WASHINGTON – Millions of migrants mostly from Africa and the Middle East have swarmed Europe in the last three years – the result of what has been explained by world leaders as a war-driven “refugee” crisis.

Yet, a United Nations document, prepared in the year 2000 and rediscovered by WND, reveals the U.N. was already promoting the notion of “replacement migration” in Europe with the support of open-borders non-governmental organizations and “progressive” politicians.

The document – "Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations?" – details the plunging birthrates across Europe and identifies a solution: mass immigration.

The 17-year-old document contended mass immigration was necessary to replace the aging populations of developed countries. Without the migration of populations from the developing world, it reasons, economies will suffer because of labor shortages and falling tax revenues.

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"Therefore, among the demographic variables, only international migration could be instrumental in addressing population decline and population aging in the short to medium term," the report concludes.

The report specifically targets the U.S., Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Russia as prime candidates for replacement migration. It is not an obscure study, written and then ignored, but a founding piece of the pro-migration agenda pushed by the United Nations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and open-borders advocates.

"Following the publication of the draft of this study, the Population Division of the United Nations organized an Expert Group Meeting on 'Policy Responses to Population Aging and Population Decline' from 16 to 18 October 2000, at United Nations Headquarters in New York," the report notes.

"Replacement migration was one among a number of possible policy responses that were considered."

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According to U.N. documents, the meeting was attended by a host of government and non-governmental organizations and individuals, and it featured numerous policy proposals in support of “replacement migration.”

Attendees included the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. group that recently declared that mass migration is not only "inevitable" but "necessary"; the U.N. Population Fund, a group dedicated to "family planning" and the spread of contraceptives; and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Among the invited experts were two Americans, Judith Treas, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, and Michael Teitelbaum, former vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Both experts concluded that a large increase in migration would not benefit the United States, though Treas noted that immigration already accounts for about one-in-five new Americans.

“Immigrants will not prevent the long-run aging of the population, except in the highly unlikely scenario of a ten-fold increase in annual immigration levels,” Treas said.

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When writing about Europe, on the other hand, many experts supported “replacement migration.”

Veteran political commentator and former White House adviser Patrick Buchanan told WND the fact that the U.N. "signed on to a mass migration of Third World peoples to Europe and America, to replace the native populations, is consistent with its anti-Western ideology and comes as no surprise."

"Not long after its birth, the U.N. came to be dominated by delegates, diplomats and staff among whose operative principles was that the West was guilty of historic crimes against humanity, and that justice demanded the endless transfer of the West’s illicitly acquired wealth to a Third World it had oppressed," said Buchanan, a senior adviser to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and a former presidential candidate.

"Resentment, envy and hatred of the West among intellectual circles at Turtle Bay (the U.N.) – often echoed within the West itself – needs to be resisted like a disease, if the West is to remain the Great Civilization it has been," he told WND.

Former U.N. Ambassador Alan Keyes told WND he views the “replacement migration” plot as "a decisive existential threat."

"Given our form of government, careless immigration policies actually exacerbate an attack on the sovereign body of the people, whom the U.S. Constitution vests with ultimate human authority over the government it establishes, and the constitutional terms on which it is established," he said.

On Wednesday, at a keynote to a gubernatorial forum in Minnesota, former Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann also warned that migration from Islamic countries is a vital threat to Western civilization.

“This is something that we have to be cognizant of, and not be afraid of it,” Bachmann said, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

“That’s what I see in Minnesota: too many people who are being afraid of being called racists, bigots, Islamophobes — I’m not afraid of it, because what we’ve got to do is talk about the truth of the problems that are going on in Minnesota.”

Bachmann said America should “step up deportation in the country of people who are unwilling to bear allegiance to the United States,” stop immigration from Muslim countries and prevent the creation of “parallel societies within our society.”

Ten years ago, when Europe's demographic crisis was not as apparent as it is today, WND covered an international conference in Warsaw that warned of a coming "demographic winter" that posed an existential threat to Europe as the rejection of the "natural family" was leading to plunging birthrates and the consequent importation of millions of workers from countries with historic colonial ties who spurn Western values and refuse to assimilate.

Male-dominated migration

More than 1.3 million migrants applied for refugee status in Europe in 2015, a record number for the continent, according to the Pew Research Center.

An estimated 75 percent of Europe's asylum seekers in 2015 were young males, many without significant training or education. Among them were Gambian (97 percent male), Pakistanis (95 percent male), Afghanis (80 percent male), Iraqis (75 percent male) and Syrians (71 percent male).

Aydan Özoğuz, the German commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only 25 percent of recent migrants to Germany would find employment in the next five years.

"Many of the first Syrian refugees to arrive in Germany were doctors and engineers, but they were succeeded by many, many more who lacked skills," Özoğuz said.

In Sweden, the government accepted 163,000 asylum seekers in 2015. A year later, only 500 of these migrants had found any work, according to the European English-language news site The Local.

The migrants cost the Swedish government millions of dollars in financial and housing benefits from the state.

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In the Netherlands, 90 percent of Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers who entered in recent years remain dependent on social benefits.

Almost none were employed after 18 months in the country, reports Wakker Nederland, a Dutch public broadcaster.

In addition, a high percentage of so-called asylum seekers are not refugees fleeing persecution or war but economic migrants seeking to move to Europe for financial benefit.

