Francis Porretto nails it. As usual.

"Sweden has been unusually open to Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants these past few decades. In consequence, neighborhoods such as Rosengaard and cities such as Malmo have become zones of lawlessness, where life and property are not safe and packs of young Muslim men routinely terrorize ethnic Swedes for fun and profit. "Public order" in those places is a meaningless phrase; law enforcement is virtually unknown. The combination of uncontrolled immigration of Middle Eastern Muslims, an ethic of cultural relativism, and a luxuriant welfare state that guarantees a comfortable living to the willfully idle has brought Sweden near to social and economic collapse. Similar developments are observable in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and England.

There have been open-borders countries in the past that have not experienced such convulsions. When we ask after the differences between those cases and Europe's current ones, what do we find?

* A country that successfully absorbed a large influx of immigrants had no welfare state worth mentioning.
* The immigrant wave came overwhelmingly from religiously and culturally compatible sources -- not identical, but similar enough that assimilation was possible and the retention of some vestigial customs from the mother country was socially tolerable.
* The immigrants were required to assimilate to the language, laws, and public norms of their adopted home; they were expected to accommodate themselves to their new nation's institutions and customs, not the reverse.
* Law and popular sentiment were well aligned in all the above respects; no one entertained any fantasies about the immigrants' "right" to found exclaves, whether political, cultural, or linguistic, in their new land.
Clearly, when one proclaims a moral imperative to accept the downtrodden of other lands into one's own nation, and combines that imperative with non-assimilationist public policies, moral and cultural relativism, and a luxuriant welfare state, the consequences will be dire. The combination creates incentives so perverse that the affected nation's survival is imperiled, as we see in modern Europe."
(bold mine)

as always, clear thinking and fine writing from Eternity Road

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