By Paul Nachman
07/17/2018
In April, Senator Tom Cotton [R-Arkansas], on the occasion of receiving the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award, spoke at the institute’s annual Churchill Dinner. Cotton’s keynote address, "The Citizen Statesman," is striking both to read and view, focusing heavily on immigration and on what we at VDARE.com call "The National Question."
Similarly, in June and July, Hillsdale College scholar Michael Anton (whose September 5, 2016 piece The Flight 93 Election [in Claremont Review of Books Digital] laid out, unforgettably, what was at stake for American civilization that November) published two articles — each with a take-no-prisoners title — that cover the waterfront, immigration-wise. They are:
Matching Anton’s blunt writing, PJ Media commentator (and Time magazine alum) Michael Walsh has stepped up twice recently with frankly-expressed ruminations about immigration and the future of Western civilization:
Those items — Cotton’s speech and the four articles by Anton and Walsh — merit fulsome unpacking here at VDARE.com. But for now, this suggestion will have to do: Go read them all!
Despite the excellence of their output, those three writers are probably nonentities who write for podunk publications (excepting Anton’s piece in the WaPo) according to members of our chattering classes.
However, the chatterers might give pause when they see someone like British-born historian Niall Ferguson outputting similarly blunt statements about immigration and the West. Ferguson — currently a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and having a welter of current or prior appointments at Harvard, NYU, the London School of Economics, Cambridge, and Oxford — had a brief piece in the June 17, 2018 Sunday Times of London, The EU melting pot is melting down [also available at Ferguson’s own website] containing several outbreaks of bluntness.
Here’s one of them, from near the conclusion of Ferguson’s article:
In his upcoming book on US immigration, my brilliant friend Reihan Salam — himself the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — makes a bold argument: America must either restrict immigration or risk civil war as rising inequality and racial tension combine.
Wow! "Civil war," linked to "racial tension." It’s not a new idea here at VDARE.com, but it might well startle members of what Mark Steyn calls "America’s depraved political class."
Earlier in Ferguson’s article, he wrote:
Finally, there is a practical problem. Europe’s southern border is almost impossible to defend against flotillas of migrants, unless Europe’s leaders are prepared to let many people drown.
Well, yes. It’s obviously a "Camp of the Saints"-style existential question for Europe: What to do if the Third World organizes to overrun the West?
As it happens, there’s an interesting current example of one part of the Third World’s reaction to being overrun by another part. From the Associated Press last weekend:
Algeria’s government has resumed expelling migrants into the Sahara Desert to die, leaving 391 people to wander through some of the world’s most hostile terrain in the middle of summer, a U.N. migration official said Saturday.
The migrants, from 16 different countries, were abandoned at the border with Niger, according to a tweet from Giuseppe Loprete, the head of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration in Niger.
The Associated Press reported last month that Algeria has left more than 13,000 migrants in the desert of Niger and Mali since May 2017, forcing them to walk or die under searing heat.
[Deadly Algerian migrant expulsions resume in desert, UN says, by Lori Hinnant, Houston Chronicle, July 14, 2018]
Parting thought: Not every problem has a solution that uncomprehending humans will find palatable. Or as this nearly-70-years-old environmentalist sees it: Nature bats last.
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