Forty-two years ago, the great French author Jean Raspail wrote a deeply prescient novel. A flotilla of rusty ships packed with beggars sets sail from the Third World. They head for the French Riviera, where a million wretched, brown-skinned people hope to storm the beaches and feed on the wealthy white West. Will the French army fire on the invaders or welcome them as refugees? In the end they do neither; soldiers throw down their weapons and run away as the mob stumbles ashore. Millions more follow, and Europe is snuffed out.
The
Camp of the Saints has never gone out of print, and has been translated into all major European languages–and yet the coverage of the European “migrant” crisis goes on as if it had never been written. The masses pouring in from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a host of African countries are doing exactly what Mr. Raspail predicted they would and, tragically, so are the Europeans...
What Europeans are doing reflects something deep in their nature, which makes them capable of extraordinary levels of
pathological altruism. But the present invasion also has a legal background that dates to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It defines a refugee as someone:
[who] owing to [a] well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.
The convention required “non-refoulement,” which means refugees cannot be turned back at the border. It also prohibited countries from applying to refugees the usual punishments for illegal entry. The convention came out of the Second World War, applied only to Europeans, and gave signatories the option of limiting their definition of refugees to people who were displaced “as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951.”
In 1951, the world population was 2.5 billion. It is now 7.3 billion, and the overwhelming bulk of the growth has been in those very countries that are so miserable that huge numbers of their citizens want to leave.
The United States did not sign the convention. What it did sign, in 1968, was a protocol added to the convention, which removed the original geographic and time limits. This meant signatories were required to take in anyone from anywhere forever. Until 1968, however, the United States had no legal obligation to accept any refugees...
The supply is essentially unlimited: Last year, UNHCR said there were more than 50 million displaced people around the world, of whom about 17 million were officially designated as refugees.
Except for the countries right next to the places people are trying to leave, white countries accept by far the most refugees. China completely ignores the “non-refoulement” rule...
Countries just do what they please, because the conventions have no enforcement mechanism. The only price for spurning refugees is accusations of heartlessness, and so long as a country isn’t white, there isn’t much of that...
News reports routinely talk about Syrians “fleeing war and turmoil in the Middle East,” but it’s not as though the Syrian civil war suddenly turned brutal, and shell-shocked families are fleeing war zones with only the clothes on their backs. Many have decided they are just tired of refugee camps–and the ones in Lebanon have cut back somewhat on handouts. Those coming straight from Syria just want a chance at Europe, too. As one 35-year-old woman who brought two young children with her from Aleppo explained at the Hungarian border, “I decided to leave Syria because I want my kids to have a comfortable life, to study.”...
In any case, it’s hardly the poor who are making the trip. Smugglers charge as much as $2,000 per adult to ferry people just a couple of miles from Turkey to a Greek island. It takes money to travel on to Germany or Sweden–though some European countries are laying on free travel, food, and shelter. These newcomers are not the needy; they are the greedy.
Finally, this “refugee crisis” is not just an absurdity; it’s absurdity on stilts. Syrians don’t qualify as refugees under the conventions. As noted above, a refugee has to have a well-founded fear of persecution. Being caught in a war zone is not persecution...
Liberals are scratching their heads, trying to figure out what set off the current flood... The answer is simple: Waves of illegals are coming because they can.
The spinelessness of the Europeans is perfectly matched by the arrogance and aggressiveness of the illegals... The illegals sense weakness, and they are right. They exploit that weakness, and their success inspires yet more hundreds of thousands–no doubt millions–from every wretched country. Only force will stop them, the force that any healthy people would have used immediately...
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