Le ultime sconfitte elettorali di Angela Merkel nelle elezioni regionali tedesche segnalano un limite umano e psicologico evidente della cancelliera: desidera essere considerata da tutto il mondo “umanitaria” e non una “discendente del Fuehrer”.
Ma i segnali crescenti che riceve dagli elettori tedeschi indicano che una cosa sono le buone intenzioni, un’altra la realtà della politica. Certo, l’integrazione di ampi strati sociali immigrati è un obiettivo che può essere perseguito, ma nel corso di più generazioni e a costi molto alti. Se il numero delle persone da integrare è alto, nel breve termine è molto più probabile che le distanze linguistiche, educative e culturali portino molti degli immigrati verso la devianza sociale e il ribellismo. Una cruda realtà che vale per l’America, e tanto più per l’Europa e la Germania, dove il numero degli allogeni, procedendo con questo ritmo, potrebbe toccare entro cinque anni il 50 per cento della popolazione.
Angela Merkel took a shellacking in German regional elections recently, but she’s not about to get tougher on immigration, which is what provoked her bad results. She’s sticking with her open-door policy, even though it isn’t working very well. It is a typical feel-good policy that ignores reality: Merkel, and lots of other German leaders, want to prove that they are fine humanitarians, not the descendants of the Fuhrer. And so they “welcome” hundreds of thousands of refugees and are trying to turn them into good Europeans.
Alas, most of the refugees—including the many who would really love to assimilate—can’t do that. Not primarily because they are culturally alien, but because they lack the wherewithal to work in modern Germany. They don’t speak or write the language; they don’t have the technical skills, like mathematics, necessary to get a job; and they don’t know how to live in a Western city. So, while the Germans give them apprenticeships to learn work skills, the immigrants drop out to the tune of about fifty percent. The dropouts collect unemployment. Bottom lines: the taxpayers are paying for unqualified refugees, don’t like it, and send that message to the chancellor.
I’m old enough to remember the Los Angeles riots of 1992, when street gangs destroyed entire neighborhoods downtown. President George H.W. Bush went out to California to get advice from the locals, and one of the hot ideas of the moment was to empower the gangs, let them run businesses, and put their energy to work for the community. It sounded great, but only briefly. If memory serves me right (always a bit chancy), it was Peter Ueberroth who said “they can’t read or write, how in the world can they run a business?” So they went back to fighting, in which the thugs had advanced degrees.
Assimilation is hard and slow and expensive; you can’t just wave a wand and transform third-world illiterates into productive Western citizens. Maybe in a generation or two it can be accomplished. My grandparents continued to speak Russian and Yiddish, their children mastered English, and some of them even went to college, but it wasn’t until my generation came along, born 40 years after the immigrants cleared Ellis Island, that you had kids who were totally immersed in American culture. And we’re the best at it. Germany’s numbers are off-puting. In about five years, ethnic Germans will constitute less than half the population (lots of Turks).
Michael Ledeen
