Harden
your hearts.
According
to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 68 million people
around the world are or at risk of becoming refugees. The migration of a few
million people has already turned the European Union inside out and motivated
the election of an America-first presidency. What we have seen so far, though,
is nothing compared to what is to come.
Fertility
is declining in almost all the educated and prosperous parts of the world,
notably including East Asia. But it remains extremely high in the
least-educated parts of the world with the worst governance and the poorest
growth prospects.
At
constant fertility, the number of people aged 20 to 30 years will grow from 1.2
billion to almost 4 billion over the present century, and all of the growth
will occur in Africa and South Asia (notably in Pakistan, where total fertility
is 3.6 children per woman vs. 2.4 in India). Africa will be the main source of
new young people.
At
least 5,000 Africans died during
2016 crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. According to Frontex, a half-million
attempted the crossing last year, and the United Nations estimates that 2 million have done
so since 2014.
Writing
in The New Republic, Laura Markham reports
that a trickle of "extra-continental refugees" is infiltrating the
United States via Brazil, and that this trickle is likely to turn into a flood:
Because
of the high risks of crossing and the low odds of being permitted to stay, more
and more would-be asylum-seekers are now forgoing Europe, choosing instead to
chance the journey through the Americas ... Each year, thousands of migrants
from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make their way to South America and then
move northward, bound for the United States -- and their numbers have been
increasing steadily. It’s impossible to know how many migrants from outside the
Americas begin the journey and do not make it to the United States, or how many
make it to the country and slip through undetected. But the number of
“irregular migrants” -- they’re called extra-continentales in
Tapachula -- apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico has tripled
since 2010.
Markham
adds:
The
largest groups tend to be from India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Nepal, and
Congo -- demographics that do not, or likely would not, fare
well in European immigration courts -- but others come from Iraq, Afghanistan,
Eritrea, and even Syria, too. Their first stop is most often Brazil, which has
a favorable reciprocal visa law.
From
Brazil the migrant stream works its way through the jungles of Panama to
Central America, and through Mexico to the United States.
Africa
can't absorb its rapidly growing population. The World Bank estimated in 2014
that between 1993 to 2008 the average per capita income of sub-Saharan African
economies barely budged -- it increased from $742 to $762 per
year (measured in 2005 purchasing-power parity-adjusted dollars). Africa
retains the fertility behavior of pre-industrial society, with an average of
five children per female, but lacks the infrastructure, education, and
governance to absorb them into economic life: 64% of sub-Saharan
Africans live on $1.90 per day or less.
The
problems of sub-Saharan Africa (as well as Pakistan and other troubled
countries) are physically too large for the West to remedy: The sheer numbers
of people in distress soon will exceed the total population of the industrial
world.
That
means that there is a point in time at which the most devout pussy-hat wearing,
virtue-signaling, politically correct liberal will pretend not to notice millions
of starving children dying before his eyes.
President
Trump's reported comments about certain countries as sources of prospective
immigrants may sound callous. He simply is ahead of the curve. The hour is
already late to put a merit-based immigration system in place with effective
enforcement against illegal immigration. Mexico solved its economic and social
crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s by exporting the poorest fifth of its
population to the United States. With no prejudice to the Mexicans who chose to
migrate, it is understandable why Americans feel put on. But that is tiny
compared to what is headed towards us ten, twenty, or thirty years from now.
The
mass of human misery headed towards the industrial countries simply is too
great for us to bear. It is hard to see how humanitarian catastrophes of
biblical proportions can be avoided. The responsibility of an American
president is to make sure that they don't happen to us.