Message #144465

[Bianca]

But all over Europe people have had their Katrina moment. As the respected American journalist Bruce Bawer writes in this devastating piece, in Norway, Denmark and Holland voters are turning to parties that openly oppose mass immigration. These are ordinary people who work regular jobs and travel abroad and have friends of every race and creed, but who do not want to be a minority in their own country or capital, just as no Indian or Ugandan or Moroccan would want to be a minority in his.

The media tried to paint these parties as racist and fascist. Never mind that Pim Fortuyn's party was led by an openly gay man and an openly, er, black woman.

What has prompted this rightward shift? Bawer points to several factors. One is the prosaic one of numbers:

One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

Secondly, there is the financial impact of a immigration, a taboo within a taboo in Left-wing circles, a sub-taboo.

For while some immigrant groups in Europe, such as Hindus and East Asians, enjoy relatively low unemployment rates and healthy incomes, the largest immigrant group, Muslims, has become such a burden that governments have made extensive cutbacks in public services in order to keep up with welfare payments—closing clinics and emergency rooms, reducing staff in hospitals, cutting police and military spending, eliminating course offerings at public universities, and so on. According to a report issued last year by the think tank Contribuables Associés, immigration reduces France’s economic growth by two-thirds. In 2002, economist Lars Jansson estimated that immigration cost Swedish taxpayers about $27 billion annually and that fully 74 percent of immigrant-group members in Sweden lived off the taxpayers. And in 2006, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise warned that Norway’s petroleum fund—which contains the massive profits from North Sea oil that have made the nation rich—could wind up drained to cover outlays to immigrants. (This in a country whose roads, as a report last year indicated, are in worse shape than Albania’s.)

But perhaps most importantly is the growing realisation among some European liberals that continued immigration, predominantly from the reactionary Muslim world, is destroying liberalism. One of the most striking signs of this is the collapse of the Rainbow Alliance, so that Bawer (who is himself gay) writes:

Owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who ten years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly two-to-one margin.