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The West has sleepwalked into mass migration for more than a decade. Will a glaring breach of its borders jar it awake?
Eleven years ago, almost to the day, Europe was experiencing a migration wave that threatened to make the continent buckle. In the space of a matter of weeks, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East made their way into Europe, principally by crossing to the islands of Greece and Italy: “the soft underbelly of Europe.”
As various European countries started to panic, it was German chancellor Angela Merkel who decided to control the day. “Wir schaffen das,” she said in August 2015. “We can do this.” Merkel and some of her counterparts in the EU effectively suspended normal immigration procedures and opened the borders of Europe to anyone who wanted to come.
In those days, the route into Europe via Spain was relatively quiet. That was because the option of getting into Europe via Central and Southeastern Europe had been opened up, so there was less need for migrants to use the Spanish option. There were also effective agreements with the Moroccan authorities—unlike those in lawless Libya, for instance—which saved Spain from the most challenging of the 2015 waves.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press
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Douglas Murray is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.