David Broder has a good piece in the New York Times today about the extremist right-wing government that's now running Italy. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has certainly moderated her rhetoric since being elected, he says, but underneath you'll still find the same old animating radicalism. This is particularly true of her government's animus toward migrants, which is now shared throughout Europe:
Ms. Meloni’s administration has spent its first months accusing minorities of undermining the triad of God, nation and family, with dire practical consequences for migrants, nongovernmental organizations and same-sex parents....Ms. Meloni’s government isn’t just nativist but has a harsh authoritarian streak, too.
For Italy this is bad enough....In Sweden, a center-right coalition relies on the nativist Sweden Democrats’ support to govern. In Finland, the anti-immigrant Finns Party went one better and joined the government....Conservatives in Britain echo Ms. Meloni’s obsession with favoring birthrates over migration; French anti-immigrant politicians like Éric Zemmour cite Italy as a model of how to “unite the forces of the right”; and even in Germany, the Christian Democrats’ long refusal to consider pacts with the Alternative for Germany is under strain.
It's commonplace to observe that Europe has been more or less at peace for 80 years now—surely a record for the continent. Credit is usually given to wise postwar politicians or to alliance-building projects like the EU, but this misses a more fundamental reason: the ruthless resettlement of ethnic groups to their home countries after World War II. This is not something most people know about—or care to remember—but it happened. And ruthless though it might have been, it accomplished its purpose. With postwar European countries relatively homogeneous, tribal conflicts waned and peace reigned. It's notable that the only exception to Europe's peaceful 80 years came in the former Yugoslavia, where tribal tensions erupted after Josip Broz Tito died and there was no longer a leader with the iron hand to keep them in check.
But 80 years is a long time, and eventually Europe's ethnic homogeneity was bound to break down as more and more migrants made their way in. Every lesson of history suggests that this was certain to ignite, if not wars, tensions short of war. And it has. We can blame right-wing parties all we want, but they've merely been conduits for a historical inevitability.
This is why I don't support the extreme pro-immigrant position adopted over the past decade by the US left. I am, needless to say, decidedly opposed to the deliberate cruelty toward migrants that's manifested by so many Republicans. Our policies should be as humane as possible at all times. But at the same time that we should keep fighting against the baseless fear of migrants from south of the border, a reality-based approach demands recognition that we will never eliminate this fear. We can only mute it, and that only by restricting its flow.
There's a level of migration—legal and otherwise—that's low enough to keep anti-immigrant fervor in check. At a guess, it's about a tenth of a percent of the country's population per year. We're currently at five times that rate, which makes a furious tribal response almost unavoidable.
I admit that this is an ugly conclusion. But short of deliberately embracing a fantasy-based view of the world, I'm not sure what alternative there is.
Migration of Depression era displaced persons to California in the 1930's caused no wars, although I have read accusations from elites this class of surplus labor was not civilized enough to maintain the standards established by the '49ers.
The response was the same then as it is now...
The Chief of Police in LA sent his officers out to set up blockades along the roads coming in from the East to turn back the Dust Bowl refugees.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-09-me-then9-story.html
Armed vigilantes would descend on migrant camps and beat and intimidate the "Okies"— drive them away from municipalities. One Hooverville, an encampment with 1500 people, was burned to the ground and the occupants were chased out without any of their possessions. And because Californians feared that the Okies were spongers, the California legislature changed the law so newcomers couldn't collect benefits until after 3 years of residency.
As for war, the US Communist Party membership skyrocketed during the Great Depression. Some historians believe that if FDR hadn't implemented his social safety net, there would have been a revolution...
https://www.history.com/news/dust-bowl-migrants-california
Anyway, California DID NOT welcome the Dust Bowl migrants with open arms.
Maybe better than "historical inevitability", which has a real air of a "who cares, really?" attitude to it, maybe say "human nature is typically shitty" to imply at least a chance that it can be improved over time?
Settler colonialism, which creates conflicts leading to wars, may be a type of migration but is not the type of most of the migration occurring today.
