IMMIGRATION thread

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Was meaning the advancement in logistics, technology, eduction, identity, and so on, would significantly decrease the risks. Mass movement in ancient times brought famine for example.

The population movements are larger and faster, though. The various Germanic tribes did flood over the borders en masse largely in a single year but it's likely the numbers in the hundreds of thousands over all, rather than the millions.

Today we have no leaders of Stilicho's calibre. Merkel is more in the vein of Honorious, able to turn any advantage into a handicap.

Aside from that, no historical lesson is exact but the WRE faced many of the problems we do today, wasteful and corrupt to-heavy state organisations, depleted and demoralised armed forces, monetary collapse, falling native populations and even adverse climate change.

As I have said before, the mistake our ancestors made was believing Rome could not fall. That's eerily similar to the EU mantra of "ever closer union", the assumption that history is on your side.

The good looking ones are Serbs.

I heard the good looking women were Persian

Syria doesn't have have enough people to send a million over for the next 100 years. I would think a lot of the Africans are not really eligible as they just come to become a famous football player.
Whether we can process that many people every year is a question of funding, but I'm sure they can all get a job here once our companies figure that they work for less money than Germans. But that is capitalism and the market will regulate itself and it's better for all of us.
(Also the British invented it )

You have just had a massive scandal where hundreds of women were sexually assaulted in public and the Police were powerless to stop it.

Syria can easily send you another million and so can North Africa, time to wake up and smell the coffee. This doesn't have to go on for a hundred years, in another three years you could have 4.5 million new immigrants who don't speak your language or share you ideals.

Lets suppose for a moment that, like Sweden, roughly 70% of them are men, who will mostly be men of fighting age. The entire Bundeswehr, including reserves, is only a around 210,000. If these people decide to riot en masse you'd potentially have to mobilise your entire armed forces alongside the police to stand up to them, assuming no more enter Germany, which they will.

Germany needs to recognise the scale of the problem now or reap the whirlwind.

[Montmorency]

I think you have underestimated Merkel, though of course if her gambles fail then things will get chaotic in Europe.

Days after returning from difficult negotiations over a third Greek debt bailout, Angela Merkel met a group of school children in the northern city of Rostock.

With the cameras rolling, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl named Reem Sahwil told Ms Merkel that she feared being sent back to a refugee camp in Lebanon if her family’s asylum application was rejected. “I don’t know what my future looks like as long as I don’t know if I can stay,” she told Ms Merkel in perfect German. “I’d like to go to college. That is really a . . . goal I’d like to achieve.”

Ms Merkel responded with a lesson in political realities. “We can’t just say, ‘You can all come. And all of you in Africa can come.’ We can’t manage that,” she said. Ms Sahwil broke down in tears. A video of the moment went viral, leaving an impression that the German chancellor could be cold, even mean.

Yet only a few weeks later, the woman who had failed to console one refugee was embracing hundreds of thousands.

My impression is that in 2015 Merkel understood that, as has been highlighted by the New Year's incidents, the German police and border guard are completely incapable of managing such throngs, so her options were to expend her political capital domestically and in Europe on shutting down the borders and concentrating the migrants already in the continent - making a fortress of the EU and damaging Germany's soft power in Europe when it has very little hard power - or to force the issue and bring things to a head, making it a problem that all Europe would have to confront but that could only be solved with German domination.

Of course, it's a tremendous gamble with repercussions far beyond German society, but basically it will be necessary for the EU states to accept Merkel's power play or try to deal on their own with a disintegrating political and economic framework. I understand that neither of these are preferable for many, but frankly it's good to see some proper leadership in the Western world again.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

See - that except tells me something very different.

She doesn't know there's a difference between a North African and a Levantine.

Notably, the report from the German authorities identified a majority of North Africans, not "North Africans and Arabs" as many news sources have been suggesting.

And who calls a 14 year old girl "Ms"?

I think the truth is that Merkel was simply unprepared for the influx and is unprepared to make hard choices. As you note, she is not ready to spend her personal political capital to protect even her own people until forced. Meanwhile, that unspent capital is depreciating as the Contient slides towards a real atrocity - Cologne has brought Germany many steps closer to a Pogrom against Arabs.

