The unspeakably “extreme” suddenly becomes—the mainstream

Anyone who thinks seriously about the immigration problem knows that to save the West it will not be enough merely to stop further non-Western immigration; there must also be an out-migration of many recent unassimilable immigrants. Some readers have said that while they agree with me on this idea, I shouldn’t say it out loud, because it is so radical it will only alienate the moderates whom we need to win over to the easier idea of reducing or stopping immigration.

Now it turns out that my supposedly extreme idea is not so extreme after all. Under President Nicholas Sarkozy, France, the Western country with the largest Muslim population, is planning to start paying legal immigrants to return to their home countries. This is fantastic news, showing that it is possible to seek, not just the reduction of non-Western immigration, but its reversal. It suggests that even in the West’s present depths of self-abnegation, there are, to paraphrase a beautiful passage of Nietzsche’s, a thousand healths and hidden possibilities of life in the West. It is not over. The people who tell us it’s over, the people who sadly or smugly pontificate that we’ve already gone so far toward white minorityhood and civilizational collapse that there is very little we can do but wait and hope that somehow things don’t turn out too badly, ought to be spurned as the rotten defeatists they are.

Germany has had a program for the last 25 years giving resident foreigners financial assistance to leave, but it was only directed at asylees and it only covered their travel and resettlement costs. I do not know of a program that offered legal immigrants a significant sum of money in exchange for their leaving. It is possible that the great majority of immigrants in the West like their new life so much that no reasonable amount of money will induce them to return to their homes. Obviously a program such as that in France is not the complete solution to the immigration problem. But it is a step in the right direction. It is, above all, a sign of life.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 29, 2007 08:07 PM | Send