printThe “demographic decline” argument, in the context of the immigration S.O.S, has been used as an excuse to swamp—and weaken—native European populations. From the fact that a nation isn’t breeding to some state-set, desired level—it doesn’t follow that said nation “deserves” to be swamped with better breeders.
Mark Steyn used to be a proponent of this non-argument. I dissected his fallacy in “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot”:
I am told that I don’t understand Mr. Steyn of the dooms-day demographics. So I listened to his “End of Europe” lectures, in which he vividly describes the multitudes of Muslims going forth to North America and Western Europe to be fruitful and multiply and push for Islam. Their Pan-Islamist identity trumps their new assumed identity. Because of numbers, Mark asserts, History is on the march in the Muslim direction. By 2030 much of what we think of as the developed world will be part of the Muslim world.
Here Steyn hits a brick wall. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, he proposes nothing much at all. Oh yes, if you’re not already fighting (futilely, in my opinion) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can show your marbles by publishing offensive cartoons, making rightwing movies, and writing right-wing text.
The “One-Man Global Content Provider” is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.
Declining birth rates?and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative?are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy western civil society and shore up the State.
If, as Wilders and Steyn contend, “Islam is a problematic religion; every school of Islam is basically at its core jihadist; and the religion is much closer to a conventional imperial project than to a faith” ? its religionists must be kept out. State-engineered mass immigration must be halted.
Yes, postmodernism, political correctness, and relativism hobble the West. Post-colonialism, however, affords it the opportunity to redraw the frontiers at the borders. This is the Wilders project. It has yet to be embraced fully by his American boosters. As Steyn has openly conceded, “For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on.
When he cops to being “wimpy,” Steyn means on immigration. He and others are latecomers to the immigration S.O.S.