It will be a sad irony if a fear of repeating the past actually results in exactly that, repetition of pasts sins. Before you label me Melodramatic consider that a few weeks ago what happened on New Year's Eve was unthinkable.

[Montmorency]

I think the truth is that Merkel was simply unprepared for the influx and is unprepared to make hard choices.

Rather the opposite: Merkel understood that Germany and Europe were unprepared for the migrants unless they immediately somehow united to fund and enforce a Trumpian security regime around the entire Mediterranean underbelly, and she took a big risk by acknowledging it and moving events in a direction that would benefit Germany, or at least prove least harmful.

Remember that when you are facing millions of migrants - remember back to all your lessons from Medieval and ancient history - you either throw them back by the strength of your arms, or you let them pass.

consider that a few weeks ago what happened on New Year's Eve was unthinkable.

The event itself was trivial. What mattered (and still does) was the reaction.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Rather the opposite: Merkel understood that Germany and Europe were unprepared for the migrants unless they immediately somehow united to fund and enforce a Trumpian security regime around the entire Mediterranean underbelly, and she took a big risk by acknowledging it and moving events in a direction that would benefit Germany, or at least prove least harmful.

So she deliberately created the current situation and resulting abuses?

I don't understand what you're saying here.

That concerted joint action was necessary was as obvious as it was impossible.

Remember that when you are facing millions of migrants - remember back to all your lessons from Medieval and ancient history - you either throw them back by the strength of your arms, or you let them pass.

More properly, you throw them back or you submit to them. Peoples have never simple "passed through". Migration continues until the onward pressure abates - so if you "let the migrants pass" they stop and settle.

At that point you either subjugate them, integrate them or submit to them.

The event itself was trivial. What mattered (and still does) was the reaction.

Neither the assaults nor the abject failure of the German Police were trivial. I like to think of myself as a hard man but even I would say that several hundred women being assaulted in public is nothing but a national disgrace.

The reaction has been mostly apathy from the German Establishment, some talk of tightening Asylum rules but that's basically it - the German people are currently vacillating between committing an ethnic cleansing and adopting a battered wife attitude.

What we are seeing is the Liberal "heart" of the EU in France, Germany and Scandinavia swinging to the Right. What hasn't been picked up on yet is that, particularly in Germany, people are starting to move to the Right of the UK.

[Montmorency]

That concerted joint action was necessary was as obvious as it was impossible.

So she deliberately created the current situation and resulting abuses?

I don't understand what you're saying here.

I'm saying she saw the first so she took actions that would lead sooner rather than later to questions of regional policy to a head.

At that point you either subjugate them, integrate them or submit to them.

A view not held by most contemporary historians; what you call integration they consider mutual assimilation, since typically the major changes affected those at the top of the political structure most immediately and significantly. Strip it to the barest essentials and you just have the dichotomy I gave.

What we are seeing is the Liberal "heart" of the EU in France, Germany and Scandinavia swinging to the Right. What hasn't been picked up on yet is that, particularly in Germany, people are starting to move to the Right of the UK.

That is indeed one of the elements in the European challenge Merkel brings to the fore. If she succeeds, she can fracture or at least stabilize right-wing populism in Europe. If she fails then she opens yet another vulnerability in the system for them to leverage.


Note that this isn't to express utmost confidence in Merkel. Her trademark is in dealing decisively with 'fresh' political pressures with a payoff achieved in the short-term, say within one year at most. Looking at her record, there's no evidence in particular that she can manage a long-term investment with continuous and active (especially public) management. Notably, she has always struggled to align the various strands of policy issues into a coherent synthesis, though that is what she seems to be approaching now.

But whatever you think of her tack (sic), or of her Central-Europeanism, it is clear that something like her is what we have been asking for. How long have we been crying for want of strategic direction in Europe? A democratic society in disarray always calls for a quasi-autocratic visionary, the very thing it tends to fear most. If she does get this right, she could be as great as FDR, the strong hand sweeping away the burden of fear and despotism.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

If Merkel is our hope I think we're doomed - not least because if she manages to unite Europe it can only be by the use of hard economic power.

Oppression of subject peoples leads inevitably to systemic collapse of the state or war.

Democracy is our only hope for any kind of lasting peace.

Merkel is not Augustus, she can't manage despotism cloaked in popular democracy and she isn't brave enough to try. She might be egotistical enough though.