels “to continue to work energetically and vigorously together to achieve visible and rapid progress here.”
The border checks are not nearly enough, and for once our politicians are not even pretending that they are. The parties of our coalition Government are desperate to achieve some agreement about limiting migration with the Parliamentary opposition, meaning the centre-Right Christian Democrats. The latter, sounding increasingly like Alternative für Deutschland, are demanding the blunt pushback of asylees at the German border if they have crossed through another European country to get here. In practice, this would entail a rejection of nearly all asylum applicants, because it is very hard for refugees to get to Germany without travelling through some other EU state.
Now, the CDU is not acting out of moral conviction. Its leaders are political opportunists who bear direct responsibility for the present migrant crisis, and they would just as soon close the borders as open them even wider than Merkel did in 2015, if only it served their interests. At the same time, their opportunism in the face of changing political winds has altered the discourse forever, and that really does matter.
According to media reports, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the CDU that “he would prefer to reduce illegal migration to zero”. The CDU, however, ultimately broke off negotiations, because Scholz’s Government doubted that courts would support a rejection of asylees en masse. It offered to try blanket rejections at a few trial locations, to see how judges would react, but the CDU refused. It said it does not want legal experiments; rather, it wants to send a signal to the migrant hordes – specifically one that “would be the opposite of the signal sent in 2015”, when its own former Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the peoples of the Third World to Germany. After the CDU left the negotiating table, establishment media began their typical whining, outdone only by Chancellor Scholz’s amazing speech to the German Bundestag, in which he shouted and ranted about the intransigence of the Christian Democrats over many minutes, like a man with his back to the wall.
After Scholz finished throwing his tantrum in the Bundestag, the Right-populist Government of the Netherlands announced that it wished to implement the comprehensive pushback of asylees on its own borders:
Marjolein Faber, the Asylum Minister of [Geert] Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV), wants to take unusual measures to minimise the influx of asylum seekers and migrants. She aims to create “the strictest asylum regime of all time” and make the Netherlands a pioneer in strict migration policy.
To this end, the Dutch Government first wants to declare a crisis that would enable it to suspend laws without the approval of Parliament temporarily and to govern by “royal decree”. New legislation would then follow. According to the Government plan, this emergency measure would… initially prevent the start of new asylum procedures and restrict the family reunification of already recognised refugees.
Refugees are to be housed in a few large centres and provided only with the necessities of life. The new Government no longer wants to grant asylum for an unlimited period and, like Germany, wants to control the borders more strictly. At the EU level, the Netherlands also wants an opt-out clause that would allow it to not implement common EU legislation.
German state media are fighting very hard to cast the Dutch plans as a crazy example Right-wing extremism, but in the new discourse that is very hard. Substantial portions of the relentlessly progressive, democratic and anti-fascist German political establishment are at this very moment demanding pretty much the same thing.
Naturally, the Left is having a very big sad about all of this. On Saturday, that cut-rate German Guardian known as taz ran a piece screaming that ‘My Germany is staying open‘. “The asylum debate is getting more intense,” it wrote. “Human rights are at stake.” To defend these rights, it assembled 32 astoundingly vapid pro-migration statements from various ‘celebrities’, who insisted over and over that “diversity is our greatest strength”, that migration is necessary to prevent Germany from becoming “grey and brown” (that is, old and fascist), that “it is not an achievement to live where you live”, that “we need further immigration to develop culturally, intellectually and spiritually”, that we need “to see each individual as a human being”, that “society needs to develop a completely different, positive sense of cooperation” and that “an open society is the best protection for our democracy and humanity”. If you had asked me to compose an extended parody of migrationist drivel, I could not do any better than this. The fuzzy buzzwords, the vague moral appeals and the absence of any concrete argument are all the unmistakable symptoms of a sclerotic and defunct ideology that has come to the end of itself.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Sorry to burst your bubble as you write so well but we’ve seen it all before here in the UK. Tories and others have been talking a good fight about immigration for decades and here they are, on the way to being replaced.
If they honoured their 2019 Manifesto, they would still be {in service} now.
Sorry meant here WE are, on the way to being replaced.
