In re the migrant wave... - Re-published 9 January 2016

 

Re-published in light of ongoing events in Germany and the apprehension of two Iraqis in Texas who had passed the immigrant vetting that was promised and who are accused of wishing to re-export themselves to the jihad in the ME.  pl

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"Indeed, I would assign to Washington most of the blame for what is happening right now. Since folks inside the beltway are particularly given to making judgements based on numerical data they might be interested in the toll exacted through America’s global war on terror. By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.

There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.

The number of internally displaced within each country is roughly double the number of those who have actually fled and are seeking to resettle outside their homelands. Many of the latter have wound up in temporary camps run by the United Nations while others are paying criminals to transport them into Europe.

Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war..."  Giraldi

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Phil Geraldi is a close friend.  I have great appreciation and respect for the Christian charity that permeates his cited article.  I share his remorse and regret for the horrors that the United States has inflicted on the Islamic World although both he and I have resisted the worst expressions of the foolishness that has been US policy in the last fifteen years.

Nevertheless, I must point to the fact that the current  migrants to Western Europe are merely the "bow wave" of what IMO is a volkervanderung that will consist of many, many more people moving generally from East to West.  There are millions of people in the MENA and Central Asia regions who would like to move to Western Europe or North America.  Some of them want to get themselves and their families out from under the bombing and out of the general mayhem, but, IMO an even stronger "draw" is the high standard of living to be found in the destinations of choice.  It is now clear to those waiting in the Islamic World that the West does not have the will to resist this mass migration, a period of movement of the peoples that may well permanently and massively alter the cultures of the Western European countries.  Is the United States responsible for triggering the avalanche of migration that is just starting?  Yes, we are responsible, but is the Western European region really capable of assimilating the millions who will be on the move toward Germany, France, etc.?  The countries of Western Europe are more or less ethnically and culturally uniform in their ways of life.  Americans have a hard time understanding that truth.  The US is not and has never  really been an ethnic "nation."  The US was built and continues to be built in a process of never ending immigration that has changed the nature of the country in every generation.   For most Americans there exists a basic assumption that immigrants can be assimilated and will become integrated in a society changed by their presence. 

Europe is not really like that.  France is a good example.   There is an element in French society, descended from colonial subjects who were loyal to the metropole in Algeria and elsewhere and who voluntarily moved to France proper as part of the process of de-colonialization.  These people are truly French.  They are to be found throughout French society and government.  But, there also many, many people who have moved to France from the francophone maghreb and West Africa who have no interest in becoming culturally French.  Their goal is cultural autonomy in separate enclaves.  There are now so many examples of this mentality and actions based on it that I will not bother to present such examples.

The question must be asked.  Will the Germans accept having their way of life changed by the millions who undoubtedly will begin to move toward Germany?  How many Muslim migrants will Germany successfully absorb?

The present wave of migrants contains some Christians.  These are usually more Western in culture and easier to absorb.  Just from looking at them in TV reporting it is easy to see that many of the present migrants are somewhat westernized and often are educated people.  Those who come after them will be less and less like that.  pl  

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-refugee-crisis-made-in-america/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period

Comments

[Kim Sky]

I agree, this is just the tip of the iceberg, the prices that these people have paid to arrive in Europe imply mostly middle class, more and more will come. And photos of so many of the places they're being held look as if they're straight from a science fiction film - Children of Men - comes to mind.

Germany is already back-tracking, exiling many to Kosovo of all places.

This will be the time that the truly unimaginable handling of migrants will be put into place and used, here on out. Just like here, we have detention centers holding only women and children -- all run by corporations that want more prisoners.

We all know that massive migrations due to simple poverty, climate change etc. are coming (much less full on war). Tis a bleak, bleak glimpse into the future.

Am reading a book right now called, "The Right to Stay Home", by David Bacon -- a deep look at the forces motivating migrants from Mexico to flee here. And the insane conditions that a migrant faces in today's America - An eye opener.

[readerOfTeaLeaves]

Also agree, but with a few reservations:
(1) neoliberal economics is foundering and at risk of imploding; nevertheless, the use of debt as an instrument of power will continue
(2) people who have been taught largely by rote, or who have not mastered reading in their native language, will be far more difficult to assimilate. Presumably, that describes 'those who come after'. It is an exceedingly grim prospect.

