Posted on July 13, 2023

Illegal Immigration and Western Spiritual Sickness

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, July 10, 2023

The usual suspects have weighed in on recent belated efforts to enforce U.S. immigration laws.

Our now bankrupt media, the corrupt government of Mexico, and the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion apparat have damned a series of laws recently passed by the Florida legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that enforce existing federal immigration laws.

Such critics seem oblivious to the current violence that is paralyzing Europe in general, and in particular France—as if such European chaos offers no lessons for the U.S. or any other salad-bowl, open-borders Western nation.

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We are beginning to see something similar now coming to a head in Western European countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Sweden in particular, but also Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Greece. While European illegal immigration differs from the American brand, the same parameters of Western spiritual bankruptcy persist.

Mexico and its citizens accept that millions in Mexico prefer to live in the United States even though America is premised on principles antithetical to Mexico.

They also assume that by smearing the American hosts as racists, xenophobes and nativists, they will achieve greater concessions.

So too millions of North Africans, Middle Easterners and sub-Saharan Africans flee without legal sanction to Europe.

The premise shared by such illegal immigrants, their host country, and their home governments is that literally hundreds of millions of people would prefer to move to Europe—and abandon their own homes, extended families, and familiar landscapes to enter a completely alien and antithetical culture.

Such illegal aliens, like those who enter the U.S., likewise assume they can lodge preemptive indictments of their hosts as racists, nativists and xenophobes—largely on the brief that after leaving their own poorer and often most failed states, they did not magically obtain near parity soon enough after arrival.

Illegal aliens in Europe further feel they can enter a mutually beneficial relationship with Western Leftists. The Left will normalize and amnesty their illegality. It will claim their own governments and people are racists for looking askance at illegal immigration. And it then will leverage illegal aliens to form a large new demographic bloc that will support leftist causes, either in the street, or legally through acquisitions of amnesty, green cards, and eventually citizenship.

In other words, the Left increasingly has realized in both Europe and North America that its policies on immigration, identity politics, climate change and fossil fuels, crime and the economy are nihilist.

Their agendas eventually transform their large cities into precivilizational enclaves. And they are losing popular support. Thus the international Western Left needs both new voters and new dependents to be whipped up to serve as blameless victims of their conservative enemies.

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One could argue over whether 18th and 19th-century Western imperialism and colonization of Asian, African, and New World landscapes proved solely lethal and toxic or sometimes beneficial to native peoples or both.

And further few can agree whether colonization proved in the long run and in a cost-to-benefit analysis, even predictably profitable for European interlopers, colonists and imperialists.

Yet whatever one’s take on past European colonization beyond the borders of Europe, what is indisputable is that most colonized people eventually rose up and threw out colonials—whether by violence in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia or Vietnam, or transitionally and over time in India, Libya or Egypt.

Apparently, sinful Westerners were once spit out abroad, but as penance now are to be hosts to millions from those lands they fled.

But on what logic or premises exactly?

Did the former victims of colonialism announce, “We hated you and yours so much in our country that we are now risking our lives to join you in yours?”

Or was the subtext the placard slogan used by demonstrators on the closure of the once huge American base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, “Yanquis, go home!—and take me with you?”

In surreal terms, the old anti-colonialist mantras of the 1950s and 1960s of “our country for ourselves” has now become something like, “Keep out of our country, but don’t keep us out of yours.”

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The non-West sees a richer, more leisured, and more relativist West as something akin to H.G. Wells’s posthuman Elois—strangely effete creatures who coast on the fumes of a distant past that once bequeathed to them their present wealth and leisure. Yet these perceived unworthy inheritors of the work of prior generations are seen as hardly deserving of respect. Indeed, they rightfully earn from illegal immigrants even greater contempt for not defending what they enjoy.

Thus, millions with impunity swarm American and European borders. Many are defiant in smearing their would-be hosts as racists or worse for daring to enforce the sort of immigration laws taken for granted in their own homelands.

In Paris, they riot and burn on the assumption that the soft West deserves what is dished out. The host apparently is seen as some sort of sick masochist who enjoys being told how sinful the West was and is—and how deserving it is of a comeuppance of riot, arson, mayhem and violence.

If that logic seems preposterous, then why does the violence periodically break out to such devastating effect? Exploitation? Racism? Yet, in Europe there is less of both than in his prior homeland, evident by the vote of his own two feet.

The Ethiopian in Italy, or the Algerian in France apparently sees his European host also as a sheep that merely bays when given a needed periodic sheering—albeit with the care of the sheerer to clip away at, but not extinguish, his bountiful host.

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His host is culpable as well. The West demands little of the illegal entrant, whether defined as obedience to laws, or to melt into and absorb the culture that he has voted for with his feet. The Westerner’s greatest fear is not even hostile, violent, and unassimilated illegal aliens, but the perception that such a community judges the Westerner as illiberal.

Instead, the post-civilizational Westerner has lost all confidence in his homeland, his traditions, his values, and his very future, to the point that he is well beyond the inability of defending his civilization—given that he no longer even knows how to define it.