 
|
10A100
Immigration Bomb
by Jim Davies, 12/13/2010
Perhaps it's because so many journalists are camping out in Stockholm, awaiting breathlessly the next episode of the Assange drama, but the last week brought an unusual volume of news from that capital of a nation of only 9 million people. On Saturday, the lead item was of two bombs detonated in the city, one of them fatal to the bomber but neither, fortunately, to anyone else. Perhaps he acted too hastily, having noted the media attention. The outrages did serve, however, nicely to explode the myth that immigration is something needing government control.
This unprecedented wave arrived in Sweden for one prime reason: not only was there little or no obstruction (quite rightly) but there was a positive stimulation in that Swedish governments have offered generous welfare to new immigrants - money taken at gunpoint from their new neighbors. So they came by the million, to escape discomforts elsewhere, but live as parasites. It's hard to imagine a worse formula for peace, and this weekend the peace was shattered. Let's apply some more reason to this subject. Thomas Sowell
has exhaustively shown in his Migrations
and Cultures that during all of history, people everywhere
migrate to take advantage of better circumstances; in the case
of all those to America, from countries with powerful, intrusive
governments to one with a government relatively laissez
faire. Swedes came here in huge numbers in the 1800s, to
exploit the huge farming opportunity in the mid-West, as Vilhelm
Moberg told in his Emigrants Trouble is: some measure of welfare (redistribution of wealth, from the productive to the politically powerful) is integral to the idea of government. Nobody would support government, otherwise! Therefore, there will be an immigration "problem" - some will come for reasons other than the honest one, to seek work opportunities. Therefore, the solution is to dispense with welfare, and therefore to dispense with government. This is perfectly obvious, except to those who will not look. To the extent that some dislike immigration, they have a powerful reason to dispense with government. To the extent that such bigots fail to call for an end to government, their nasty racism and xenophopia stand exposed.
|
|
He was some kid from a provincial town,
one of a large number of recent immigrants to the country from
Bosnia and the Middle East. Out of that 9 million population,
close to 2 million are in that class; to visualize the impact
here, imagine that thirty four million strangers had
moved to the USA during the last 15 years, all speaking a language
unknown to natives and practicing a religion hostile to theirs,
few bothering either to learn English or to get
a job, forming immigrant enclaves in which the crime rate rose to
levels never seen before. This youngster was one such thug, and
he was protesting the modest (
saga.
So far, so good; natural migrations bring great benefit to all. What
changed in recent decades was the artificial motivation.
People move now not so much to find better work opportunities -
more freedom - but to obtain better handouts, selecting countries
on the basis of how much welfare is on offer. Our conclusion
should be obvious: immigration and welfare don't mix. It's so
obvious, even I wrote of it as early as 
