Europe's Last Gasp, Is America Far Behind?

Last Days of Europe: Immigration At the Root of Europe's Problems

Can uncontrolled immigration kill a continent? According to Walter Laqueur, it already has. Laqueur, an historian who's spent a lifetime moving between America and Europe, is a scholar and public intellectual of international stature. So it's news when the latest book from so knowledgeable and unimpeachable a friend of Europe echoes and extends the themes of a pugnacious series of American tracts on European decline. Whether European intellectuals will be able to dismiss Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent, just as they've dismissed so many other such books, is an open question. (It's tough to discount a book endorsed by Henry Kissinger and Niall Ferguson.) What's certain is that, in the midst of our own immigration debate, Americans cannot afford to ignore The Last Days of Europe.

Immigration Disaster

In combination with Europe's demographic decline and guilt-laden multiculturalism, says Laqueur, unchecked immigration has created a massive and growing population of unassimilated Muslims, hostile to their own countries and determined to transform Europe beyond all recognition, through a combination of violent and non-violent means. "Why had the European countries brought these [Islamist] attacks upon themselves?" asks Laqueur. "Above all," he says, "it was naïveté that had made possible the indiscriminate immigration of earlier decades."

In his concluding reflection on what went wrong for Europe, Laqueur singles out immigration as first among causal equals: "...uncontrolled immigration was not the only reason for the decline of Europe. But taken together with the continent's other misfortunes, it led to a profound crisis; a miracle might be needed to extract Europe from these predicaments. more

The immigration debate is raging right now in the USA. I haven't commented too much on it. My solution: deport all illegals and double legal immigration. Create a great influx of people from a variety of nations such that learning English will be an imperative. What else can a Kenyan, a Swede, a Thai and a Bolivian speak when forced to live together? Also mandatory: a moratorium on Mexicans and Canadians, they're already over-represented. It's also somewhat dangerous to import huge amounts of neighbors with dubious loyalties.