Do civil wars count? An influx of refugees from the Iraq War, combined with drought, is generally considered to be one of the key factors that kicked off the Syrian Civil War.
I think evidence verifies the Syrian 'civil war' was an Obama and CIA project.
I think you're confusing dissimilar cases, Kevin.
European states, as they have existed since WWI, were explicitly nation-states. They were intended to put people who shared a national heritage into a common state. Spain is the home of the Spanish people, who speak the Spanish language and share a Spanish culture. France is the home of the French people, who speak the French language and share a French culture. And so on. Some of the post-WWI countries (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) apparently had more diversity than they could really handle, but the template was the same: people united by language and culture living in borders that defined their national communities.
The two exceptions I can think of are Belgium and Switzerland. If you scratch a little below the surface, you can find plenty of special situations: many Basques in Spain consider themselves somewhat separate from the Spanish, for instance.
In a nation-state, it's very difficult to justify immigration. If a Pole wants to move to France, why should he be accepted? France is for the French, and Poles have their own state. This attitude seems retrograde and intolerant to modern cosmopolitan elites, but it's really built into the assumptions of the modern nation state, and no one has yet repudiated the model.
The US is an entirely different case. It was culturally diverse from the start, and diversity was expected and accepted. We had no problem letting the Pennsylvania Dutch have communities with their own language and religion, interacting little with others. The Swedish Lutheran Church in Swedesboro, NJ held services in Swedish until after the Revolution. The Ukrainian Catholic Church in Hartford, CT still holds most of its services in Ukrainian. Although there have been calls to designate English as the official language, they haven't gotten much traction. Americans are Americans because we (or our ancestors) chose to be Americans. When we naturalize a new citizen, the new citizen takes an oath renouncing allegiance to any other country. There is certainly anti-immigrant sentiment, which has shown in many ways (some quite ugly) and many places, but we eventually recognize immigrants as Americans.
We can take a lot more immigrants, because we explicitly allow anyone to be an American. This approach is foreign to anyplace in Europe. Even Belgium and Switzerland have their distinct communities, and outsiders don't really fit into either.
You seem to have a rosy picture of the immigrant experience in America. Once immigrants began coming in large numbers nativist sentiment rose in response. The 4 million Irish refugees from the Great Potato Famine were the first to feel the heat from the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement. People of Southern European descent were considered to be an inferior race. And let's not forget the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_in_United_States_politics#:~:text=Nativist%20movements%20included%20the%20Know,of%201907%22%2C%20by%20which%20the
I didn't mean to gloss over anti-immigrant sentiment, which has been present in the US, as far as I can tell, ever since there was a US. But it is not inherent in the US system the way it is in European countries. The US had open borders for most of its history, in the sense that there was no limit on the numbers of immigrants allowed. There was anti-Irish sentiment, but no one today would claim that Irish Americans aren't Americans. There's not much support for that idea these days, and maybe it wouldn't be practical given how easy it would be for nearly anyone to get to the US.
There was anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-Italian, anti-Greek, anti-Jewish sentiment as well, but no one would claim that these groups aren't Americans. Legally, Algerians living in France are French citizens, but they aren't widely considered French. Legally, Turks living in Germany aren't German, and never can be, and Germans wouldn't accept them.
A France or Germany with open borders would no longer be France or Germany, in the sense they've been understood for the last 150+ years.
We will most definitely not rationalize nativism, which is by its nature prejudice. This nation and liberty is not founded on empirical Hobbesian or Lockian logic, and has nothing to do with evolution or evolutionary biology/ideology, but instead the golden rule. What Jesus taught about loving your neighbor as yourself, and expanding the ingroup to encompass the outgroup, is without a doubt our finest moral instruction, and discerning human kindness from the actual truth and reality of evolution from the biological perspective, which is undeniable.
And by undeniable, I mean that evolution is real, but that we as moral creatures are not slaves to it, kindness and compassion are real, whether natural products of this evolution or some special form of complexity or gift beyond it.