“Europe Has Been Belatedly Discovering How Unbelievably Stupid It Was …”

Paul Nachman
VDARE
April 29, 2015

When Thomas Sowell writes something about immigration, it’s almost always worth quoting.  Here’s the latest example, from a Townhall.com article (Anti-Trust Law and Lawlessness, April 28, 2015) that’s really about something else:

We all make mistakes and some of us learn from them. What is even better is to learn from other people’s mistakes, where they pay for those mistakes while we learn free of charge.

Many Americans who say that we should learn from other people, especially Europeans, mean that we should imitate what they did. That may make those who talk this way feel superior to other Americans. But let us never forget that the most disastrous ideologies of the 20th century — Communism, Fascism and Nazism — all originated in Europe. So did both World Wars.

More recently, Europe has been belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values, and which often promote hatred toward Western people. [Emphasis added.]

Maybe that is a mistake that we can think about when Congress finally decides to do something about our open borders and our immigration laws that we refuse to enforce.

Beyond the intrinsic excellence of his writing, quotes on our subject from Sowell are especially valuable, since he’s not Caucasian.

Of course, what Sowell has to say would apply best in a polity governed by rationality, and the tone of his remarks above is that this is only a dim hope for today’s United States.  Indeed, he would probably agree with Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies who — while speaking specifically on immigration at a 2004 conference sponsored by Pat Buchanan  — noted that, in the U.S., “We make public policy by pathetic anecdote.”