[Amir]

The 1st Iraq war (Saddam's invasion of Iran 1970-88) was an international conflicts between standing armies. The civilians were relatively spared, judging by the casualties. There is a huge Iranian and Iraqi diaspora but this trickled out over a decade and spread it relatively affluent refugees over Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand silently as the concentration was lower. As CPL had mentioned the first waves are affluent and get absorbed relatively easily.
There is also a very large Iranian population in California that fled the effects of the Iranian revolution and was later somewhat augmented by war refugees in the 80s.

The 2d (Saddam's Invasion of Kuwait 1992) Iraqi war was short lived and the country was quarantined afterwards prohibiting any traveling or exchange of goods and services through normal channels. The Iraqi refugee population was mostly hosted in the neighboring countries or internally in the "no-fly-zones".

The 3rd (Bush's illegal invasion) Iraqi war is still ongoing and the refugee crisis has been present for the past 15 years but some might have not noticed it. The Iraqis could probably not get to EU or USA as easily due to post-911 restrictions.

In Europe they did not notice the massive Afghan immigration as most went to Pakistan (4.000.000) and Iran (3.000.000). There is a large and prosperous Afghan community in D.C. who arrived as Old Moneyed during the first wave.

I have no first hand information about Syria but the refugee crisis in this conflict might be best be seen as a continuum of the population transfers that were unleashed by Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2004. The classical "Divide et Impera" approach, practiced by likes of David Petraeus, were successful due to presence of ample pre-existing inter-communal hatred. It started in and around Bagdad and spread out like an oil drop over the rest of the M.E. in the course of the decade.

In retrospect, what you now see are the results of the "Forty Years War" that was started when Soviets and US empires decided to fight it out in the Middle-East. There are actually lots of parallels with US's East Asia adventure after the WWII.

DAESH is now the culmination (touching wood as the last word has not yet been written about this) of this ongoing horror show and should be considered as heirs to the Khmer Rouge ideology.

[Amir]

Why would one see those immigrants as "Christians" instead of as members of their sects within Christianity, namely identifying them as Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox?

Would their intra-religious conflicts since Schism until 20th century be similar to today's M.E. conflicts exacerbated by an additional inter-religious diminution of conflict between Militant Evangelicalism, Ultra-Zionism and Muslim Fundamentalism?

[Amir]

Exactly. The Belgian government created the "Muslim Executive" which was to be funded though them. In Dutch they say "Wiens brood men eet diens woord men spreekt" or "We spread the message of those that fund us".

Alas this was set up too late and the infiltration by KSA though their religiously funded front organizations was already active and fighting to take over the Executive.

The fact that KSA funds local mosques and/or pays of the salary of their official/unofficial imams is a fact that I can attest to in a couple local of instances in my Flemish university town.

[Ulenspiegel]

"Germany is already back-tracking, exiling many to Kosovo of all places."

Yes, but not only people from Kosovo, but from all save countries. The immigrants made the mistake and applied for political asylum.

The contradiction is, that we indeed need immigrants and but to a certain extend send these back who are more suitable for integration than the people from MENA.

[Tidewater]

Tidewater to Steve,

There has been massive migration in Pakistan. In 2007 Karachi was a city of 14.5 million and by 2013 it had grown to 23.5 million. Part of this increase has been due to the emigration of Pushtuns from the Khyber/FATA area and from Afghanistan since the 1980's. There are at least seven million Pushtuns in Karachi. Some critics accuse them of bringing in a Kalashnikov culture, drugs, etc. Many problems but the city is a powerhouse of human industry.

There are 50,000 registered Afghans in Karachi. Recently, after the attack by the Pakistani army on Miramshah, many more refugees left that area, North Waziristan, and they are probably not going back.

An example of how refugees from Afghanistan have affected American life would be the orphaned children educated in madrassas who became the Taliban. There are, or if not there anymore, which I doubt, there were enormous refugee camps along the Afghanistan border with Pakistan for decades. One way the Haqqani network became powerful was its ability to turn out suicide bombers from these Pushtun orphans of war.

