Just As They Want It: Europe’s Implosion, Africa’s Explosive Expansion

The author of the Hoover Institution piece excerpted below never mentions it, but the main force pushing policies which suppress White births — and open the gates of Europe to non-White invaders — is the Jewish power structure. Allowing Jews to control your media and your policies is like putting a hundred scorpions in your infant’s bed.

IN DECEMBER, a group of the French protesters known as gilets jaunes were stopping motorists at a traffic circle where the N151 meets the D951A, next to a forested hill in Burgundy. The gilets, so called for their distinctive yellow traffic-emergency vests, had banded together a month before to rally against a tax on diesel. Over several weeks, though, their grievance had grown less political (about this or that policy) and more existential (about the impossibility of making ends meet in France’s boondocks).

Yellow-clad Jerome, an ambulance-driver by trade, asked a visitor whether he’d been to nearby Clamecy. It’s magnificent, came the reply. The half-timbered houses…The birthplace of the novelist Romain Rolland…The renowned 13th-century Gothic church, tucked between the meandering Yonne and a smaller river called the Beuvron.

Jerome knew. He grew up there. “Did you really look at it?” he asked. “It’s dying.”

And it is. Clamecy had 5,900 people in the mid-1970s, and factories to employ them in, but it only has 3,900 people now, and most of them are old. Beautiful though its streets may be, attractive though it is to Parisians seeking country homes, most of its shops are deserted, and on weekdays so are most of its squares. You can buy a two-story house in the center of the nearby village of Dornecy for €14,000 — about $16,000. Much of rural Europe is undergoing a similar transformation. The cyber-rental agent Airbnb is trying to rally its clients to restore the village of Grottole, which sits atop a mountain in Basilicata, near the instep of the Italian boot. Grottole had 13,000 people in it during the Middle Ages, but it has 300 now, along with 600 abandoned buildings. In early 2018 the mayor of Ollolai, in Sardinia, put 200 houses on sale for one euro each in hopes of stabilizing the village’s population (which had fallen from 2,250 to 1,300 since the 1960s) and attracting the investment necessary to keep its beautiful housing stock from deteriorating. The same thing is happening in the Sicilian town of Sambuca. In Spain there is a real estate company called Aldeas Abandonadas that sells not abandoned houses but whole abandoned villages, starting at around $35,000. There are 3,600 such abandoned settlements in the region of Galicia alone.

For a long time, the need for infusions of labor and tax revenue led Europe’s politicians to turn a blind eye to a consistently unpopular century-long wave of mass immigration. In Europe, immigration means Islam and racial difference, the accommodation of which brings its own costs.

This paper is about the causes and dimensions of Europe’s demographic crisis; the consequences of resorting to immigration to solve it; the special implications of Europe’s proximity to fast-growing Africa; the international dimension of demographic decline; and how differing ways of addressing it threaten to pull apart the European Union, which, at the turn of 2019, was 28 countries strong.

How Grave is Europe’s Demographic Crisis?

Europe is shrinking at alarming speed. The European Union reached a population of 509.4 million in 2015, its constituent countries having added about a hundred million people since the early 1960s. That will turn out to be a peak of sorts. Eurostat, the statistical agency of the EU, predicts that its population will likely creep up to 518m by the year 2080. Europe will need to import people in order to do that. Without migration, Eurostat shows, Europe’s population in 2080 would fall back down to 407m, roughly where it was in the middle of the last century.

Other things being equal, for a population to remain stable, the average woman must have about 2.1 children in the course of her life. At that level she can “replace” herself and her husband. Europe’s birthrates fell sharply in the 1970s and towards the end of the century reached steady and sustained lows. Women in Italy, Spain, and Germany have averaged 1.3–1.4 children in recent decades, with Spain briefly plumbing a level of 1.1. That means trouble. Each generation is followed by another that is only two-thirds its size.

For a long time, Europe’s demographic downward momentum was disguised by immigration and by increases in longevity: The population stayed the same even as birthrates fell. Those increases in lifespan have now worked their way into the system, the median age has risen sharply, and the role of migration in filling gaps has become more obvious. Germany and Japan, in which half the population is over 47, are now the oldest societies the world has ever known, with Italy and Austria close behind them. (Perhaps a theory has been developed about why the four countries that hold that distinction should be the ones that made up the defeated Axis in World War II?) On top of this, there came in 2015 a cruel surprise: Life expectancy in the EU began to fall.

