SocialTechnologies.com: “Germany’s Jeopardy: Could the Immigrant Influx ‘End European Civilization”?
- FRANK SALTER, Posted on 06/01/2016
Audio version
Outline:
Introduction: Dire predictions
Social conflict
More crime
Reduced welfare
Greater ethnic inequality
Racialized politics
Reduced civil liberties
Benefits? Arguments for open borders
Conclusion: Jeopardy. Will Europe Survive?
Introduction: Dire predictions
My name is Frank Salter. I’m an Australian political ethologist, meaning that includes biological approaches when studying society and politics. I’ve spent much of my career researching at a Max Planck Institute in Germany, as well as teaching there and elsewhere in Europe and the United States. One of my research areas is ethnic solidarity and conflict and how this affects democratic welfare states.
In this talk I discuss the dire predictions that have been made about the massive influx of immigrants and refugees still entering Germany and other European countries from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Many then fan-out, crossing Europe’s old national borders which are no longer regulated due to the Shengen Agreement. Some believe this could end European civilization, despite the outpouring of goodwill and hospitality shown by millions of Germans and other Europeans. These predictions have not only come from anti-immigrant ideologues but from moderate politicians.
An example is Tony Abbott, until recently Australian prime minister. Speaking in London, Abbott called on Europe to close its borders to avoid a “catastrophic error”. He declared that protecting the borders will “require some force; it will require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at our consciences – yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever.”
Curiously, neither Abbott nor the other commentators explain why the influx would be so damaging. The same is true of Angela Merkel’s argument for opening the borders. Where was the sober and transparent assessment of costs and benefits?
In this talk I attempt such an assessment, by reviewing research on the way that ethnic diversity tends to increase social conflict and crime, undermine welfare, exacerbate ethnic inequality, racialize politics and erode civil liberties. I then compare these costs with the benefits of mass Third World immigration asserted
by Angela Merkel and her supporters.
Social conflict
Recent tragic events, including the attacks in Paris, make terrorism appear the most obvious and immediate threat. The overwhelming majority of incomers are Muslims. Though most Muslims are not terrorists, many terrorists are Muslims. In general, rising ethnic diversity increases the chance that one minority or another will oppose the government’s foreign policy. Tragedy results if even a small number of disaffected individuals adopt violence.
However, terrorism is not the main harm likely to arise from the present immigration. The main effect will be to fracture the psychological bond of nationality, leaving citizenship a hollowed-out legalism. That is because rising diversity is associated not only with violence such as terrorism and civil war, but with a general loss of social cohesion. But let us begin with violence.
Data from numerous studies show that the more ethnically diverse a society the greater the risk of conflict and, conversely, the more difficult it is to forge unity. Civil conflict is less likely in more homogeneous societies. Academic researchers have attempted to quantify the risk.
In the 1990s a global study by Rudolf Rummel at the University of Hawaii measured how 109 variables contributed to collective violence of the extreme variety – guerrilla and civil war – between 1932 and 1982; that’s a 50 year period. He found that one fifth of the variation in collective violence was caused by just one variable, the number of ethnic groups within the society. Conflict was made more intense when the antagonistic parties had different religions. [ii] That finding is obviously relevant to the present situation where Muslims are flooding into a largely Christian and secular Europe.
A study of contemporary societies by Finnish sociologist Tatu Vanhanen examined ethnic conflict defined more broadly to include discrimination, ethnic parties and interest groups, as well as ethnic violence and civil war. Vanhanen used evolutionary theory to hypothesize that diversity would cause conflict to rise. Among the 176 societies he studied, Vanhanen found that in 2010 two thirds of global variation in ethnic conflict was explained by ethnic diversity.[iii] In other words, much of the difference between united peaceful countries and those riven by ethnic conflict is the latters’ ethnic diversity.
A related effect of diversity is lowered cooperation and “social capital”, the extent to which people support each other. As heterogeneity grows, participation in clubs and volunteer work falls. People become more isolated and less trustful. The effect is strongest in local neighbourhoods where people experience different ethnic groups.[iv] In other words, it is not ignorance or isolation that cause ethnic discord, but contact with other cultures, including foreigners entering a homeland territory in large numbers.
