They will come ...

The English Channel, relatively speaking, has become under Prime Minister Johnson as permeable and chaotic as America’s Southwestern border. More than 25,000 illegal aliens have landed in England from France so far this year (three times more than in 2020); nearly 2 million entered the United States in the 12-month period ending last September the thirtieth. In both countries, the authorities have been hogtied in their efforts to deport the invaders by immigration courts and lawyers, by human rights agencies, and—in the UK—by the European Convention on Human Rights, agreed in 1950, and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951, much of which the United Kingdom has incorporated into its own body of law. The U.S. is bound (absurdly) to international law on the subject; but even were it not, the Biden administration has made open borders its unofficial and unstated policy.

Priti Patel, the British Home Secretary, has been trying to persuade the French Government to patrol its beaches more thoroughly and prevent the migrant smugglers from getting off their boats; but President Macron,  hard put to get himself reelected next April, is posturing both as the defender of France and of the European Union, an attitude that has made him worse than uncooperative so far. Nevertheless, in England as in the United States, sane people recognize the magnitude of the crisis and are urging that it be effectively confronted. One of these is Charles Moore, the journalist and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, writing recently in the Daily Telegraph. Another is Janet Daly, a regular columnist for the same paper that published her excellent essay (November 28, 2021), “Collapse of Cold War Certainties is stoking the global migrant crisis.”

Mrs. Daly, who was born in the United States but has lived for decades in England, argues that as long as the world was divided between two blocks, Eastern and Western, the first dominated by the Soviet Union and the second by the United States, each with its own group of client states, Third World countries were guaranteed the institutional, financial and economic–as well as military–support upon which their own petty tyrants, and their subjects, could reply. With the collapse of the Cold War, and the end of the ideological client system, neither Russia nor the U.S. was under the same constraints to maintain their former “allies” (not all of them, anyway) as viable states and societies. The result was the irresponsible misrule and incompetent management—political, economic, and human—by native governments that is a major cause behind the migrations of their populations to the First World. “Will the West (led by America) ever regain its interest in these places and people now that the competition for their favour is gone?” Mrs. Daly asks. “We wait and see. In the meantime, they will come.” Unless, of course, they are prevented by military force from doing so. “Immigration,” Éric Zemmour, the author and columnist who is expected soon to announce his candidacy to replace Macron as President of the French Republic, said the other day, “is war.” And must be resisted as such.

Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world despise and fear four things above all: Racism, class distinctions, civil violence—and religious rivalry (religion itself, actually, but that is another matter). If neoliberal societies are unable, or unwilling, to prevent “them” from coming, and by the millions and tens of millions, the Western countries and Western civilization itself will be first submerged in, then torn apart and destroyed by, racial and religious animosities, ethnic, tribal, and class warfare, and Enoch Powell’s vision of the “Tiber running with blood” will be a metaphor for the entire West; and liberals  (those of them that survive) will have a whole new world to deplore, despise—and reform.