EU Elites Giddy at Migrant Surge; the Public Not So Much

With the avalanche of illegal entrants at U.S. southern border, President Joe Biden must be channeling German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On August 25, 2015, the latter gave a speech inviting the outside world to move to the European Union.

How did that work out for the EU?

Well, not quite well. Merkel may have sounded idealistic, but there were hard-headed considerations behind the invitation of the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African migrants.

First, Europe is dying. Even Poland is below the replacement level. Valiant efforts to stem the lethal trend by Budapest in Warsaw so far have produced mixed results. Financial incentives to have children have not yet resulted in a baby boom. It is even worse in the western part of the European Union.

Thus, Merkel figured she needed fresh blood to pay taxes, work, and service the wealthy but geriatric and emasculated Europeans. Like Barrack Obama, who pointed out that Islamist terrorism was, essentially, not a big deal in terms of the volume of people murdered in the West, Merkel similarly acquiesced in migrant pathologies because they are easily balanced by the overall putative benefits of foreign youth in the EU.

Further, the trope goes, post-national Europe cares about neither Christian tradition nor Western civilization. Thus, it will be relatively easy for the European Union to dissolve the newcomers in a bath of moral relativism, nihilistic progressivism, critical theory, and the libertine dictatorship of pleasure. Islam will be neutered just as Christianity was.

Merkel’s cost-benefit analysis thus reckoned that migrant tax and service potential outweighed any downsides to the invitation of mass population transfer. In this context, her supporters agree, occasional terrorist attacks, a spike in the assaults on women, and other pathologies, for instance, grooming perpetrated by Pakistani gangs on underage girls, are just nuisances well worth the price of the alleged cultural enrichment.

Besides, all the quirks will disappear as the European nations melt away and are replaced, or at least augmented, by equally neutered, often Muslim, new citizens of the EU.

So get used to the anti-Israeli demonstrations, like the ones in Germany now over the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza. The virulence of the street protests has prompted the Israeli ambassador to ask the Merkel administration to protect the resident Jews there.

Anti-Jewish violence is on the rise in the west of the Old Continent, but not in the Intermarium. It has been safe to wear your yarmulka in Budapest and Warsaw, but not in Paris or Berlin.

Same concerns the vandalism of the Jewish cemeteries and other properties as well as anything from beatings to terrorist attacks. Those take place overwhelmingly where the migrants have settled, so not in the east. For example, in Sweden the Islamists woo their new cannon fodder openly. The recruits fan out accordingly. The Jewish communities are uncomfortable to say the least.

And the migrants keep coming. There is no respite in sight. Italy’s Lampedusa has just registered a single largest landing in a long time: 1,200 illegals disembarked from multiple vessels, virtually all originating in Libya, on the same day a couple of weeks ago. Spain’s Ceuta has further clocked 5,000 arrivals in one day.

Nigel Farage of Brexit’s fame predicts that this year alone 20,000 uninvited guests will penetrate Britain’s maritime border.

Most EU political elites are giddy, while the people markedly less so. In a very recent poll, 71% of the French admitted they have had enough of foreign immigrants. They want the wave to stop. The rank and file military and police feel the same way. For example, soldiers in Spain shoved migrants back into the sea at least once.

In the southeast of the EU, Greece trembles in fear at Turkey’s blackmail to turn on the spigot with additional unwanted visitors to swell the massive ranks of these who already strain Athens’ meager resources.

Bulgaria alarms us about the twelvefold increase of illegal border crossing attempts by Third World citizens since the beginning of the year. Over 6,000 have been intercepted and returned to Greece and Turkey. How many got through?

Migrants will be a big issue in Bulgaria’s snap elections that have been called for July 11. If there is more havoc at the border, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s center-right populist GERB party stands to gain. It promises to stem the flow.

This is like in American, albeit on a smaller scale.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is Professor of History at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of statecraft in Washington D.C.; expert on East-Central Europe's Three Seas region; author, among others, of "Intermarium: The Land Between The Baltic and Black Seas." Read Marek Jan Chodakiewicz's Reports — More Here.