Vox's Dylan Matthews: Europa Delenda Est

The deep thinkers at Vox have the solution to the "refugee crisis." Let everyone in!

Seriously. Everyone. According to Dylan Matthews [Email him]

"The short-term solution is fairly obvious," Joshua Keating writes at Slate. "The EU as a whole needs a more ambitious plan to rescue migrants." That's definitely true. But even the best search-and-rescue operation will only manage the problem. It won't go away until life in the EU is no longer dramatically better than life in the migrants' home countries. And while many migrants are fleeing violence and political instability in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere, many others are merely fleeing poverty. One survivor of this weekend's ship sinking was reportedly from Bangladesh. [The only real solution to Europe's migrant crisis is to let everyone in, by Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 21, 2015]

One of the problems with living in a PC Culture of Fear is that the concept ofis abolished.

If you literally believe that everyone in the world is interchangeable and the only thing keeping the Third World in poverty is the fact that everyone can't come to Europe, it naturally follows that everyone in the world should be allowed to come to Europe. And no one can argue against this, because if you do, at some point you are going to mention that everyone in the world is not interchangeable. And once you've done that, you're a racist.

The case that immigration hurts rich countries like those in the EU economically is so weak that even opponents tend not to make it.

Nationalism is on the rise in the EU at the moment, and is elevating racist anti-immigrant parties like the UK Independence Party or the Front National in France.

The case that it hurts low-skilled workers is heavily disputed and, in any case, addressable through transfer programs within rich countries.

For such a poorly supported policy, we sure put a lot of effort into maintaining it. The rich world spends billions of dollars every year on armed guards and planes and drones to make sure the global poor stay poor. It wasn't always this way: US and European borders were more or less open until the outbreak of World War I.

And it doesn't have to be this way in the future. We can, if we want to, "fast-forward to the world of the future where everyone can enjoy a First-World standard of living," as Bryan Caplan puts it.

A few sentences later...First, note the casual use of "racist." And second, the stupefying assertion that UKIP or the FN don't make economic arguments against immigration.Don't worry if it reduces wages anyway. We can just make more welfare programs. (This is the part the Beltway Right blanks out.)What were European racial attitudes like before World War I? Oh yeah. Never mind.It's all so simple! European institutions and standards of living can be indefinitely maintained, even when the population that created those institutions and standards of living is completely replaced and rendered politically powerless.

And if you are a reporter or "thought leader," it really is this obvious. Because anyone who says otherwise gets fired.

Of course, as Matthews notes, Europe still does have border security and armies. Few actually believe annihilating European populations with more finality than any military conquest could is a good idea. But they have no moral vocabulary to argue against it, at least not without facing social, financial, and even legal costs. So hypocrisy and poorly defined "common sense" is the only thing holding back the West from fully embracing suicide.

But that can only slow down the process. My guess is you'll see a bigger push for open borders as a result of all this. And one can't help but wonder if enabling an endless flood from the Third World is one of the reasons pro-immigration politicians launched the disastrous intervention in Libya to begin with.

Anyway, it's funny how people sworn to destroy us recognize mass immigration from the Third World as a weapon even as our leaders tell us it is a "strength." Maybe someone should just send ISIS a link to Vox.