Linde Lund shared Angela Merkel's photo.
Speaking
at her annual party conference, Angela Merkel described 2015 as “an
unbelievable year,” and called the refugee crisis “a historic test”
which she hopes Europe will pass. “We will do our bit to make sure this
happens,” she added.
Angela Merkel is wrong. It isn't a historic test for Europe. It's a test for Angela Merkel and she failed.
Angela Merkel is wrong. It isn't a historic test for Europe. It's a test for Angela Merkel and she failed.
Germany on the Brink
ON New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women were reportedly raped.
Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, the authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees.
That delay has now cost Cologne’s police chief his job. But the German government still seems more concerned about policing restless natives
— most recently through a deal with Facebook and Google to restrict
anti-immigrant postings — than with policing migration. Just last week
Merkel rejected a proposal to cap refugee admissions (which topped one million last year) at 200,000 in 2016.
The
underlying controversy here is not a new one. For decades conservatives
on both sides of the Atlantic have warned that Europe’s generous
immigration policies, often pursued in defiance of ordinary Europeans’
wishes, threaten to destabilize the continent.
The
conservatives have made important points about the difficulty of
assimilation, the threat of radicalization, and the likelihood of
Paris-style and Cologne-style violence in European cities.
But they have also trafficked in more apocalyptic predictions — fears of a “Eurabia,” of mass Islamification — that were somewhat harder to credit.
Until recently, Europe’s assimilation challenge looked unpleasant but
not insurmountable, and the likelihood of Yugoslavian-style
balkanization relatively remote.
With
the current migration, though, we’re in uncharted territory. The issue
isn’t just that immigrants are arriving in the hundreds of thousands
rather than the tens of thousands. It’s that a huge proportion of them
are teenage and twentysomething men.
In Sweden, for instance, which like Germany
has had an open door, 71 percent of all asylum applicants in 2015 were
men. Among the mostly-late-teenage category of “unaccompanied minors,”
as Valerie Hudson points out in an important essay for Politico,” the ratios were even more skewed: “11.3 boys for every one girl.”
As
Hudson notes, these trends have immediate implications for civil order —
young men are, well, young men; societies with skewed sex ratios tend
to be unstable; and many of these men carry assumptions about women’s
roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary
Europe.
But there’s also a longer term issue, beyond the need to persuade new arrivals that — to quote from a Norwegian curriculum for migrants — in Europe “to force someone into sex is not permitted.”
When
immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes
slowly, and there’s time for assimilation to do its work. That’s why the
Muslim population in Europe has been growing only at one percentage point a decade;
it’s why many of the Turkish and North African immigrants who arrived
in Germany and France decades ago are reasonably Europeanized today.
But
if you add a million (or millions) of people, most of them young men,
in one short period, you get a very different kind of shift.
In
the German case the important number here isn’t the country’s total
population, currently 82 million. It’s the twentysomething population,
which was less than 10 million
in 2013 (and of course already included many immigrants). In that
cohort and every cohort afterward, the current influx could have a
transformative effect.
How
transformative depends on whether these men eventually find a way to
bring brides and families to Europe as well. In terms of immediate civil
peace, family formation or unification offers promise, since men with
wives and children are less likely to grope revelers or graffiti
synagogues or seek the solidarity of radicalism.
But
it could also double or treble this migration’s demographic impact,
pushing Germany toward a possible future in which half the under-40
population would consist of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants
and their children.
If
you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous
society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and
scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a
spokesman for the current German government.
You’re
also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization
among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in
terrorism but a rebirth of 1930s-style political violence. The
still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel
“Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets,
would have a very good chance of being realized in the German future.
This
need not happen. But prudence requires doing everything possible to
prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the
time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for
able-bodied young men. It means giving up the fond illusion that
Germany’s past sins can be absolved with a reckless humanitarianism in
the present.
It
means that Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the
continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her
high-minded folly.
