‘The Strange Death Of Europe’ Says Europe’s Decline Is A Choice
by Michael Rosen, The Federalist:
According to the European Commission’s official compendium of migration statistics, as of January 1, 2016, more than 35 million residents of the two-dozen-plus countries constituting the European Union were born outside of the EU. These foreign-born residents composed more than 8 percent of the populations of Germany, Britain, Spain, France, and the Netherlands, and nearly 12 percent of the populations of Northern European countries like Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia.
As Douglas Murray demonstrates in his startling, well-argued polemic, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, those numbers continue to swell. The explosion of humanitarian crises in the Levant and Central Asia, along with the already disproportionate migration to the continent from Islamic countries, threatens to disfigure European states and the Western values to which they’re ostensibly devoted.
Murray begins on a bold enough note: “Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.” Well, then. To clear the underbrush for this trenchant thesis, Murray takes a hatchet to the flawed justifications Europeans have posited for indulging immigration, such as goosing the economic engine, enhancing cultural diversity, and revitalizing an aging population.
In fact, he argues, “the economic benefits of immigration accrue almost solely to the migrant,” the problems presented by incomplete integration dwarf the benefits of diversity, and, far from importing young people, European governments should first “work out whether there are policies that could encourage more procreation among their existing populations.”
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