German governments should be aware of the tendency of ethnic diversity to cause social conflict because that tendency has been studied in German research institutions. For example, ethologist Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a professor at the Max Planck Society, and colleagues such as Johan van der Dennen at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, have for decades studied the effects of cultural mixing on ethnocentrism and xenophobia in mass anonymous societies. Both have warned that large scale mixing of different ethnicities reduces social stability and risks domestic peace.
Some of the research I’ve been discussing was inspired by evolutionary theory. This is an important approach long excluded from the social sciences. Human psychology evolved in the context of ethnically homogeneous groups. From this perspective the diversity now being imposed by modern elites is unnatural on the evolutionary time scale. That unnatural level of diversity is responsible for some of the conflict, according to evolutionary theory. Further confirmation of this evolutionary hypothesis is the finding that genetic diversity, as distinct from cultural diversity, correlates with social conflict. Since ethnic groups are pools of genetic similarity,[v] mixing such pools increases genetic variation within a society and, according to new global research, causes greater social conflict.[vi]
Stronger causes than genetic diversity are cultural, economic and historical factors, which help explain the surge of goodwill that Germans, Swedes and other Europeans showed Syrian refugees in 2015. But these factors can fluctuate greatly in the short term, while it can take many generations for genetic variation to fall.
More crime
Crime is social conflict in which the aggressor breaks the law. The track record of crime committed by non-Western immigrants to Europe is not reassuring.
A disturbing trend in France, which has Europe’s largest Islamic population, is the growth of no-go areas where even police dare not venture except in force. In addition in France and Britain there are occasional riots so violent and extensive that police lose control. These periods of mass conflict amount to uprisings.
The trend is for parallel societies to be established as the immigrant populations from less compatible cultures segregate themselves and new generations come of age. Generous welfare and multiculturalism exacerbate immigrant crime, which often increases in the second generation.
Between 1997 and 2013 large scale organized sexual exploitation of white girls took place in the English town of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, predominantly by Muslim Pakistani men. Up to 1,400 girls as young as 12 years of age were raped and sex-trafficked by multiple men.
Sweden and Denmark also offer a glimpse of what Germany can expect from the intake of unselected immigrants coming from incompatible cultures. In Sweden the majority of those charged with murder, rape and robbery are immigrants, despite immigrants numbering only 16 per cent of the population.[vii]
In Denmark immigrants from several countries commit crimes at a much higher rate than do ethnic Danes. This is especially true of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.[viii] The greatest frequency of law-breaking was shown by the children of non-Western immigrants. Those aged 15-19 were overrepresented by 93 per cent, those aged 20-29 by 130 percent, and those aged 30-39 were overrepresented by 135 per cent. Ethnic Danes were underrepresented for all these age categories.
For Germany the data are less accessible but an unconfirmed report indicates that in 2011 asylum-seekers committed 3.3 per cent of all crimes, many times their proportion of the German population.[ix] By 2014 that already-high figure had jumped to 7.7 per cent of all crime. In the same period, the number of assaults and shoplifting across Germany more than doubled.
Reduced welfare
Obviously the influx of millions of poor people will strain welfare budgets. Europeans who have paid social security insurance their whole working lives will soon be supporting health, housing, unemployment and age benefits for millions who have never contributed. If the influx is not stopped, this will be the start of an astronomical transfer of wealth, while the system survives.
It might not survive long because most European governments are already heavily in debt and managing heavy welfare expenditures. In 2013, the last year for which data are available, general government gross debt in Austria was 81% of GDP, in Belgium 104%, France 92%, Germany 77%, Italy 128%, Spain 92%, and the United Kingdom 87%.[xi]
In Sweden government debt is only about 39% of GDP but its immigrants from Africa and the Middle East are straining the budget. These immigrants make up about 16% of the population but take as much as 58% of welfare payments, representing a large wealth transfer from ethnic Swedes.[xii] That transfer is a bad investment because about 48% of working-age immigrants are unemployed. Even after 15 years in the country, 40% are not working.
But welfare is still more fragile than these figures indicate.
