Just over the transom from a U. K. reader:
With respect to this post, I agree with much of Douglas Murray's book as well; in fact the only parts I could argue with are his somewhat lenient stance on various English Defence League type people (not his belief in their legal right to state their position though). But the great problem with European immigration is the importation of absolutely regressive thinking, even amongst the true victims of war in Syria and Afghanistan (the 'idiot' Liberals wrongly associate contingent victimhood with innate virtue, never realising that the problem of increased rape and harassment by immigrants is precisely due to the mainstream attitudes all but the educated among their number hold - contempt for women etc).
You're quite right. European 'progressives,' having been enstupidated by political correctness, don't understand that the 'regressives' from Muslim lands do not share their values and have no intention of assimilating, and that it is cultural suicide to let them flood in. (See here.) These leftists also make the typical 'progressive' mistake of thinking that great virtue attaches to being an underdog, a victim, poor, etc. You will have noticed that leftists have a knee-jerk tendency to take the side of the loser and the underdog even when the underdog owes his status to his own bad behavior and foolishness.
Of course we should help those who are in dire straits due to no fault of their own. But aid must be rendered in an intelligent fashion, and never at the expense of the country rendering aid. The principle must be: Country First! Trump's America First! is just a special case of this. For the Germans, Germany First! And so on. The prudent and reasonable look to the welfare of their own first, and only thereafter to that of others.
But I don't see a strong parallel with the argument against mainly (as I understand it) Mexican / Central American immigration to the U.S. Among those immigrants are certainly criminals and gangs (some quite well known escapees from Latin American guerilla wars, narco-wars etc), but not, generally speaking religious ideologues or people with culturally inbuilt regressive values, just the normal regressiveness of the uneducated individual from a Western society.
I grant you that there are differences which weaken the parallel. Better to be invaded by Catholics than by Muslims. Islam is a toxic political ideology inimical to Western values. Contemporary Catholicism, despite its infestation by leftist termites, is much less of a threat politically. But it is still a threat because Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, will most of them end up voting for the hard-Left Democrat Party. Here, by the way, is the reason why the obstructionist Dems so viciously and vociferously oppose Trump's immigration reforms: their long-term strategy is to win demographically. Illegal aliens from the south are for them undocumented Democrats. This is also why they oppose photo ID at polling places. They want to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Good leftists that they are, they hold the end to justify the shabby means. ('Good' in the preceding sentence functions as an attributive, not a predicative adjective, in Peter Geach's terminology.)
Looking from the outside, and as a frequent visitor to the U.S., my impression is that most Trump voters take more issue with two things: a) being left out of the economic picture no matter how hard they work; their enemy seems to be corporations, Wall Street, and / or big government (Bernie Sanders popularity on the left would seem to be evidence that this is felt across the spectrum of political allegiance); and b) the identity / victim politics of the modern Left, which only cares about LGBT etc as political entities, not normal people, or even 'workers' (the original victim category of Marx).
I can't see the 'experiment in self-destruction' of the UK being repeated in the US; it looks like a different experiment in self-destruction to me - more to do with abrogation of the responsibilities of government to the private sphere, and eventual failure of democracy combined with a self-absorbed intellectual Leftist politics that no longer cares about the mainstream.
I would be interested to see on your blog a more detailed exploration of these 'failed experiments' as you see them unfolding; how Europe and the US correlate and how they differ. Are different sets of civilisational principles at stake in each place?
'Failed experiments' doesn't seem to be quite the phrase. In Europe and the U.K., the experiments in self-destruction seem to be succeeding. Sharia courts? No-go zones? Places in England where an Englishman must fear to tread? I will have to do more research to be able comment on how the U. K. and U. S. cases differ. But I don't think the two experiments in self-destruction are very different. In both cases a mindless immigration policy engineered by destructive global elitists.
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