15A002 Unnatural Migration by Jim Davies, 1/5/2015    

Natural migration happens when people find it unsatisfactory to live well in the place in which they were born, and go in search of a better life; of opportunity to sell their skills with better advantage. This has been going on for at least 50,000 years and is part of the wonderful saga of the human race. I'm happy to be an emigrant myself.

Moberg's Utvandrarna tells vividly of the hardships suffered by Swedish emigrants to Chisago, MN in the 19th Century, and many migrants have it just as hard; the rewards from the move do come, but not always to the first generation. Thomas Sowell's survey in Migrations and Cultures offers a sweeping history of the subject over many centuries and across the whole world, and is a must-read for those interested. Migration is very far from being a purely American phenomenon!

Both a carrot and a stick are involved in all large migrations; hardships push people away and expectation of better conditions pulls them in to a new land. Usually, assimilation with those already there has to be achieved; at first the US was an exception. Only the "Indians" had to be dealt with, and the FedGov handled that brutally but effectively. Assimilation is always a bit tricky, for the newcomers in effect compete with those already present; they offer labor, at a lower price necessarily, and only a bit later do they constitute valuable buyers of goods and services from the established population.

But the great American experience is proof that it can be done, with resounding success, even in large numbers; provided it happens over an extended period such as a century, with a small percentage increase in population each year. There was resistance even so, in America; in their turn Irish, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Germans, Jews, Chinese and Japanese... all encountered hostility, with bigotry enshrined in humor (of a sort) even until today.

It's hard to say exactly when all that kind of natural migration becomes unnatural, but it's when the "push" becomes intense and/or the "pull", almost irresistible. Then, great numbers of people who had no intention of ever leaving their homeland suddenly find that life there is untenable and they have to leave in a hurry. They become "refugees." Directly after the devastation of WW-2, they were called "Displaced Persons" or DPs This unnatural movement almost always accompanies, or follows, war. And war is in every case caused by governments. So unnatural immigration is always caused by governments. Upon arrival at their destination, because the numbers are large, the hostility is intense. Assimilation is not easy at all. And we are witnessing it in spades right now, mostly in Europe.

Italy - because it has the longest coastline - is the destination of many wishing to escape the mayhem in the Levant and North Africa, caused by US government meddling. Once in Italy they have access to the rest of Europe. They come by the boatload, paying heavily for the trip. Last month a ship with 900 aboard was taken close, then abandoned by the crew - who, understandably, had no liking for Italian jails so were taken off so as to fetch another profitable load. Enterprise will find a way. Numbers are hard to nail down and change daily, but this site suggests that of the 18 million inhabiting Syria, 3 million have fled.

This kind of migration is not at all natural. Those fleeing the violence had no wish to leave their homeland and its culture and be transplanted into an alien one; they move because life has become impossible. Once in place, in Germany and Scandinavia and France, the friction is intense; there an acute problem of language and religion and resentment of their arrival is growing fast; currently the Sweden Democrat party has come from nowhere to hold an actual balance of power, and will probably force another election this year even though the new government is less than six months old. Muslim immigrants now account for 10% of the population there, and their young thugs have made areas of Malmö "no go" for fire services and even police. It was this heavy kind of influx that drove Anders Breivik to carry out his murderous rampage in neighboring Norway, in 2011.

Breivik, in his rambling manifesto, complained not so much about the stick that drives these migrants North (its main error, in my view) but about the carrot that attracts them. For over a generation, "multiculturalism" has been part of government propaganda, teaching all that one culture is just as good as another - obvious nonsense, except in a limited sense. And the welfare provided to refugees at taxpayer expense has been lavish. This is not the sort of "carrot" that attracted migrants from the Old World to the New; they were looking not for handouts but for opportunity.

This unnatural migration is part of the mayhem triggered by Bush's invasion of Iraq on March 19th 2003. Its ill effects will last for decades. It's just one part of the unintended chaos that follows government intervention. Such mayhem will continue as long as governments do, but when they have evaporated they will cease. Then, people will move only when they wish to do so, as part of the unending human quest for progress.