What Happens in Lampedusa Doesn’t Stay There

Mr Dreher makes the same point I've been pounding for years. This is not a 'migrant crisis'. This is a full-on jihadist invasion of Europe!

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

You can’t escape the terribly inconvenient truth: if these illegal migrants had weapons, their hostile trespass onto the sovereign lands of others would be unambiguously seen as an act of war. 

An Italian friend texted me video of boatloads of African migrants rolling ashore the other day in Lampedusa.

On September 12, over one hundred boats arrived on the Italian island, bearing up to 5,000 illegal migrants. As the European Conservative’s Chris Tomlinson reported, the United Nations says that already this year, 115,000 illegal migrants have arrived in Italy. About this week’s migrant wave, which almost doubled the population of Lampedusa in a single day, the island’s deputy mayor called it an “invasion.”

An invasion is, of course, an act of war. But because the migrants do not come bearing weapons, Europe does not regard their lawless entry as an act of war. How long can the nations of Europe bear this? When will enough be enough?

Readers of the 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints will find all this depressingly familiar. The novel, by the late French writer Jean Raspail, is notorious because of its frankly racist language and characterization. I read it first in 2015, while Europe was enduring unprecedented mass migration from the Middle East. I knew that the novel was taboo, but I wanted to see if there were any useful lessons in it.

Indeed there were. True, I hated reading it because Raspail’s degrading description of the migrants dehumanized them with the language of raw disgust. Yet I persevered, because the real villains of the novel are not the million-man navy of migrants from the impoverished Third World (India in the book, though Raspail later said that he was thinking of Africa when he wrote), who set out in a vast flotilla, headed for France’s Mediterranean coast. No, the bad guys are the bien-pensants of the French establishment: politicians, professors, media figures, bishops, and others who fall all over themselves to welcome the coming invasion.

These members of the ruling class see the approaching armada as expiation for the guilt they feel over being Westerners. The Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy has a great poem called “Waiting For The Barbarians,” in which he portrays the rich, decadent people of an exhausted kingdom eagerly anticipating the arrival of a barbarian horde as “a kind of solution.” A solution to what? To cultural exhaustion? To political stalemate? To the challenge of living without meaning? All of these, one surmises.

In the novel, Raspail denounces the fictional pope, a South American (Brazil) who sells all the Vatican’s treasures to give to the world’s poor, and who urges Europe to fling its doors open wide to the migrants. In real life, Pope Francis made his first trip as pope a short voyage to Lampedusa, where he tut-tutted Europeans for not being more welcoming. Said Francis, “We have lost a sense of brotherly responsibility.”

You might wonder: what about a sense of brotherly responsibility to Italians and other Europeans who were not consulted about whether or not to take in hundreds of thousands of migrants who are not fleeing war, but who seek better material conditions? Where is the pope’s sense of solidarity with Europeans whose streets and social services are overrun with jobless migrants? He has none—and that is Raspail’s point about the sentimental humanitarianism of European liberal elites. They are happy to signal their own immense virtue, heedless of the cost to their own societies, now and in the future.

In the United States, meanwhile, an unusual sight appeared recently in New York City: a liberal politician lamenting the cost of progressive virtue. Eric Adams, the city’s Democratic mayor, was once an avid welcomer of migrants, legal and otherwise. He often paraded his own high-mindedness about migration, touting New York’s self-awarded status as a “sanctuary city”—a term that means city officials will refuse to cooperate with the federal government to enforce immigration law. Nearly two years ago, candidate Adams tweeted:

“We should protect our immigrants. Period. Yes, New York City will remain a sanctuary city under an Adams administration.”

How times change. Governors in southern border states like Texas, fed up with liberal politicians who could afford to be generous in their sentiments because they did not have to deal with mass migration, began shipping new illegal migrants north to places like New York City. Now, the Big Apple sanctuary takes in 10,000 migrants per month, and has no idea what to do with them. In a town hall meeting earlier this month, Adams warned that the cost of managing the migrant influx will require cutting services for every other New Yorker.

“The city we knew, we are about to lose,” he said. “This issue will destroy New York City.”

It’s surprising that a liberal politician, or a liberal anybody, admits this. Some years back, I was on the editorial board at The Dallas Morning News. All of us were middle-class journalists—white, black, and Latino—and the paper had a broadly pro-immigration policy, in line with its pro-business and socially liberal views. What struck me as a newcomer to Texas was how none of us on the board had to live with the unpleasant consequences of mass illegal migration, which was a huge issue in Texas.

Our kids went either to private schools or to public schools in areas where migrants could not afford to live. We had good private insurance, and so did not have to use the public hospital, where poor and working-class Texans had to go, and which were clogged with illegal migrants needing care. Our neighborhoods may have been racially diverse, but had no illegal migrants living twenty to a household in rental housing, as poorer parts of the city did.

And so, we were able to enjoy the good parts of mass migration – better ethnic restaurants, cheaper lawn care – while remaining insulated from the heavy price paid by our fellow Texans who lacked our economic privilege. We were also able to exercise the virtues of hospitality and tolerance in the policies we advocated, and above all, to carry out the most sacred act of the liberal conscience: to celebrate diversity.

To this day, the U.S.-Mexico border is out of control, just as the Mediterranean borders of the European Union are. In Britain, despite Brexit, and despite thirteen years of Conservative government, mass migration is as high as ever. There is no real political will to deal with the problem, even though voters repeatedly say they are tired of it.

The problem is that nobody in Europe (or America) wants to treat the invasion like a real invasion. Meaning, nobody wants to fire on unarmed migrants, or order a gunboat to sink an overloaded dinghy full of Africans. What if that is the only thing that will stop the migrant waves, though?

In 2022, the Hungarian historian László Bernát Veszprémy published a sobering essay in The American Conservative, warning that the coming tsunami of migration out of Africa in this century will drive European politics very far to the right, such that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, considered by establishment Europeans as ‘far right,’ may be remembered fondly as an immigration liberal. He wrote, with reference at the end to the 2019 New Zealand mosque shootings:

Europe’s borders are slowly becoming a zone besieged by illegal immigrants from all directions. How long will European politicians be able to hold back the far right? By far right, I do not mean people who want to defend their homeland and their borders, but people who want to shoot with live ammunition people who look different, and whose coming to power can only bring suffering to all the people of Europe, both Christians and Muslims. They will not be the far right of the Budapest kind, but of the Christchurch kind.

This is the malign spirit in which the protagonist of The Camp of the Saints confronts the migrant hordes. It is a terrible scene of bloodshed and hatred, one that no one should want to see in Europe, ever. Yet you can’t escape the terribly inconvenient truth: if these illegal migrants had weapons, their hostile trespass onto the sovereign lands of others would be unambiguously seen as an act of war. 

The day may well be coming, and sooner than we think, when Europeans, having wearied of pity for their conquerors and no longer bound by the forgotten creeds of their ancestral religion, regard this as a distinction without a difference.