In Balochistan there are at least two million Afghan refugees from the Kandahar area and points just north of the border. The Balochis want them gone because they don't want a larger population diluting their Sardars' authority and rackets.

Idea: wouldn't forty or fifty thousand highly educated Syrian Sunni refugees be very helpful in building the Gwadar region up? Many of them have the technical skills needed and the Balochis around Gwadar do not have the skills; though many of them are of the elite, they were given the wrong education. The Chinese are going to put real money into this area, and interesting spinoffs could result, as,for example, the transportation of fresh fish brought in by the successful Makran coastal fishing fleets to Karachi markets by way of refrigerated trucks running along the new coastal highway. The locals and the newcomers will all benefit.

There is one thing unusual about Syria. According to the PNAS (March 17,2015): "There is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007-2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict."

Looks like they gave up.

[Ulenspiegel]

Tidewater wrote:"I could not believe my eyes when I read in the 'Guardian' a day or so ago the remarks by the German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel that Germany could take 500,000 refugees yearly for the indefinite future."

Maybe the situation becomes a little bit clearer if you work with hard data. Personally, I do not like Gabriel, however, he is IMHO in this case not wrong, at least if you work (like me) with the premise that a stagnating or slightly increasing population is good for Germany in the next 15 years.

Germany has an annual mortality surplus in the 150.000 range, this will increase in the next decade even with slightly higher birth rates. Therefore, Germany needs per year at least 200.000 net immigrants to have an stable but still aging population.

At the moment more than 200.000 worker retire per year and in the last years Germany was able to increase the workforce by around 250.000 per year (only 70.000 of these new regular jobs could be filled with German unemployed people). Hence, Germany can economically integrate further 100.000 workers even in a pessimistic scenario, i.e. overall a demand of 300.000, which can only be covered by net immigration.

These additional 300.000 workers per year mean with not working family members indeed around 500.000 net immigrants.

A better starting point for a discussion would IMHO be to ask whether Germany should allow a high immigration from MENA. When we check the performance of various nationalities to integrate in the German society my preferences would clearly be a very high share from Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, India, Iran and China, preferably in numbers less than 100.000 per yer to prevent the formation of social ghettos or more pc parallel societies.

[ISL]

Dear Colonel,

The fact that many of these refugees were safe in Turkey (and other, not-yet-collapsing ME states) but are migrating north strongly supports your contention regarding the "draw." Of course, Turkey as a NATO member and eternal EU candidate could do a better job keeping the refugees from moving on; however, Turkey seems not to be playing ball by European or US rules, doesn't care, and of course suffers no downside.

In any case, this has no effect on the larger picture you outline, which, IMO, raises the question: Will Europe collapse before the tidal wave arrives (this is a trickle) or during?

Either strong, likely non-democratic, govt's will remove the draw amid the rupturing of the European project - Marie Le Pen, for example, or massive ethnic cleansing is likely. (You nailed it Tyler).

Interestingly, Russia Today reveals greater complexity with large grassroots unwelcome also being expressed (ignored in the single-sided view of western media of welcoming by politico's and the volk)

Ironically, collapse sooner would prevent more bloodshed later, and the "shut up and feel volk" are IMO digging the shallow grave for the EU dream. Afterwards, given the goodwill most EU nations have created with others in the EU (snark alert)- a resumption of normal European history (aka war) almost seems inevitable. The Russian linkage to China could keep them out.

Followon question: Would removing the pressure relief of migration in the ME and african societies lead to stability or greater instability? Certainly, migration of Italian radicals and starving peasants to the US in the early 1900s maintained an ossified social structure.

[ISL]

Charly, As my Italian wife likes to note, the french language and culture only recently split from its ROMANce origins. French-Italy immigration is moving from your aunts house to your uncle's.

I would maintain that the cultural gulf between Marseille (where most of those immigrants are) and Paris is vaster by far than between Torino and Marseille.

[KenF]

Steve Jobs' father was a Syrian Muslim. We can hope the Syrian diaspora might end up, to paraphrase Jobs, "making a dent in the European world" (from innovative ideas not bombs). Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, et al., can assimilate to Western culture. Africans not so much.