The Tories took far to long to take the problem of mass immigration seriously but when they finally did so they came up with the Rwanda scheme which may of worked to deter a lot of illegal immigrants. Obviously it was defeated by activist judges but if Labour had of supported the plan their useful idiots in the judicary may of passed a different judgement and the scheme could of been up and running at least a year ago. If a supposedly left wing/socialist party gets tough on immigration I think a lot of left leaning judges will suddenly stop trying to block schemes that may work and stop finding reasons why people can’t be deported.
The Rwanda plan may have helped. I would like to see illegal immigrants be treated more like invaders, which is what they are.
Legal immigration remains high. I think it needs to stop almost completely, for a long time (decades, centuries). There has already been far too much.
You do realise that the Rwanda scheme accommodated Rwanda being able to send its illegal migrants to the UK if it could not accommodate their needs.
Mrs May signed up to the Global Compact on Migration as she was parroting their commitment to reduce migration. The Tories have lied and lied and lied about controlling migration – Rwanda was no different.
Approx 80% of the British people who bothered to vote in 2024 voted for establishment parties who have demonstrated beyond all doubt that they have no intention of halting mass immigration. Those voters can hardly complain about their replacement.
Sad but true
“that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives”…..No you wouldn’t because the third world invaders don’t really dig diversity when they gain a majority.
Carefully examined an upscaled 4k version of that photo, and not a single female nor child is visible. All fighting-age males. Happy to discuss.
How can we help all these men integrate?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/17/general-behind-lax-security-checks-says-army-hierarchical/
Britain’s second most senior general has said she wants to see less hierarchical behaviour and more “empowerment” in the Army.
Lt Gen Dame Sharon Nesmith, the deputy chief of the general staff, said in an interview that “just because we have lots of rank structure, doesn’t mean to say that we have to behave in a hierarchical way”.
Lt Gen Nesmith, tipped by some as future chief of the service, was the author of the controversial Army Race Action Plan which advocates easing security checks in order to drive diversity….
…Asked to name her most inspirational non-military leader, Lt Gen Nesmith said Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand.
“Not necessarily because I’m a fan of hers but because she’s a mum. She demonstrates her own personal leadership style and she’s ploughing her own track.”
How the effing hell did a woman so clearly stupid get to be Deputy Chief of General Staff? Has she been in a war zone?
FFS.
“just because we have lots of rank structure, doesn’t mean to say that we have to behave in a hierarchical way”.
Isn’t that a basic requirement for a military command structure to work?
This story has been all over social media the last coupe of days but see if you can understand the rationale behind it because I can’t. Also the German government are suddenly denying it, so it gets even more confusing, although they could just be being crafty because elections are round the corner and immigration is a very hot topic. 250,000 skilled and semi-skilled Kenyan migrants are being sent to Germany, but why? So German citizens, or even citizens from neighbouring countries, cannot fill whatever jobs these Kenyans are coming to do, and in exchange Germany gets to send Kenya its failed asylum seekers? Doesn’t make sense;
”The German media was abuzz throughout the weekend about the news that 250,000 Kenyans were headed to Germany to work as skilled or semi-skilled workers. With Brandenburg state elections a week away, and with immigration the number one topic as voters head to the polls, the news arguably could not have come at a worse time for the far-left government.
Now, there are panic denials coming from the government, with the interior ministry contradicting the claims. Kenyan President William Ruto was the one who first broke the news, telling Deutsche Welle that he had signed an agreement with Germany that would allow Germany to return illegal immigrants, and in exchange, Kenya would send skilled labor as migrants.
The German interior ministry released a statement on X about the Kenyan agreement, stating: “This news is false. The migration agreement between Germany and Kenya does not contain any numbers or quotas of skilled workers from Kenya who could work in Germany. All applicants must meet the criteria of the Skilled Immigration Act.”
The original agreement did not put forth a specific number, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz simply stating it was a “win-win situation.” However, Ruto, in an interview with Deutsche Welle, shocked Germany with a figure of 250,000, which took to social media like a wave. Despite the denial, the news could further harm the government’s standing in the run-up to regional elections.
