“Europe rediscovers borders,” writes Kevin D. Williamson, and I would urge that so should we. “[T]he free movement of people called ‘al-Nasseri’ across the Mediterranean and over the Bavarian Alps” has been slowed some, with Germany and Austria… announcing “the implementation of border checkpoints.”
Checkpoints, of course, are not borders; they are what government erects when it wants to be seen to be doing something (I sound like Sir Humphrey Appleby of BBC’s “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” satires). A Brownian Motion of sorts.
And to what avail are checkpoints if you are going to eventually allow a deluge of Middle-Eastern men safe passage into your communities? As Mark Krikorian points out,
… it’s important to note that refugees from the Islamic world cannot be properly vetted. I don’t mean only that the Obama administration has a frivolous approach to “violent extremists,” or that the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shown itself especially competent in this regard. Rather, it is impossible to weed out jihadists from a refugee flow. Who are we going to check with, the Damascus police department? It’s not like any document claiming to be from Syria can be relied on; fake Syrian passports, for instance, are in great demand.
Back to Kevin:
… Berlin has pleaded for “solidarity” in the face of the crisis, studiously avoiding the question “Solidarity with whom?” Sweden, with its population of just 9.6 million, is expecting somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 applications for refugee status. …
… Poland has shocked polite society by making it clear that it would prefer a small number of refugees, if any, and that they be Christian rather than Muslim. …
… Different peoples have different countries for a reason, and that’s why there are — or should be — fences or their equivalents. Whatever your assessment of the merits of Switzerland vs. Syria, Switzerland is Switzerland because it is full of Swiss people, and Syria is Syria because it is full of Syrians. As in the United States, the fingers-in-the-ears refusal of responsible European authorities to recognize this basic fact of life — that human beings are not interchangeable widgets …
Question: Weren’t most writes at National Review once for the collectivist super-state that is the European Union?
The quest to engineer a single European identity is at the heart of the crisis (as is the US’s foreign policy). “It remains unmistakably true,” wrote classical liberal philosopher David Conway, that “from its postwar beginnings to the present, the principal advocates and architects of European union have been uniformly animated by collectivist objectives that are deeply anti-liberal in spirit and form.”
“The EU already has rights to legislate over external trade and customs policy, the internal market, the monetary policy of countries in the eurozone, agriculture and fisheries, many areas of domestic law including the environment and health and safety at work,” and it has extended its rights into “justice policy, especially asylum and immigration.”
And it is this illiberal impetus that has allowed bureaucrats in Brussels to usurp the authority of previously sovereign states and make policy for the Continent (while being immune from its repercussions). Were it not for the rigid controls the EU exerts over its satellite states—each European country would be likely to respond to “refugees” in a manner consistent with the wishes of the voters, rather than that of the bureaucracy and its crooked beneficiaries.
