A Buyout Option For Europe`s Muslims?
Francis Fukuyama, a
recovering neocon, continues his attempt to distance
himself from neocon orthodoxy. Last week, in a Wall
Street Journal essay
"A Year of Living Dangerously: Remember Theo van Gogh,
and shudder for the future" (November 2), Fukuyama
heretically noted that immigration has proven a disaster
for the
Netherlands and Britain.
Of course, Fukuyama was only talking about
Muslim immigration,
not the good kind of immigration (i.e.,
everybody else in the world), so he`s not wandering
too far off the neocon reservation.
Further, Fukuyama`s policy recommendations come straight
out of Neoconism for Dummies:
"[C]ountries
like
Holland and
Britain need to…reformulate their definitions of
national identity to be more accepting of people from
non-Western backgrounds… [T]he much more
difficult problem remains of fashioning a national
identity that will connect citizens of all religions and
ethnicities in a common democratic culture, as the
American creed has served to unite new immigrants to
the United States."
Been there—done that! As I wrote about Europe on
VDARE.com over a year ago in a piece meaningfully headed
"Four Failed Immigration Approaches":
"One European country
has already tried out just about the entire neocon bag
of assimilative tricks—with deeply mixed results… The
French have traditionally tried to do with their
immigrants almost exactly what the
neocons recommend here: cultural assimilation,
education in civics theories, monolingualism,
meritocracy, separation of church and state, and all the
rest.”
And today we can see the result:
a week straight of immigrant rioting in Paris of
such intensity that one French official likened it to a
"civil war."
Bad timing, Frank!
Which brings us to the unmentionable alternative
solution that
Peter Brimelow has just pointed out in his
Why Not (Muslim) Emigration?: A more practical
approach than "fashioning a national identity that
will connect” etc. etc. would be
what we might call the “Sailer Scheme”: have the
disaffected simply leave.
A
push-pull policy could be very effective in getting
Muslims to go away. European countries should
combine the push of a crackdown on
welfare and
crime with the pull of a buy-out offer. Returning to
the Old Country with a sizable nest egg would be
alluring to many who haven`t assimilated into the
European middle class.
A
buy-out program, paying Muslims who are legal residents
of European countries to emigrate, could be a huge
bargain compared to more
rioting,
terrorism,
crime, and
multiculturalism.
Offer Muslim residents, say, $25,000 each to go away.
Permanently.
A family of five festering in the
slums of Paris,
Rotterdam, and
Birmingham could live in North Algeria, Pakistan, or
Indonesia like local gentry if they had $125,000
in the bank!
Of course, not all Muslims would accept the buy-out, but
those who stayed behind would tend to be the more
satisfied and less troublesome.
A
few technical caveats:
- The program could
only be open to legal residents in the country as of
today, to discourage both a
sudden influx and a
baby boom.
- To discourage
illegal return immigration, the buyout would only be
paid out over the course of, say, five years to
ex-residents now actually living in Muslim
countries.
- An immigrant who
accepts the buy-out but then wishes to return to the
European country for a tourist visit would have to
deposit the value of the buyout as a bond. Visa
over-stayers would be imprisoned.
At $25,000 each, for every million Muslims who leave,
the one-time cost to the taxpayers would be $25 billion.
For the Dutch, who have about
one million Muslims resident, the gross cost would
be just over 5% of one year`s GDP
($481 billion in 2004). (To get the net cost, you`d
have to adjust for savings to the taxpayer like the cost
of e.g.
educating immigrant children. It might well turn out
that this buy-out program is a fiscal boon).
Even if it took $50,000 each, that would still only be
one percent of the Netherland`s GDP per year for merely
a decade.
That`s a cheap price for solving the country`s worst
problem.
Although buy-outs are a win-win solution, they are
considered a
weird, radical idea by the reigning multi-cultis,
whose
most-quoted philosopher once asked "Can`t we all
just get along?"
But, in private life, where people care more about
effective problem-solving than competing in a
holier-than-thou sweepstakes, buy-outs are a common
practice.
When a business finds it hired the wrong people, it
often determines that paying them to go away is better
for all concerned that letting them hang around.
Europe must now know that it brought in too many of
the
wrong kind of people. It should act like a
responsible corporation and pay them to leave.
Not for the first time, the
Israelis have the right idea. I`ve already noted
that they`ve
demonstrated for us that
border fences work. Now it turns out they`ve also
tried buy-outs. Payments to leave have been used at
least twice in recent times: to pay off Israeli settlers
to exit the
Sinai in the early 1980s in the wake of the Camp
David Accords; and to vacate the Gaza Strip earlier this
year, successfully averting civil war within Israel.
Of course, for a European democracy to start a program
of immigrant buy-outs would be a crushing rebuke to
Western governments`
decades-long determination to
“elect a new people.”
That`s all the more reason to do it.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


