Thomas Sowell on the Perils of Mass Migration

Bill Muehlenberg recently posted at his site some thoughts — his own and those of the economist Thomas Sowell — on immigration. They are worth disseminating more widely.

Thomas Sowell on the good and bad of international migration:

In the West much is said about immigration, with most governments singing the praises of mass migration and the supposed great good of flooding a host culture with people from any and every culture. The assumption is that such an influx of migrants – including from developing nations – can only be a net plus with an overwhelmingly positive outcome for the West.

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While the left thinks all migrants are good migrants and it does not matter how they arrive, and with no questions asked, most ordinary people know this is madness. A normal homeowner wants to make sure his family is safe, so he carefully monitors and regulates who can enter.

As Senator John N. Kennedy (R – Louisiana) put it: “Most Americans lock their front door at night. They don’t do that because they hate everybody on the outside. They lock their front door at night because they love the people on the inside, and they wanna know who’s going in and out of their home.”…

Migrants differ not only in their respective points of origin and destination, and in the skills they bring, they differ also in their reasons for migrating and in such demographic characteristics as age distribution. And sex ratios. Some groups acquire the culture of new lands rapidly, while others cling to their ancestral ways for generations or, in some cases, centuries…. (pp. 2-3)

And some migrants arrive with attitudes that make it impossible for them to assimilate. Muslims are the chief example of this. The Qur’an tells them that they, the Muslims, are “the best of peoples,” while the non-Muslims among whom they now live are “the most vile of created beings.” Given that, why would Muslims want to become part of a society created by the “most vile of created beings”? And Muslims know further that, as Muhammad famously declared, “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.” That belief bodes ill for assimilation.

Sowell might have mentioned the Muslim grooming gangs in the UK, whose victims were girls from vulnerable backgrounds who were seduced, raped, in some cases hooked on drugs, and passed around like confetti for the sexual pleasure of dozens, or in some cases hundreds of Muslims. For a long time, the police did little to stop the malefactors, so terrified were they of being accused of “racism” and “Islamophobia.” Tens of thousands of white English girls had their lives ruined as a result.

Thomas Sowell, going strong at 95, tells us some home truths about immigration: not all migrant groups are the same; Muslims have been unable and unwilling to assimilate into the European countries; their presence undermines social cohesion; the millions of Muslims now living in Europe have made life more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for the indigenous non-Muslims than would be the case without those millions of Muslim migrants. America must learn from Europe’s unhappy experience with mass migration by Muslims, and enforce a restrictive policy based on that monitory lesson.

There is now a popular uprising in Europe, a demand that the European Union call a halt to “non-Western migration.” The European Commission has now become an enemy of Europe. It has refused to register the “Save Europe Act,” which is an attempt, supported so far by 580,000 citizens of Europe, to end migration from “non-Western countries” — which is meant, everyone understands, to prevent more Muslims from entering Europe. The bureaucrats in Brussels have rejected the effort. They claim that such a policy would constitute discrimination based on “race” or “ethnicity.” They are wrong. Islam is not a race, nor an ethnicity, but an ideology inimical to Western values. Now, as one of the organizers of this effort, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, has made clear, they will continue to raise hell — “see you in court” — with ever-swelling numbers of signatories to their petition. Europeans want to preserve Europe from those who would transform it. What is wrong with that? For European bureaucrats, everything. They would do well to heed the wise and well-considered warnings of Thomas Sowell. But there is no chance that they will do so.