Research conducted at Germany’s Max Planck Society indicates that ethnic change due to immigration will change taxpayers’ motivation, reducing their willingness to support welfare. Comparison of welfare systems around the world shows that as ethnic diversity rises, welfare tends to decline.[xiii]
Not only welfare declines but any services relying on contributions to public goods. That includes cooperation with police, charities, medical and military authorities.
Foreign aid, which is international welfare, is even more fragile. Foreign aid is strongly and negatively correlated with donor countries’ ethnic diversity.[xiv]
The irony could not be more cruel. By accepting large numbers of people of non-Western cultures, who are seeking to benefit from generous welfare, European countries not only risk losing domestic welfare for natives and immigrants alike, but reducing their foreign aid to immigrants’ homelands. It’s a lose-lose strategy.
Greater ethnic inequality
Ethnic inequality, a major cause of civil conflict, will increase as a result of the present influx. When an ethnic group fails to achieve income equality down the generations, the effect is deeply ingrained resentment and a low threshold for civil unrest. That might be why second generation immigrants often show higher criminality than their parents.
Once again there is no excuse for ignorance because Germany has its own native-born instructor on the causes of ethnic inequality. Thilo Sarrazin was an SPD politician and, until 2010, board member of the Deutschebank, the year he published a book titled Germany abolishes itself: How we risk losing our country.[xv] Sarrazin documented the slow pace of integration of Turkish immigrants into German society and economy, their disproportionate reliance on government welfare and their higher fertility. He found that slow assimilation was caused by the Islamic religion and lower educational outcomes were caused by persistent ethnic tradition.[xvi] When he wrote this, Angela Merkel was already German Chancellor. She condemned Sarrazin and endorsed his removal from the Deutschebank board, an omen of her 2015 radicalism and intolerance.
It is certain that the present influx will escalate ethnic stratification in Germany and in Europe. If this were only due to poor languages skills and low education, the inequality could close within a generation or two (still an appalling assault on the receiving societies). But many of the immigrants come from populations with long records of poor educational and economic performance, likely to result in chronic ethnic stratification reminiscent of despotic empires by importing a new underclass, Germany and Europe are abolishing their egalitarian national societies.
Racialized politics
An open door policy is advocated by self-proclaimed anti-racists such as Angela Merkel and her allies on the far left. The “anti-fa” protesters who shout-down PEGIDA and other conservatives take it for granted that borders should be open to all comers. But one certain outcome of the new immigrant influx is the further racialization of politics and growing demographic pressure on ethnic Europeans. Racialization will take the form of sectarianism, ethnic parties, multiculturalism, school indoctrination, political correctness and affirmative action – discrimination meant to equalise outcomes. Racialized politics is already a fact of life in diverse societies such as Britain, France, the United States and Australia.
Throughout recorded history societies controlled immigration, especially when it involved large numbers. Angela Merkel’s and Francois Hollande’s open door policy is a reckless social experiment that is already inducing compassion fatigue. Nationalist and anti-immigration parties are rising in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The ethnic inequality discussed earlier is an important cause of racialization. By the second generation poorer immigrant groups, especially those that are culturally or racially visible, become susceptible to radicalization by ideologies that legitimate grievances. These ideologies help immigrants rationalise their low socioeconomic status and sense of alienation by making them out to be victims of white racism. The ideologies are acquired from universities, schools, the media, social workers, politicians and ethnic leaders.
Victimhood ideologies also produce guilt and fear in whites, by linking their ethnic identities – and only theirs – to extremism and fascism.[xviii] This is unfair because white majorities are typically less ethnocentric than minorities.
The myth of minority victimhood conditions the white majority to accept replacement-level immigration. These doctrines have been influential in English-speaking countries and much of Western Europe since the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile in Germany immigration politics has started in the non-democratic mode typical of ethnic politics throughout the West. No referendum is planned to give Germans a choice concerning their destiny. With minor exceptions, citizens do not even have the option of voting against the open door policy in a normal election, because the major parties support open borders. Germans who wish to have a say in immigration policy must vote for new parties that have not yet been captured by special interests.
