It remains a mystery how such a large and homogeneous group arrived in such great numbers so quickly, but there is no evidence that the Moroccan government was attempting to stage a mass entry as a spearhead and vanguard for propelling out of their own country a huge wave of refugees. It all appears to have been somewhat spontaneous and not so passionately undertaken, as in the many scenes of fierce resistance and mob violence that have occurred in border incidents in numerous other places.
As practically the only integral leftist amongst the principal Western European countries, Sanchez has successfully masqueraded as a welcomer of the distressed and needful of the world. This is of course prodigious histrionics: Spain has a low birth rate, like almost all of the West, and needs a number of categories of immigrants to maintain economic growth. To this end it admits almost without question immigration by Hispanic Americans who can become legal residents within two weeks of arrival. They are almost all Spanish-speaking Roman Catholics, and the assimilation process is simple and almost immediate.
Sanchez had admitted 600,000 immigrants into Spain, but most of them were relatively easily assimilable, and his masquerade as a friend to all downtrodden peoples and wretched masses on distant teeming shores is unconvincing. And his immediate removal of the sudden influx last week was something of a reinforcement of his resistant armor against the Spanish center and right, whom he has aroused in many other ways as a vintage and doctrinaire leftist in a country with a long and at times extremely violent history of profound ideological and philosophical fissures. His own position has been undermined by the indictment of relatives, including his wife, for corruption.
There have been many unpleasant ironies in the terrible drama of European immigration. Not the least of them has been that of Britain, which, having seceded from Europe 10 years ago—partly because of widespread objections to practically uncontrolled immigration from various parts of Europe—lost any ability to prevail upon France and other European countries to cooperate in the prevention of illegal immigration to Britain. The resulting number of illegal migrants in Britain increased substantially. It is illogical, counterintuitive, and astounding that the sceptered Isle of Britain, which possessed the greatest navy in the world from Henry VIII in the 16th century to Winston Churchill’s second tour as first lord of the Admiralty in 1939, is unable to prevent a deluge of unwelcome arrivals in tiny and fragile craft all around the southern coast of England.
But with all that said, the total number of unauthorized migrants into the 27 countries of the EU last year was only 177,000, of whom the great majority were apprehended and in many cases returned to their departure points. This is, on a per capita basis, not much larger than the current level of such migrants to the United States, though that number is, of course, a tiny fraction of the colossal influx under the Biden administration of an unidentified miscellany of illegal migrants from all over the world—including hundreds of thousands of violent criminals, and among their number those transporting completely unfeasible quantities of lethal narcotics.
In a time of economic advance, especially by former Iron Curtain countries like Poland, where per capita income grew from $2,700 under the communists in 1990 to about $30,000 now, as the population has scarcely moved, there is some authentic need for a larger workforce. The collapsed birth rate of most of Europe does generally create a natural receptivity to desirable immigration, a condition well filled in Spain by Hispanic Americans.
The widespread concerns about the decline of Europe have been based on its inability to control immigration, which appears now to be a problem that has been largely resolved; its collapsed birth rate, which ironically requires intelligently selected immigration to mitigate its importance; and excessive socialism, which the likely next governments in France, Germany, and Spain and the existing government in Italy may reasonably be expected to address. There may then be room for great hope that the old continent—whose recent dreams of uniting among themselves and becoming the greatest political influence in the world after a lapse of nearly a century have been shattered—may yet cohere, self-reorient, and resume at least a respectable and credible geopolitical status in the world.
The greatest soft point in all this at the moment is the United Kingdom, which has just installed its seventh prime minister in 10 years, succeeding seven previous conspicuous failures from both formerly principal parties as polls indicate an Israel-like fragmentation of party support and possible electoral chaos. It is profoundly shocking that such a respected and historically influential nationality and jurisdiction could have stumbled and splintered so badly and so quickly.
It can only be hoped that the comparatively positive news for most of the principal continental countries is replicated in the UK.
