Europe's immigration problem

 Victor Davis Hanson:

...

There are mass demonstrations in Britain against illegal immigration and crime that’s not treated in the way it is with citizens. There’s a perception that immigrants, many of them in Britain illegally, are not treated equally. And I mean equally in the system, that they’re not treated severely as they should be, according to the law.

In Germany, there are massive defections in support for illegal migration. Remember, former Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “Yes, we can let in people from the Middle East.” Mostly Muslims. She let in 1 million into Germany. It’s got 15% to 16% of the population are aliens. They’re not German citizens. They weren’t born in Germany.

We have the same type of unrest appearing in the Netherlands and, to a lesser degree, in France.

Unfortunately, illegal immigration and unsecured borders are not Europe’s only problems. They made a conscientious decision—that is, most European countries—to lessen their carbon footprint, on the idea that they were going to go to zero-net emissions. Meaning, they would disavow all use of fossil fuels. The result, in a country like Germany, they shut down nuclear power plants, they shut down gas- and oil-fed plants. And the same is in true Britain.

And we’re seeing, across the board in Europe, energy prices spiking. And average citizens can’t turn on the heat in the winter or air conditioning—to the extent they have it—in the summer. But more importantly even, their businesses are not competitive globally now because the price per kilowatt-hour is more expensive than even here, the failed state of California, which has the highest electricity cost in the United States. Again, because of similar policies of Europe.

But that’s not the only problem. The postwar order of 80 years is over with.
...

There is now a war, not in Chechnya, not in Georgia, but right on their doorstep with Russia and Ukraine. And the Europeans had not all made their promises, when Donald Trump came into office in 2017, to invest 2% of their gross domestic product on military affairs. Trump was severely criticized for badgering them. Now, almost 22 or 23 of the 32 nations have met their NATO requirements. And now they promise to go up to 5%.

But recently, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said, “We can’t afford the welfare state anymore.” And I think his subtext was: “We can’t afford to subsidize 15% of our population who came here, for the most part, illegally, and are on entitlements.“

But in a wider sense, the whole socialist paradigm is not producing goods and service that allow such general entitlements. The borders are insecure. Illegal immigrants are not assimilated, acculturated, integrated into the German, French, European body politic. And they’re gonna have a terrible time spending 5% of GDP to defend themselves. This is in addition to having to lower their $200 billion surplus with the United States.
...

Trump has demonstrated that you can control the borders and is also working on controlling spending.  Europe needs to catch up with Trump on both those issues. The attacks on fossil fuels are a huge mistake.  The war on alleged climate change is ridiculous.  There has been no material change in the climate despite the sky-is-falling nonsense of the left.