Allow enough refugees in and they will provide all the evidence you need as to why a state can fail
The first step on a society's road to destruction can usually be called "stupidity". That stupidity can be due to naivety, or optimism, or ignorance, or even just plain stupidity itself.
Either way, it can be fatal. Here in Ireland we've had plenty of opportunity to study examples of how threats to other European societies have begun, so by this time we should have learnt about the suicidal stupidity of allowing foreigners uncontrolled access into one's country.
The Labour Party, however, seems to have learnt almost nothing at all about such matters. Joan Burton last week complained to an Oireachtas Committee that thousands of foreigners who were "legitimately" visiting Ireland to see relatives and to take holidays were being refused entry by "over-zealous" immigration officials. Other visitors had to endure "excessive scrutiny".
Excessive scrutiny: what does that mean, please, in a Europe which was only spared the simultaneous mid-air destruction of up to a dozen airliners a couple of years ago by a vigilant security official at Heathrow who noticed that a succession of Asian-looking men had identical bottles of mineral-water in their hand-luggage?
The bottles were found to contain a high-explosive that would have brought down any airliner. No subsequent investigation could possibly have revealed the causes of such a simultaneous mid-Atlantic multi-plane massacre, for the debris would have been spread over thousands of square miles.
To be sure, the intended authors of this massacre were home-grown Britons. But their cultural allegiance was and is to the jihadist caliphate that is apparently about to take over the failed-state of Pakistan. Which is why, as a general rule of thumb, the entire European Union should be very reluctant indeed to accept anyone from that particular country, and half a dozen other countries like it.
If you have ever wondered why a state fails, let me suggest the following uncontrolled experiment: allow a large enough number of refugees from it to enter your country, and they will very rapidly provide all the evidence you need as to why a state can fail. The answer is simple: the people in it.
The hiberno-left apparently still believes that we shouldn't have tight, stop-and-check airport security. Some US lefties were probably saying something similar about immigration controls at JFK when Mohammed Atta arrived to start a course in a flying school nearly a decade ago. The chances are that those freedom-loving American lefties were not trapped on a window sill 80 storeys up, with an inferno a few floors below, about a year later. Three thousand other people were not so lucky.
Moreover, the culprits there were part of a truly global franchise. Many of the Saudi plotters of 9/11 in New York lived in London, but the terror cell responsible was based in Hamburg. So the cultural and demographic threat to Europe is no longer some lurid right-wing fantasy. Many areas of Britain, France, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands have spiritually seceded from the polities they live within. With mass immigration, entirely new value-systems have arrived.
We know that thousands of bogus asylum seekers have arrived in Ireland in the past 15 years, we just don't know how many. Should we now deliberately allow their numbers to increase merely because Joan Burton -- using the special innocence-sensors which left-wing politicians are apparently born into this world with -- is able to declare all incoming foreigners are arriving here "legitimately"?
The shocking fact is that, last week's Oireachtas Committee notwithstanding, the issue of immigration has never once been discussed in Dail Eireann. Moreover, the ridiculous fiction-filled saga of Pamela Izebekhai, now finally drawing to a close, would only have been possible in a society where any discussion about "asylum seekers" is routinely reduced to a hibernian moral superiority competition, in which the victor is the Irish commentator who can emote the loudest and longest about the alleged plight of would-be aslyum-seekers back home. Though, frankly, I'd let the woman and her daughters stay, but as strict exceptions to the rule.
Entire areas of Ireland have been transformed by the arrival of thousands of her fellow Nigerians, who seem to find that the word "racist" rises with remarkable ease to their lips whenever they don't immediately get what they want. Are they the people Joan Burton wants to have waved through immigration at our airports? Or has she Pakistanis in mind? Or perhaps Algerians and Saudis? She should let us know, and maybe then the Dublin Airport Authority and gardai will oblige, and remove security measures for them all.
kmyers@independent.ie
