The West must find the moral courage to say "no" to refugees

The West must find the moral courage to say "no" to refugees

“Is the German public aware of this?” Elon Musk posted on Friday morning. His Tweet highlighted a video from the Mediterranean Sea, appearing to show illegal immigrants getting rescued from a small craft by the masked and uniformed crew of a much-larger ship. 

“There are currently [eight] German NGO [non-government organization] ships in the Mediterranean Sea collecting illegal immigrants to be unloaded in Italy,” the commentary read. These NGOs are subsidized by the German government.”

“Yes,” the German Foreign Office responded an hour later. “And it’s called saving lives.” 

It may have seemed like an insignificant interaction–a tech CEO getting snarky and a ministry “clapping back”–but it’s an illustrative back-and-forth, highlighting the forces behind the mass migration crisis facing the West, from Texas’s Eagle Pass to Italy’s Lampedusa island. 

The first thing it sheds light on is how organised mass, illegal migration to the Europe and the United States is. The second is how most people have no idea it’s all organised in the first place. The third is that those behind these efforts shield themselves in a self-righteousness incredible to behold. And finally, that because of this righteousness, they hold the electorate – the angry and the ignorant alike – in total contempt and disregard.

A common narrative of illegal immigration is a hard-scrabble family striving fleeing war or persecution, boarding a ship filled with other families, and sailing in under the Statue of Liberty. This view of the past may have been rose-colored, but today it’s an utter fantasy, replaced by the reality of teeming caravans and ships filled with military-aged men, actively run (and often, trafficked) by brutal criminal gangs, cartels, and the bleeding-heart NGOs that provide a humanitarian shield for the whole operation.

Few people realize all this – and that’s intentional. When people, even powerful people like Musk, talk about it, they’re shunned. Commentators who speak to this reality are called conspiracists or racists. Those who warn about the consequences are called the same. It took years for reports of rising homicides or gang activity in Sweden, for instance, to break into the public consciousness. Those who were ostracized for warning it was happening receive no apology, the victims themselves receive little justice, and it all goes on as before.

There’s a reason Western elites feel so perfectly justified in allowing mass-illegal immigration, assisting it, and then silencing its critics: they hold an ironclad belief in their own moral superiority. Take the tweet from the German Foreign Office: if you don’t think the men in sprawling migrant camps should outnumber citizens on an Italian island, you’re on the side of more dead refugees.

This belief leads to all sorts of consequences for those on the wrong end of the elite’s debate. Punishments for politicians who fight to protect their country’s borders – from Italy’s Matteo Salvini to the Netherland’s Inger Stojberg to Donald Trump – begin with relentless attack, and end in prosecutions. The message is clear: Cross the system, pay the price.

The results are clear for all to see. The hundreds of thousands of expensive tents that popped up all over American cities over the past three years weren’t bought by the mentally ill drug addicts who live in them, but by activist groups. The crime waves sweeping American cities aren’t the results of changing weather patterns, but activists and politicians closing schools, decriminalizing law-breaking, ending bail, and handicapping police. The mass illegal migrations swamping Italy, overwhelming Texas and causing panic in England aren’t caused by gravity, but by virtually-open-borders policies facilitated by criminal gangs and lubricated by nonprofits.

It may be too late to end this, but we have to try. If we’re to stand a chance at stopping this mess, the first step to recovery will be admitting we have a problem, and that it isn’t entirely a natural one. Our decline is a choice.