The facts are stark: Europe must open the door to migrants, or face its own extinction |
I know what “civilisational erasure” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a minor bump over the past 20 years, the EU rate appears to be declining once more, and now stands at 1.38. The UK’s is 1.44. A population’s replacement rate is 2.1. You may or may not see this as a disaster, but the maths doesn’t care what you think. We are gliding, as if by gravitational force, towards the ground.
Civilisational erasure is the term the Trump administration used in its new national security strategy, published last week. It claimed that immigration, among other factors, will result in the destruction of European civilisation. In reality, without immigration there will be no Europe, no civilisation and no one left to argue about it.
Of course, we’re talking about different things. The Trump administration appears to see “civilisation” as a white and western property, threatened by Black and Brown people, regardless of whether they were born here or have recently arrived. This week, Donald Trump claimed that, with the exception of Poland and Hungary, European nations “will not be viable countries any longer”, as a result of immigration. Well, Poland has a total fertility rate of 1.2, which means a rapid slide to inviability unless it allows more immigration. “Civilisation”, as it has often been over the past two centuries, is in Trump’s case a racist and white supremacist concept. The erasure the Trump government appears to fear is of “white” culture.
There is and was no such thing. Our language, science, mathematics, music, cuisine, literature, art and – thanks to the legacy of colonial and post-colonial looting –........