Europe Under Siege
3rd August 2015
Another 1,800 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean by the Italian coast guard over the weekend, bringing the number of migrants received by Italy to some 90,000 so far this year (it handled 170,000 for the whole of last year). As Italy still hasn’t been able to get Europe to implement fully a redistribution plan, both the situation there for migrants and the financial strain on Italians continue to worsen.
Meanwhile, with or without permission, many of the migrants keep making their own way to the more economically vibrant north. This in turn creates the kind of dysfunctional political dynamic on display between France and England in recent days, where the migrant crisis festering in Calais has seen as many as 5,000 migrants each day for the last six days try to force their way across the Eurotunnel by hiding in trucks and boarding trains. Eurotunnel authorities warned over the weekend that increased security at Calais, promised by both French and British ministers, would only displace the problem to other, less well-guarded ports. “There are smaller ports in Belgium such as Ostend and in France such as Dieppe, Le Havre and Cherbourg, which are not as secure as Calais. The migrants are desperate. They are likely to look elsewhere.”
The would-be migrants risking their lives to sneak from France to Britain show many uncomfortable truths. First, they are indeed migrants and not, as European rhetoric often has it, refugees. The movement is driven not by acute dangers of a war or natural disaster, but by global inequality; people born in some countries are willing to chance everything to get to a place where, even as illegals suffering every kind of discrimination, they can enjoy much better lives than would be possible at home.
One of the classic tropes of science fiction is the nuclear war alert where the people who thought ahead and built/stocked a bomb shelter are besieged by neighbors who now demand entrance and safety — whereas of course there is neither room nor supplies for all those people.
This is the situation that Europe — and soon America — will face. I don’t have any faith that the governments involved will be able to face the pressure of their own bleeding-heart ideology; so it will come down to where the trigger point is for the populace involved. And that point will come, as predicted by Enoch Powell his famous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968.