By Michael Barone
Friday, September 18, 2015
Human beings are
hard-wired to protect young children. That’s the easiest explanation of the
rush of Europeans — especially, but not only, elites — to welcome huge numbers
of refugees after publication of the picture of a dead three-year-old boy on a
Turkish beach.
In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would
take in 800,000 as refugees. That’s 1 percent of Germany’s population. The
proportionate equivalent in the United States would be 3 million — three times
the level of legal immigration.
But within days Germany was barring migrants at the
Austrian border, and Hungary finished a twelve-foot fence blocking migrants
from Syria. Slovakia and the Netherlands imposed border controls. Sympathy
turned to caution and fear.
The reason is obvious: Europe faces a flood of migrants
far beyond its capacity to absorb. Some 4 million people have fled Syria’s
civil war, and 10 million have been displaced. Thousands have been ferried
across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas by smugglers. Hundreds have died in
transit.
Most of the would-be migrants are young men, seeking
economic gain rather than political refuge. Most are Muslim, with far different
cultural attitudes from Europeans. Some — no one knows how many — are
undoubtedly terrorists or susceptible to terrorism.
Some Europeans congratulated themselves on their
open-handed approach. Some Americans reacted similarly, remembering the words
of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your
tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched
refuse of your teeming shore.”
But that’s a misleading comparison. The very poorest
seldom migrate, because they can’t afford it or, as in Syria today, can’t get
away. And the huge flow of immigration to America from the opening of Ellis
Island in 1892 to World War I — triple, as a percentage of population, the
1982-2007 surge — was not of the poor with economic motives.
Most Ellis Island–era immigrants came from the
multiethnic Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, where they were
second-class citizens — Jews, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats —
in an age of surging nationalism.
America’s tradition of civic equality beckoned. Here,
they believed, they would be equals with everyone else. They came not to oppose
American culture but to partake of it. American elites from Theodore Roosevelt
to Henry Ford endorsed this idea of common citizenship and pushed successfully
for assimilation in schools and workplaces.
American elites today are less certain of the worthiness of
our national culture and have retarded assimilation of immigrants. European
elites are worse, laden with guilt of past sins exaggerated (imperialism) and
all too real (Nazism). Germans in particular understand that their history
imposes special burdens on them, and they have tried to shoulder them
honorably.
That helps explain Merkel’s promise to accept 800,000
migrants. Unhappily, it doesn’t make it practical. Successful countries have
advanced not because they have fertile farmland or natural resources — some,
such as Switzerland and Singapore, have neither — but because of the strengths
of their national cultures. It’s sensible for them therefore to fashion their
immigration policies to build on those strengths.
The United States has fallen short of this with
immigration laws that have favored low-skill immigrants rather than the
high-skill people the nation always needs, and by incompetent enforcement of
those laws. Europe has fallen farther short by encouraging, through
“multiculturalism,” separate enclaves controlled by Muslim and other immigrants
who oppose national norms of tolerance and order.
And both the U.S. and Europe have allowed uprisings and
civil wars in Syria and Libya to go on, generating hundreds of thousands of
refugees and opening the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean. America and
Europe may be uninterested in foreign disorders, but foreign disorders are
interested in us.
It’s not surprising that Eastern European nations, with
their experience of culture-crushing Communism, resist elites’ calls to allow
thousands of aliens to live in their midst. It’s not surprising that other
European nations did not echo Merkel’s call to admit hundreds of thousands of
migrants — or that Germany has found it necessary to close its borders as well.
It’s natural for civilized people to offer help when they
see a drowned child wash up on a beach. But it’s not always wise to offer to
let anyone in who shows up. Such offers risk incentivizing literally millions
to break the law and to risk — and sometimes lose — their lives. That’s not
humanitarian.
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