Twenty years ago, the United Nations published a document titled "Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?". It was not a right-wing conspiracy theory, but a sophisticated working plan for Western democracies dealing with demographic aging. It has since gone mainstream. Just read what Richard Thaler, a Nobel laureate in economics, said this month: "We need more immigrants to pay pensions".
A recent article by Elsa Fornero, former Italian Minister of Labor, also explains the mentality of those who govern Europe and how they prepare the demise of its civilization:
"If the Italian population 'disappeared', we need not worry, because there will likely be someone ready to take its place; just look at the other side of the Mediterranean, where countries with highly dynamic populations and an age structure very different from ours, with many infants, children and young people and relatively few elderly people, appear. By accepting demographic decline as a social paradigm, by adapting to a society not only with fewer schools, uninhabited villages, abandoned houses and less mobility but also fewer cinemas, theaters, tourism and sports facilities, we are implicitly telling them that our land it is already theirs".
Western elites openly treat immigration as a mere economic resource to support welfare systems that would otherwise be bankrupt. They also forbid any discussion of the impact that these immigration numbers are having on the culture, customs and identity of a society. The very concept of "identity" is viewed with suspicion and branded as a "racist" fantasy.
Canada, (pop. 40 million) is now setting record goals in immigration history, with a plan to bring in 1.45 million more legal immigrants by 2025. The New York Times explains that in the two largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver, 60% of the population in just ten years could be composed of ethnic minorities.
Multiculturalism is becoming a key tool in the dissolution of national identities and the label of "populism" serves to exorcise a rational reaction to the great fears that have besieged Western societies for several decades: the fear of people facing massive, unregulated immigration; the fear that Western culture will dissolve into a blob of relativism and parallel societies (even The Economist denounced it); the fear of countries without external borders or internal moral legitimacy. It is the fear of a cultural disintegration that has been insidiously validating the probability the sociological majority disappearing and, ultimately, society itself.
New official British figures reveal that 10 million people (1 in 6) in England and Wales were born abroad; an increase of 2.5 million since 2011 despite government pledges to attempt to limit immigration.
Today, 90% of Britain's demographic growth comes from immigration.
The same shift is taking place in Sweden. In 2015 alone, Sweden welcomed 163,000 immigrants, the equivalent of 1.65% of its total population. Combined with other years, it is a demographic revolution: As of 2015, approximately 17% of the population were foreign-born.
"The Swedish Parliament unanimously decided in 1975 that Sweden is a multicultural country", wrote Kyösti Tarvainen, a professor at the Aalto University of Helsinki.
"At that time, more than 40 percent of the immigrants were my compatriots, Finns. The situation has changed: in 2019, 88 percent of net immigrants were non-Western and 52 percent were Muslims. Therefore, there has been a huge cultural change in the immigrant population, as its largest group has gone from being Finnish to being Muslim... with immigration unchanged, ethnic Swedes will be a minority in 2065."
Demographic change in a European country that has allowed itself to be submerged by non-European immigrants is rapid, often extremely rapid. As the French demographer Michèle Tribalat explained:
"Malmö had 328,000 inhabitants on December 31, 2016; Lessebo had nearly 8,800 on the same date. Lessebo is a town 230 kilometers northeast of Malmö. In 2002, 48 percent of children born that year in Malmö were born abroad or in Sweden to at least one parent born abroad, compared with 12 percent in Lessebo. In 2016, the percentage was 58 percent in Malmö and 57 percent in Lessebo".
The old Lessebo no longer exists.
Tino Sanandaji, a Swedish economist of Kurdish-Iranian origin who wrote Mass Challenge, a bestseller on how Sweden is imploding due to multiculturalism, noted that "Contrary to what some ideological historians would have us believe, Sweden has never been a country of immigration."
"Sweden has long been a homogeneous country and it is only in recent decades that it has begun to welcome a large number of non-European refugees. Until 1985, Sweden had very few non-Western migrants, only 2 percent of the population, because the Social Democrats, in power before 1968, were a fairly conservative party on these issues. But Swedish politics became more radical and in the second half of the 1980s the government began welcoming large numbers of migrants. In the period 1985-2015, asylum immigration in Sweden was about four times higher per capita than in other Western European countries, so that the share of the population of non-Western origin increased from 2 percent to 20 percent of the total population. Governments then believed that Sweden's social protection system would avoid the problems already observed in France and other European countries. The facts proved them wrong, but it took a long time to admit it".
That is why Swedish people recently voted in a conservative government. It is their last chance to stop this unprecedented national self-destruction.
In France now, nearly a third -- 29.6% -- of the population aged 0 to 4 is of non-European origin compared to 17.1% aged 18 to 24, 18.8% aged 40 to 44, 7.6% aged 60-64, and 3.1% over 80. This was recently revealed by Insee, according to the French National Statistics Institute, which examined the last three generations. 16.2% of all children between the ages of 0 and 4 in France are children or grandchildren of Maghrebi origin; 7.3% are from the rest of Africa and 4% are from Asia.
French President Emmanuel Macron just called it "demographic transition", a euphemism for a cultural replacement. In Callac, a small, quiet town with 2,200 inhabitants in central Brittany, the authorities want to settle immigrants to fight "desertification," noted Le Figaro. The aim of the municipality and a philanthropic foundation in Callac, to repopulate a small "aging" town with migrants, revitalize the town center and develop economic activities. The Callac model reportedly inspired the asylum bill announced by Macron for 2023: distribution of foreigners in "rural areas".
Former Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe, in his book, Immigration et Intégration: avant qu'il ne soit trop tard ("Immigration and Integration, Before It Is Not Too Late"), reports that between 2000 to 2010, Belgium welcomed more than 1 million immigrants into a population of 11 million. On September 5, the Belgian academic and economist Philippe Van Parijs, remarked to the newspaper De Standaard that "Brussels is no longer Belgium". Van Parijs conducted a demographic study, and his discoveries will surprise only those who want to remain blind. In ten years, the percentage of Brussels residents whose parents both have Belgian citizenship, has decreased from just 36% to 26%.
"[N]o fewer than three quarters of the inhabitants of Brussels are of immigrant origin. There are more Brussels residents of Moroccan origin than Flemings or Walloons".
This historic transformation was foreseen by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former UN secretary general, who in 2007 outlined this vision of the future of Europe:
"The unprecedented collapse of the population of Europe and its accelerated aging contrast with the still very rapid population increase in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. This will result in very acute imbalances! From a strictly quantitative point of view, immigration would be a solution. But we cannot treat the question as a problem of communicating vessels. Immigration without precaution risks imploding Western societies at the cost of very serious problems (culture shock, neo-colonial structures, unemployment, etc.)".
That is why the new Italian government just returned to blocking ships carrying illegal migrants. A country facing demographic suicide (1,707 kindergartens closed down in the last ten years) cannot afford to be overwhelmed by mass immigration without losing its national identity.
The West is at stake. The choice Europeans urgently need to make is whether they would like to transform their countries into a wholly different culture -- as the people who inhabited Turkey did after center of Christendom fell to the Ottoman Empire, or as Egypt did from being the land of the Christian Copts to that of a state where the Copts now face non-stop persecution (here, here and here).
Unfortunately, Europe, whether it likes it or not, has virtually no time left to decide whether or not it wishes to continue embracing open borders, multiculturalism and globalism, and, through passivity, find that its hard-won Judeo-Christian values, freedoms and identity will be quickly made extinct.
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
Marilyn Griffin