Reduced civil liberties
Rising diversity undermines civil rights. Wherever the founding ethnic group has lost control of immigration, governments come under pressure from the political left and their minority clients to suppress “hate speech”, which can include statements of opinion and fact. The limiting of free speech also precedes and helps cause the rise of replacement level immigration. But certainly it is also an effect of diversity.
Restrictions of speech have a chilling effect on public debate. The millions now flooding into Germany and Europe are beneficiaries of this repression. Their presence will only increase pressure on government to crack down on restless natives. The underlying reason for the crackdown will be the rise of massive endemic social conflict, wholly predictable and indeed predicted by social scientists.
Benefits? Arguments for open borders
Are these costs outweighed by the benefits proposed by Angela Merkel and her supporters? Six main arguments have been advanced to persuade Germans to accept the influx.
1. The first argument is Merkel’s claim that Germany and Europe are morally obliged to settle genuine refugees. There is obviously a moral duty to help but the argument that refugees must be settled in Europe fails for two simple reasons. Firstly, many of the incomers are not refugees but economic immigrants. Secondly, the heavy costs imposed by the influx on native Germans means that a moral policy must optimise the two sides’ interests, not maximize immigrant welfare at the expense of the host society. After all, the first duty of governments, especially in democracies, is to protect their constituents. Germany and the EU could be helping refugees in or near their own countries.
2. The second argument is Merkel’s claim that Germany will benefit by throwing off its Nazi legacy once and for all. This is a despicable argument because Germans are innocent of genocide, unless one accepts the Nazi doctrine of collective racial guilt. The opposite effect is more likely. Vilification of ethnic Germans could intensify because Merkel has launched a new era of racialized politics in which exponents of mass Third World immigration will use any victimhood narrative to silence the majority.
3. The third argument was stated by the German Interior Minister in mid September 2015.[xix] He claimed that the government had no choice but to accept any number of refugees because Article 16a, paragraph 1, of the German constitution, the Grundgesetz, states that “Persons persecuted on political grounds shall have the right of asylum.” This is a strictly legalistic argument because, as we have seen, there is no moral duty to settle large numbers of refugees in Germany. So let’s look more closely at the law. Paragraph 2 of Article 16a of the Grundgesetz states that paragraph 1 does not apply to persons entering the Federal Republic “from a member state of the European Communities”.[xx] The overwhelming majority of refugees entering Germany have come via other EU states. Germany was entitled to prevent them entering but the Merkel government suspended the Dublin Regulation, which requires asylum seekers to be returned to the European country of first arrival.[xxi] How could Germany have accepted this EU law in the first place if it contradicted the German constitution? If, on the other hand, the Dublin Regulation reflects article 16a of the constitution, how could it be so easily suspended?[xxii] Clearly Germany and the EU can legally protect their borders. It is Merkel and other EU leaders who allowed the influx, not any law.
4. The fourth argument was advanced by Merkel and Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsch, who maintained that the refugees will make productive workers. Zetsch stated: “They could, like the guest workers from decades ago, help us preserve and improve our prosperity. For Germany cannot any more fill the jobs available.” This is utopian speculation that runs counter to precedent and knowledge of cultural differences. More likely, Germany will be burdened by immigrant communities suffering high unemployment and concentrated in low productivity unskilled jobs.
5. The fifth argument is even more radical. It was stated by demographer Stephan Sievert, of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. Sievert optimistically stated that Germany’s population was at last growing, after decades of stagnation.[xxiii] Sievert does not admit that his implied policy entails the rapid demographic replacement of the German ethnic family, in effect cultural genocide by stages. If the German people were given the opportunity to vote on this policy, perhaps a majority would agree with German author Botho Strauss, who declared that he prefers to live among his own people even if they are falling in numbers, rather than live in an imposed cultural mix.[xxiv]
6. A sixth argument has been offered by Merkel, in her New Year’s address for 2016. It is the open border mantra, that immigration is generally good. Merkel stated that “countries have always benefited from successful immigration, both economically and socially”.[xxv] It is a danger sign when highly educated people resort to tautologies, such as deducing that successful immigration is successful. In fact immigrant societies – America, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and others – are all well down the track of turning their founding cultures into minorities without ever offering them a democratic choice. Merkel also followed the usual pro-immigration line by accusing her critics of “coldness or even hatred”, implying that she is motivated by warmer emotions. And she foreshadowed a new inclusive definition of what it means to be German, which is a prudent move for someone intent on demographic transformation. Omitted from this latest statement, but likely to follow, are other elements of the pro-immigration mantra, such as diversity is strength, or German identity is the same as citizenship, or school children must be educated in tolerance, or immigrants rescue German culture from its white-bread impoverishment. These arguments and assertions are completely normal in Western societies whose political classes have opened them to mass immigration.
