The reality of Europe’s migrant crisis

So here’s an interesting thing. Footage so striking that even the BBC has run with it. This is the film of a migrant boat landing on a beach in the south of Spain. In recent years for a whole variety of reasons, Spain has avoided the worst of the migrant crisis. Perhaps that’s why these images have broken through where the daily images from Italy this summer have not.

Anyway, it’s hard to think of a more vivid encapsulation of the ongoing suicide of our continent than this one. If you believe Angela Merkel, the European Commission and most of our political class, the people storming that Spanish beach are doctors, engineers and physicists fleeing the terrible civil war in Morocco, and just desperate to lend their skills to our continent.

The reality (as I recently described at book length) is somewhat different from that dream. These young men from a range of sub-Saharan African countries have come to Europe for a hundred different reasons and they will stay in Europe. Most will try to move northwards. And along the way the only employment most of them will find will be working with illegal gangs made up of people from their countries of origin.

Meanwhile, those people on the beach in Spain can happily stand for all the rest of Europe. They want to have a nice time, the sun is still shining and it’s all just a bit of a bummer that another boatload of people would illegally break into your continent while you’re working on your tan. But someone else will deal with them, won’t they? Except they won’t. It’s a myth, like the idea that it doesn’t matter because it’s just one more boat and the continent can easily take in this boat.