As I commute into work each morning on the D.C. Metro, and I see the new America, with vastly disparate cultures shouting into their cell phones in Somali, Urdu, Chinese, Arabic, Tagalog, Spanish, Burmese, oblivious to others around them, while the lone middle-aged white guy who gets a call tells the caller he in on the Metro and can't talk, I wonder how things will go down once the wild-ass prosperity ends. And unless the fundamental laws of economics have been suspended, it will. Maybe hard times will bring these self-interested disparate cultures together, like a federal government diversity poster. We can only hope.

[William R. Cumming]

One sentence extract from you interesting comment:
"In any case, this has no effect on the larger picture you outline, which, IMO, raises the question: Will Europe collapse before the tidal wave arrives (this is a trickle) or during?"

Great question! IMO Western Civ may have collapsed at the Battle of the Somme [1916] but that is too shorthand a response to your question.

The US has again through its post WWII FP assisted in the collapse of Europe and West Civ. It has done this in many ways but principally IMO by not terminating the US NATO role in the early 90's.

[William R. Cumming]

This is a terrific comment IMO! The PETROCRACY Governments in MENA don't understand that you cannot drink oil!

[William R. Cumming]

Great comment IMO! Demographics rules the MENA and EU.

[William R. Cumming]

Perhaps more simply you could just have said that most demographic predictions are wrong.

After all a world population of about 18,000 400,000 years ago now looks like it might reach 9 billion by end of this century.

[William R. Cumming]

IMO many Kurds finally understand that Kurdistan will not become a nation-state and that system of nation-states now rapidly collapsing due to Globalization of finance and communications.

[William R. Cumming]

AGREE! The real questions about MASS MIGRATION IMO have to do with whether a NATION-STATE system will continue [endure?]?

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks Amir for this insightful comment.

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks for insights in this brilliant comment.

[William R. Cumming]

IMO Western Civilization is tied to the World of Islam in many ways. Perhaps this migration and its progeny a final chapter?

If Cordoba a City of Light in the 10th Century who extinguished that CITY OF KIGHT?

[Balint Somkuti]

That is exactly why it is an intentional lie, to compare hungarians in 1956 to present migrants

[robt willmann]

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the Bush jr. administration created a tragic refugee problem, with a huge number refugees inside Iraq itself and many who fled going outside of Iraq. I seem to remember reading a figure like four-plus million, divided between those who became refugees in their own country, Iraq, and those who went elsewhere.

I think some refugees from the 2003 invasion of Iraq went to Syria, but I do not know of any estimates of the number. I do recall reading that they were having a difficult time, which is of course common for refugees fleeing violence.

So a question -- not addressed by the propagandists disguised as media -- is, what has happened to the Iraqi refugees in Syria since the U.S., et. al., have promoted violence, property destruction, and bloodshed in Syria to try to overthrow the government there?

[jld]

Italians, Portuguese and Poles were nearly all Catholics which was (is?) also the majority religion in France so your point is moot.

[Haralambos]

one attempt at some background, robt: here are a few links with some background to the refugee situation. This is a timeline for Syrian refugees. It goes up to lte 2014: http://syrianrefugees.eu/?page_id=163

This covers refugees of Iraq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_Iraq

This is a piece today on Greece this year: http://www.ekathimerini.com/201416/article/ekathimerini/news/iom-doubles-estimate-of-syrian-migrants-to-greece-in-2015

Here is the piece from today on arrivals in Athens from Lesvos: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/10/4500-migrants-and-refugees-to-arrive-in-piraeus-by-thursday-evening/

These numbers lead me to believe that the situation here in the EU is much worse than the politicians are admitting.

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Tyler and/or all,

You might find this post over at James Kunstler's blog and the comments which follow it to be interesting. The post is entitled "There Goes Europe". The comment section is a real free for all, and PC is not a prerequisite for participation; i.e., no pursed lips and time in the penalty box for thoughtcrime, just views, counterviews. What your read is on S/N ratio is up to you. You might find poster Janos Skorenzy's POV interesting. Certainly stirs up the commentariat.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/there-goes-europe/