Americans are not immune to these trends. Their life expectancy has regressed in recent years, too, due to falling longevity among Whites. (In the landmark 2015 study that first sought to quantify and explain the decline, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton ascribed it to addictions and mental illness, citing prominently “the increased availability of opioid prescriptions for pain” and the falling price and rising potency of heroin.) Certain geographic regions have seen precipitous drops in fertility: In 1947 there were 55,000 people born in West Virginia, in 2018 only 18,000. But the country is far from any nationwide demographic trend that would point towards depopulation.

In Europe, by contrast, such trends have been in place for decades, and are well anchored. (Germany has had more deaths than births since 1972.) According to the late historian Walter Laqueur, the present auguries of demographic decline should not to be confused with early-twentieth-century doom scenarios, some of which might come to pass and some of which would not. “Yesterday’s prophets were dealing with future trends,” Laqueur wrote, “whereas those concerned with today’s Europe are dealing with developments that, for the most part, have already happened.”

There are many forces promoting childlessness today; one is economic: one generation’s pensions are paid for by the work the next generation does. Think of that younger generation as a “machine” that doles out money. Every member of the senior’s generation has the same right to collect money from it. But only a subgroup of the seniors paid the entire, prohibitive expense of setting that machine up, by having, rearing, and educating children. The childless never had to make that investment in the pensions they now collect.

In every generation, parents have hoped that children would provide them with support when they themselves were too old to work. In this sense, what Social Security and other forms of state-sponsored pension do is pool the risk of childlessness. Doing that does not eliminate the reasons for having children. But it eliminates the economic reasons for having children. In fact, Sinn explains, it turns most of the incentives for procreation upside-down:

“Earlier, childlessness was a threat to one’s own life that was to be avoided under all circumstances. But today, childlessness brings a massive material advantage, which more and more people are claiming. The new Volkswagen Golf, the vacation in the Maldives…these can be financed from savings that need not be spent on children’s education, or from what the wife can earn by choosing a career instead of children…The threat of childlessness, of course, is just as present as it was back then, except it is transferred onto the society as a whole.”

Immigration, and the Special Case of Africa

It may be wrong to speak of mass immigration as a choice. Certainly, no western European country over the last half-century has managed to do without it, despite consistent and overwhelming public opposition to it. The half-century over which European native fertility has been below replacement has also been a half-century of mass immigration, both planned (as in the German recruitment of Turkish labor for industry and mining) and unplanned (as in the sudden rush of “harki” loyalists into metropolitan France after the overthrow of French rule in Algeria in 1962).

Sweden is in a situation that no modern country in the West has ever found itself in. If the United States by 2016 considered itself overburdened with a population that was 13 or 14 percent foreign-born, how can we expect tiny Sweden, a rustic monoculture until the day before yesterday, to behave now that it has a population of which almost 19 percent has been born abroad. In many European countries there is talk about how, if migration isn’t slowed down, the country will eventually become unrecognizable. In Sweden, it may be too late to avoid that. Sweden’s Muslim population is now 8.1 percent. According to the Pew Research Center, Sweden will reach 30 percent Muslim by 2050 if refugee flows continue at the current rate and 21 percent Muslim in the unlikely event that they stop altogether. Already, foreign-born mothers account for more than 30 percent of Sweden’s babies.

The impact on European culture of mostly Muslim Middle Eastern and North African newcomers has long haunted the European political imagination. Only in the last decade or so has it dawned on migration specialists that sub-Saharan Africa might be the source of an even larger disruption.

Africa is adding people at a rate never before seen anywhere on the planet. In 1960, the so-called “Year of Africa,” the continent had 278 million people. Its population has since quintupled to 1.3 billion — and by mid-century, only a generation from now, it will double again, the United Nations Population Division predicts. The drama lies not only in the absolute numbers but also in their interaction with the opposite dynamic of western Europe, where the population will fall to a doddering half billion or so. The closer you look, the more disorienting is the change. In 1950 the Saharan country of Niger, with 2.6 million people, was smaller than Brooklyn. In 2050, with 68.5 million people, it will be the size of France. By that time, Nigeria, with 411 million people will be considerably larger than the United States. In 1960 Nigeria’s capital, Lagos had only 350,000 people. It was smaller than Newark. But Lagos is now sixty times as large as it was then, with a population of 21 million, and it is projected to double again in size in the next generation, making it the largest city in the world, with a population roughly the same as Spain’s.

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Source: based on a report from the Hoover Institution