Only 2.65 percent of migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy in 2016 were deemed refugees, according to a U.N. report. Out of 181,436 migrants, a mere 4,808 were granted asylum in Italy.

The same U.N. report notes that 90,334 of the migrants to Europe did not even request asylum. Instead, they entered into the black market economy immediately.

Many E.U. officials are no longer denying that fact, with one official claiming last month, "In most of the cases, and that is actually the case on the central Mediterranean route, we're talking clearly and manifestly about economic migrants."

European Council President Donald Tusk agrees with the assessment, concluding the current policy toward illegal immigration is "not enough."

Some politicians in Europe are calling for a strict crackdown on illegal immigration, placing the blame for mass migration on NGOs as well as the complicity of the European Union.

"You can't any longer speak about immigration but about an invasion organized, funded and planned by Brussels with the complicity of Rome," Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's Northern League party, claimed in May.

Migration 'inevitable'

Along with the E.U., the United Nations has been a major proponent of migration to the European continent.

The U.N.'s New York Declaration on Migrants and Refugees, a document adopted by the General Assembly in 2016, demonstrates the continued support for migrants provided by the U.N. It includes provisions to "strongly condemn xenophobia against refugees and migrants and support a global campaign to counter it" as well as "strengthen the positive contributions made by migrants to economic and social development in their host countries."

The U.N.'s views on migration are further outlined in a video created by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a U.N. organization that provides services for migrants.

A U.N. propaganda video released in July declares: "Migration is INEVITABLE. Migration is NECESSARY. Migration is DESIRABLE."

Watch U.N. video promoting mass migration as "necessary":

Some believe the actions by the U.N. and NGOs are leading to what French writer Renaud Camus termed "the Great Replacement," in which, over just a few generations, the names of places remain the same but the people and their values change.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Strasbourg, Luc Ravel, recently stated in the French publication Valeurs Actuelles that France was undergoing such a replacement, pointing to the influx of Muslim immigrants and their high birth rates relative to the native population.

"Muslim believers know very well that their birthrate is such that today, they call it … the Great Replacement, they tell you in a very calm, very positive way that, 'one day all this, it will be ours,'" said Ravel.

Ravel and other critics on the right provide as further evidence of an engineered "Great Replacement," the propensity of left-wing media and politicians to decry childbirth, promote abortion and simultaneously declare that migration is needed to raise birthrates, as evidenced in the following screenshots.

But the Great Replacement is seen as a positive for many left-wing political parties across Europe, many of which have been vocal supporters of migrants and regularly court them with policy proposals.

For example in Germany, a whopping 63.7 percent of Social Democrats and 65 percent of German Green Party voters support giving residents without an E.U. passport the right to vote in elections.

A migration policy paper written by experts under the German government's commission on migration came to a similar conclusion, declaring that migrants should be able to vote in local elections.

Germany's commissioner on migration, Oezoguz, further believes that the length of prior residency required for citizenship should be reduced.

But the European populace overwhelmingly rejects the current rate of migration.

According to a Pew study, 94 percent of Greeks, 88 percent of Swedes, 70 percent of Britons and 67 percent of Germans report they are unhappy with the E.U.'s handling of refugees.

Prophesying a 'demographic winter'

In 2007, at the fourth World Congress of Families, attended by 3,300 lawmakers and activists from 75 nations, Poland's vice premier, Roman Giertych, warned of a coming "demographic winter."

Returning to the centrality of marriage and families is the only way to avoid civilizational disaster, he insisted, declaring the family as "the hope for Poland, the hope for Europe, the hope for the entire world.”

"Without the family, there is no nation, there is no continent, there is no civilization, there is nothing," he said.

Just eight months before the congress, Mark Steyn, in his book "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It," warned that amid the shrinking of the European family, one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history already was making traditional views of European culture outdated.

He predicted Europe "will be semi-Islamic in its politico-culture character within a generation.”

While it takes a fertility rate of at least 2.1 children per woman for a nation to replenish itself, countries once known for big families, such as Greece and Spain, had fertility rates of 1.2 and 1.1 respectively at the time. The current rate in Greece may be as low as 1.1. Italy's fertility rate is 1.4, while the country's Muslim population has grown from about 2,000 in 1970 to 2 million today.

By 2050, Steyn wrote in September 2006, 60 percent of Italians, for example, will have no brothers, no sisters, cousins, no aunts, no uncles.

“The big Italian family, with papa pouring vino and mama spooning out the pasta down to an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs,” he wrote.

Italy is currently the gateway for migrants into Europe, and over 180,000 migrants entered Italy in 2016.

A paper by European Union representative Constantinos Fotakis concluded that “replacement migration” would be beneficial for the entire E.U.: “There is a growing awareness that restrictive immigration policies of the past 25 years are no longer relevant to the economic and demographic situation in which the Union now finds itself. Some European policy makers think that it is now the appropriate moment to review the longer term needs for the EU as a whole, to estimate how far these can be met from existing resources and to define a policy for the admission of 3rd country nationals to fill those gaps which are identified.”

French official Georges P. Tapinos expressed support for mass migration as a humanitarian consideration. Interestingly, the recent massive wave of “refugees” was justified almost purely on the basis of humanitarianism.

Earlier this month, President Trump hinted at the demographic decline in his speech in Warsaw's Krasinski Square, arguing the survival of the West rests ultimately not on armies and economies but on "strong families and strong values."

"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?" Trump asked.

"Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"

Trump then emphasized: "We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive."

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