In the marches of Eastern Poland, the Danube plain and throughout the mountains of Austria a huge worm – the anti immigration worm – is turning. The new governing coalition in Austria, the conservatives (this time the real thing, unlike our Pro Brexit Conservative party), announced it has teamed up with the nationalists to create what the BBC described on this morning’s news as the first ‘Far Right’ government’ in Europe since…..? They didn’t actually say it, the little vegetarian corporal ruled from Berlin.
It is an absurd idea to describe a government that wishes to maintain its borders against mass migration as far right but if you are a rich leftie working for the Beeb for £300,000 upwards, the thought of not being able to get a cleaner from Bangladesh for less than the minimum wage must be shocking. Not only do they clean but they can wait at your table to demonstrate your stance on racism.
Following this news Herr Kurz, the new Austrian Chancellor, who does not employ Asian cleaners, issued a statement that Austria has joined the V4 alliance (Poland, Hungary, Czech & Slovak Republics) against the EU in regard to migrant quotas and the moves to punish Poland for rejecting them. The V5, as they have become, aided by the President of the EU – Donald Tusk – want a fundamental shift in the EU migration / refugee policy and a drastic cut in the numbers of admissions.
In the spring of 2015 the newly elected neo-communist/nationalist governing coalition in Athens was embroiled in a major showdown with the other Eurozone members over debt relief and the relaxation of the bailout terms. And they were losing badly. At the height of the negotiations (Greece was represented by the now infamous Varoufakis) the minister of defence, vice president of the government and leader of the nationalist party partner of the neocons, Panos Kamenos, threatened Merkel’s government with opening the floodgates and letting hundreds of thousands of jihadists into the EU unless Germany backed their bid for a massive debt write-off.
Germany did not capitulate and only a couple of weeks later the Immigration minister in Athens announced that the Aegean sea has no borders and people should be free to move about. Soon after that the illegal migration stream that was running from Turkey to the Greek islands became a flood. The official refugee / migration policy in Athens was to ferry them to the mainland and show them the way to Germany and Sweden. This went on from May 2015 until the deal between Germany and Turkey and the closure of the N. Greek border by the Balkan states.
That deal too has only partially succeeded as the Greek government has amended their refugee policy again allowing rejected asylees to appeal the court decisions for up to four times. Why? because the Greeks have discovered there is no business like refugee business. There are huge numbers of NGOs and charities in Greece working off their middle class guilt via refugee schemes, not entirely out of pure altruism; most hope to be bankers when they go home and there is nothing like a bit of charity work on your CV if you want to work for Goldman Sachs or similar, somebody has to pay them and feed their clients and that means their home governments. NGOs lobby the latter for foreign aid which Athens spends on housing the refugees in the thousands of houses that have stood empty since Germany bankrupted the country a few years back.
The result of this has been a backlog of close to 70k migrants stuck in Greece and waiting for the chance to hire a trafficker to take them to points north (hence the recent stringent checks on Greek passport holders and arrivals from Greece at northern airports).[pullquote]
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This Ponzi scheme will collapse. The aid workers will fly out, the grants will stop, the housing programmes will go bust, but the migrants will keep coming. Unless Western governments deal with the root cause, stopping the sale of weapons to all sides in the Middle East so the various psychotics who rule in Arabia cannot go on killing, gassing, burning and bombing each other’s populations. Only then will the refugees be able go home.
Alcibiades
Thank you for adding further complexity Myles. I wonder what our liberal friends make of all this given that complexity isn’t their thing?
If I may add in my two-pennies worth on the issue of migrants wanting to return home: Doesn’t the evidence of our nation’s ‘recent’ history convincingly demonstrate that putative refugees almost never leave once they’ve settled here?
Dodgy Geezer. My experience of refugees in Africa was that people do not want to leave their homes in the first place,even if by our standards they are awful. Arabia was once a magical place, few people would want to leave, but now it is a horrible concrete jungle overflown by predatory jets from all sides. Even so I would not want to be a refugee, Imagine tomorrow morning I put a cardboard suitcase in your hand, gave you a pair of plastic shoes, some old clothes,I tell you to bid your wife and family goodby hand you £50 and tell you have to get from say the equivalent of Egyptian Sinai to London via the southern Med by foot/ truck/ courtesy of gangsters, a couple of months in a prison in Libya being buggered by the guards, and oh a sea crossing in which a third of the passengers are drowned. Would you do that for a wait in an NHS A & E or life in a country where most of the locals don’t say it but do their best to secretly show you are not wanted ? I am not at all sympathetic to mass immigration or mini immigration, I would ban it all but this is just looking at it the other way around
Not quite. First off, not 30% of them drown. The casualties were about 3000 in a wave of well over 1 million. Secondly, on one hand they have the dismal life their failing system and civilization have created. On the other the welfare states of the west that have just torn their borders down. It’s worth the risk Myles, any way you look at it. The trouble is there’s not enough space over here for 3 billion people.
Safe passage would not be a concern if daily life is peril. Uneducated people spend bread money on lotteries.
Occams Razor suggests to me that this just another form of Jihad, and on that score Europe is losing the battle.
“…[I]f you are a rich leftie working for the Beeb for £300,000 upwards, the thought of not being able to get a cleaner from Bangladesh for less than the minimum wage must be shocking. Not only do they clean but they can wait at your table to demonstrate your stance on racism.”
Naughty, Myles, very naughty, but oh so true…
…Only then will the refugees be able go home. …
Why will the refugees WANT to go home? Will their respective countries offer comprehensive free social services and benefits matching the West?
Alcibiades? Never heard of him until today, which is only to say that reading MH’s offerings improves my historical education (Ist Class Honours, Red Brick Division)
“Carthago delenda est” might also be an apt allusion, albeit not Greek.
Remember Kofi Annan.
UN-SG there for a while.
After stepping down from that role, he tok on a very specific task, attempting to help his fellow black Africans.
His very particular message, in those efforts, was:
“Black African farmers! Use effective farming methods that were, yes, developed in the White West”.
Run outa town on a rail, he was.
Editor Harris cites sales of weapons to the ruling psychotics in Arabia as a root cause of problems there.
Perhaps.
Also to be factored in, I think, is the necessity for Arabian Good Guys/Gals to return home, and fight like Heck to establish good governance.
Fighting for good governance, at cost to their own fortunes and lives, is what Our forebears did.
The Arabians now face that challenge.
Oh well, so do black Africans, Persia, folk of parts of the Sub-Continent, the Pacific Islands, and erm, almost all of Asia.
Greece is a part of the story, but the immigrants come via Italy and Spain as well, not forgetting those who just fly in to Kosovo, or Paris or Berlin or London and never leave. They come because they are poor, and we are ( still) rich, because of our welfare systems and for the blondes. They know all this, because however poor they are, they have access to the internet and can see for themselves the disparity between their own lives and what exists in the West.
The same process drives young men from Central America north to the USA.
So long as the Central African Republic has GDP per capita of just $700 p.a. they will carry on coming.
There was a time when Europe could have put a stop to all this by militarizing the Med. and turning back any would-be immigrants, but for Western Europe, those days have passed, as there is already a voting bloc, needed by the Left which will paralyse any efforts at ending mass migration, as well as being a huge Fifth Column in the unlikely event of War.
I fear for Eastern Europe because they will soon be surrounded on all sides by malevolent forces, north, south, east and west.
For details on income disparities, see:-
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html