These six alleged benefits of massive unselected immigration are typical of the intellectual level of open border arguments elsewhere in Western countries. That such shallow and sometimes mendacious rhetoric is uttered by intelligent individuals would be impossible without their near monopoly of media access resulting from the ideological intolerance that has suppressed open debate for decades.
Conclusion: Jeopardy. Will Europe Survive?
The evidence just reviewed indicates that dire warnings are not overstated. The ethnic transformation now being inflicted on Germany and the rest of Europe by its political class, if continued, will severely damage European culture and way of life. The opposed arguments are flimsy and fail entirely to address the perceived risks. Commentators are not exaggerating then they warn that European civilization, the result of three millennia of cultural evolution, is in jeopardy.
Hopefully common sense will prevail and journalists and politicians will listen respectfully to the people’s concerns and aspirations. Perhaps Merkel and Hollande will recover from their moral mania and free themselves from special interests long enough to deign the flood to recede. Perhaps the EU will formulate a conservative immigration policy, one that does not cater mainly to the interests of immigrants, minorities and the corporate sector but also respects Europeans by preserving their identities, cultures, domestic peace, equality and national cohesion. It is more likely that voters will solve the problem than Europe’s intellectually corrupt political class, and that new parties will be granted the power to reclaim national sovereignty from the failed EU project. In that case the EU will collapse, as individual nations move to protect themselves from the Shengen Agreement, now become a mortal threat instead of a promise. That could form the basis for a new trans-European movement that protects the identities and ways of life of individual nations and Europe as a whole.
But until now these considerations have been foreign to Angela Merkel and her supporters. She sells her open door policy as humanitarian. But in reality this is a cruel policy likely to produce suffering across Germany and Europe. She has failed to consider the interests of individual European nations or of Europe as a whole. Europe’s political class has, in effect, embraced the most aggressive form of multiculturalism, in which the establishment forms an alliance with minorities to dominate the majority.
The suffering the open door policy will bring – the inequality, including the special evil of ethnic stratification, the collapse of welfare, the crime, the slums and no-go areas, the degradation of women, the racialization of politics, the decline in wages, the loss of national cohesion, the growing sense of loss and alienation among Germans and immigrants alike, the accelerated replacement of Europeans in their ancient homelands, the constriction of civil rights and the pervasive chaos – all of this will last for generations.
Merkel is doubly cruel because she is stripping developing societies of their more educated and industrious people. The inevitable fall in European foreign aid will hurt poor countries around the world, caused by the stagnation of European economies and decline in social capital.
A responsible policy would resemble the British strategy of helping refugees in or near their own countries while restricting their immigration to Europe, though it should be noted that in Britain non-refugee immigration is out of control.
For Germany the situation is more threatening due to its toxic political culture, despite its present low level of ethnic diversity. The country’s chances of recovery – which means adopting a sustainable immigration policy – depend on how the following questions are answered by events.
How long will it take for the present reaction to become a powerful political force? How long before Germany’s leadership feels the wrath of a people enraged at the prospect of the transformation of their country? And should the reaction become intense, will citizens remain mobilised long enough to build political organisations sufficiently powerful to correct the situation? Will they be able to inflict political censure on Merkel and the political class so stark that it neutralises the incentives offered by the establishment? Will they be able to do so in the teeth of relentless attacks from the mainstream media and educational establishments? Will they stay focused long enough to renegotiate EU arrangements or withdraw Germany from them? Will they persist long enough to push through constitutional amendments that define Germany as the homeland of the German people and allow legal redress against leaders who attempt demographic replacement?
Whether or not there is a pause in the influx, Germans and other Europeans should educate themselves about the deep causes of this disaster and how to prevent its recurrence.
