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Death of Europe: Europeans are losing the place they call home, says DOUGLAS MURRAY
IS OUR continent on a suicide mission? Over the years of the recent migration crisis I have been travelling across Europe from the most remote southern islands of Italy to the north of Sweden, from the islands of Greece to the suburbs of France.
I have travelled to the places where migrants continue to land and the places where they keep ending up. Everywhere I have gone I have come to the same conclusion: our continent is in the process of self-murder.
Amid the day-to-day distraction of life and politics, it is easy to forget this biggest event of our time. All pale into insignificance besides the story of the loss by Europeans of the only place we had to call home.
Whenever this country does have a debate about immigration it is minuscule. It tends to focus on Calais. The British public sees footage of people sitting in makeshift tents or hurling missiles into the roads to slow the trucks down so they can board them and break into Britain.
Each time actors, celebrities and politicians head to Calais and visit the camp. They return to tell the British public that it must be more open-hearted and generous.
The argument they make is humane. It is an understandable reaction to human misery but it is a core part of our society's suicide mission.
Take that example of Calais. Before the latest clearance of the camp there were about 6,000 people living there. None of them should have been there.
By being there they had already broken every one of the rules that our continent put in place which demands they seek asylum in the first country of arrival. Almost nobody arrives into France first.
All these people have landed in Greece or Italy and made their way north.
And yet still the celebrities and others pick at our consciences. Can we not be generous and at least let in the people who are there? It is wholly understandable - and also ill-informed madness.
Over this year's Easter weekend alone about 8,000 people were picked up between the coast of north Africa and the south of Italy.
They were described - as everyone always is - as being "rescued". In fact what happens - what has been happening for years - is that each day boats filled with migrants set out from north Africa.
At first - after some high-profile sinkings - they pulled people out of their boats (or escorted the boats in) when they were close to islands such as Lampedusa.
But over time the European vessels have gone ever-closer to the shores of Libya. Today the smugglers hardly put any petrol into the barely seaworthy vessels they now put out.
The boats need go only a few miles out to sea before they are collected by European naval vessels and brought into Europe. The smugglers now do the smallest part of that journey. The Europeans do the rest.
Of course it is possible when standing in a migrant camp in one of these places or speaking to the people who arrive - as I have done many times - to think that perhaps our continent can cope with this flow.
From these far-flung outposts a few thousand people arriving every single day and then being shipped or flown up on to the mainland of Europe can seem a manageable prospect. In fact it spells a continent's catastrophe.
During the heights of the migration crisis of 2015, when Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up the doors of Europe to the world, the whole continent began to buckle.
But in reality that flood of millions into Europe only sped up a process that had been under way for years. Ever since the postwar period European governments had encouraged migrant workers to come in.
At first - as Chancellor Merkel herself admitted in a speech in 2010 - they expected the workers to return home. But they didn't. They stayed. As did the flow after that and the ones for decades after that.
The governments of countries such as ours failed to get anything right. All their predictions were wrong for decades. They were wrong that people would stay for only a short time. Wrong to think that they would not continue to come in large numbers.
Wrong that they might not want to bring their extended families to join them. And wrong to think that once the tap was turned on anything but very radical action could ever bring the numbers to a controllable level.