Since then, the figure of 250,000 has been deleted from the Deutsche Welle X channel, in what looks like an attempt at damage control. However, the figure is still available on their website.”
https://rmx.news/article/250000-kenyans-for-germany-far-left-government-issue-panic-denial-as-state-elections-loom/
Ah, they are introducing spot checks on the borders. Yeah, that will stop them.
What borders?
Two steps forward, pretend to take a step back. Two more steps forward, etc, etc.
You are right. David Icke called it “The Totalitarian Two-Step”: two steps forward, one step back.
Translation of some of the statements from the TAZ.
What will the European Union become when ever more governing parties disregard human rights? I’m meanwhile allergic to Beware of the beginnings. We’re already right in the middle of it.
[Michael Friedmann, believes Germany to be ruled by Nazi-Fascists because who else could want to deport foreign criminals whose asylum applications were long since rejected?]
My Germany is already dangerously wrong. This is not about a country and certainly not about my country. It’s about the universal right of individuals to live free from harm to either body or soul and the injustice to declare those seeking to gain this right subhumans who can be rejected at borders based on their perceived usefulness.
[Samira el Quassil, obviously not very much troubled about a country which isn’t hers]
I don’t want to live in a country without foreigners. A Germany exclusively populated by gammons would be horrible.
[Christine Rösinger]
My Germany remains open because diversity is our strength. I want to live in country where everybody’s personal dignity is sacrosanct.
[Mirrianne Mahn, barely audible behind her high-quality facemask and not particularly convinced that The Unvaccinated have a person dignity which could be sacrosanct]
Germany today is more secure than ever. We need more immigrants to continue to progress culturally, spiritually, intellectually and as democratic state.
[Hans-Jochen Wagner, mirror image of Rösinger above: I hate Germany and want to get rid of it!]
The current debate about asylum and immigration is being artificially inflated to distract from the real problems: Wars between foreign countries and the climate catastrophe. But taking care of that is seen as too abstract, too cumbersome and not popular enough. Rather employ a few migrants as scapegoats, these are at least visible and can be deported, the climate not so much. Cosying up with Nazis was never a good strategy. We need a firewall to protect us from these and not one around this country.
[Johannes Hendrik Langer, green airhead with no mind of its own and absolutely no idea why anyone could be worried about issues closer to home than foreign wars]
I want to thank my friend*istesses from Syria, Iran and Ukraine for the many positive experiences I had with them and the many things I could learn from them. They’ve enriched our lives since 2015 and I only wish my hard-hearted fellow countrymen would stop trying to make this kind of enrichment for themselves and us ever more difficult.
[Heike-Melba Fendel, excited about excitingly different kinds of street food and not interested in anything else]
And as last one:
If Germany doesn’t just want to be Many it must open up more. A democracy which only shines on the inside will eventually go blind because of itself. How horribly dreadful, how much poorer would this country have been … without us.
[Khesrau Behroz, Why not move to some place you like better? We’ll manage, ‘mate’.]
Great article, thank you! You’re consistently one of the best commentators on the current ideological insanity, and this is a great perspective, that we won’t hear from the denialist mainstream media.
Perhaps, can we dare hope that democracy, virtuous or not, can triumph over the virtue addicted elites, who believe that they know what’s best for us all, while conveniently feathering their own nests.
Liberal Progressives always figure out what the rest of us have been telling them 30 years after we told them. This is a migrant SWARM. I am sorry but people are swarming all over Europe and the UK.—This simply cannot go on and we cannot stop it yesterday so it must be stopped NOW, TODAY, IMMEDIATELY. ——-I give the analogy of the smoker trying to stop smoking. You have done damage to yourself but all you can do is STOP NOW.
‘Our’ obligations to the world’s poor might be reduced by all these pressures on the political elite, but there’s still a lot of the poor to be ‘accommodated’ by human rights and asylum.
Italy may have reduced the numbers of migrants coming to Italy by boat but the number of asylum claims have increased by a third. And Sir Keir is ‘interested’ in that.
Expect no more than the dissembling that the general public have been subjected to on this matter for decades. The Rwanda scheme was just that, a scheme. A curtain that distracted from the vast legal immigration the Tory government allowed. The only ‘good’ leader that the Tory party could elect would be one who wound the whole thing up and shut up shop.
Yes, what changed? Anyone else just a soupçon of suspicious? I am.