Retired Social Democrat central banker Thilo Sarrazin, author of the enormous bestseller Germany Abolishes Itself. about the effects of German immigration policy, gave an interview to Zeit offering the following advice (awkward translation by Google Translate):

Only political persecution and genocide are regarded as grounds for asylum, calls for the ex-politician in TIME. Refugees from the Balkans should be deported immediately.

A sizable fraction of the “Syrian refugees” appear to be Muslim Kosovars from peaceful but poor Kosovo.

Sarrazin’s graph- and stat-heavy book sold 1.2 million copies in Germany, but of course it has never been published in the U.S. And Sarrazin speaks English at least as well as First Lady candidate Columba Bush, but nobody in the American media has sought his opinion on what’s happening in Germany.

Back in 2011, Ed West wrote in the Telegraph about a Christopher Caldwell piece in The Spectator on Sarrazin:

By Ed West, January 17th, 2011

The great Christopher Caldwell (regular readers will remember he wrote a book, which I might have mentioned only 185 or 186 times, called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe) has a piece in The Spectator about the German publishing success story of the epoch, Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Abolishes Itself”) by Bundesbank governor Thilo Sazzarin.

To call it taboo-breaking would be an understatement. It would be like a late Victorian novel that featured graphic scenes of masturbation, lesbianism, and inter-racial sex, all of them involving members of the Royal Family. As Caldwell writes of Germany (and Europe’s) strangulated non-debate about multiculturalism:

Today, though, this limited scope for public discussion stymies the tiniest steps to fix problems that have been obvious in other countries for decades. You cannot say that Germany’s asylum policy draws idlers as well as refugees. You cannot say, as Sarrazin discovered during his time as a ‘finance senator’ in Berlin a few years ago, that welfare payments are more than sufficient to feed and shelter all but the most extravagant poor person, and ought to be reduced. Sarrazin apparently came to believe his country was dying of its etiquette, and spoke up. “I don’t have to respect a person who lives off the state while expressing contempt for it,” he said in 2009, ‘who doesn’t plan for the education of his children in a rational way, and is constantly producing new little headscarf girls.”

More daring, Sazzarin even declares: “In hindsight the guest-worker immigration of the 1960s and ’70s was a colossal mistake.”

Caldwell himself pushed the terms of debate with his 2009 book, which argued from a rational, moderate and humane viewpoint, and looking from a historical perspective in particular, that mass (rather than elite) immigration in Europe came with far larger costs than benefits. But why are we afraid of discussing it? It is not just decency or fear of offending people, nor of blood in the streets or a return to Fascism, but, as Sazzarin points out, vested interests. Caldwell writes: “He notes that ‘a host of integration specialists, Islam scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and activists, and a raft of naive politicians work hand in hand, and tirelessly, on belittlement, self-deception and denial’.

“That is why Sarrazin has struck a nerve in areas that go far beyond immigration and poverty policy. The regime of euphemism has not just led to mistakes. It has also empowered a class of so-called Gutmenschen in government and the academy. If Sarrazin is right, then much of what they have lately done is not just misguided but, however good their intentions, corrupt. They are fighting with considerable skill for their political lives. Sarrazin’s few political defenders, meanwhile, tend to have one thing in common — they are retired.”

Gutmenschen. What a wonderfully apt term for the self-righteous public servants for whom diversity really is enriching. …

So we either “celebrate” diversity, or get put out of business; but if something has to be enforced by law, then it can’t really be called a celebration as such. Is it any wonder people across Europe are rejecting “diversity”, if it comes at the cost of freedom, and requires a standing army of Gutmenschen to govern our lives? And they are rejecting it. As Caldwell writes: “A decade or so from now, Germans will be surprised that they ever looked on Sarrazin’s observations as anything but common sense. And that will be true whether they act on them or not.”