Unchecked immigration has Germany on the brink

Ross Douthat

On New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women reportedly were raped.

Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees.

That delay has now cost Cologne’s police chief his job. But the German government still seems more concerned about policing restless natives than with policing migration. Just last week, Merkel reject- ed a proposal to cap refugee admissions, which topped 1 million last year, at 200,000 in 2016.

For decades, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have warned that Europe’s generous immigration policies, often pursued in defiance of ordinary Europeans’ wishes, threaten to destabilize the continent.

With the current migration we’re in uncharted territory. The issue isn’t just that immigrants are arriving in the hundreds of thousands. It’s that a huge proportion of them are teenage and 20-something men.

Among the mostly-lateteenage category of “unaccompanied minors,” as Valerie Hudson points out in Politico, the ratios in Sweden were even more skewed in 2015: “11.3 boys for every one girl.”

As she notes, these trends have immediate implications for civil order — young men are, well, young men; societies with skewed sex ratios tend to be unstable; and many of these men carry assumptions about women’s roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary Europe.

When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there’s time for assimilation to do its work. But if you add a million, most of them young men, in one short period, you get a very different kind of shift.

In the German case the important number here isn’t the total population, now 82 million. It’s the 20-something population, which was less than 10 million in 2013 (and already included many immigrants). In that cohort, the current influx could have a transformative effect.

It could double or triple this migration’s demographic impact, pushing Germany toward a future in which half the under-40 population would consist of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants and their children.

If you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a spokesman for the current German government.

You’re also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in terrorism but a rebirth of 1930sstyle political violence.

Prudence requires doing everything possible to prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders for the time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for able-bodied young men.

It means Angela Merkel must go — so her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.