“Open borders” means no borders. “No borders” means no nation-states.

Philip Carl Salzman writes at the Middle East Forum about the ideas of borders and multiculturalism mainly as they affect Canada. His observations are applicable much more widely:

The idea of “open borders” is to open one’s heart and arms to everyone in the world, open one’s country to all comers, to encourage everyone to come. “Open borders” is an increasingly popular idea in the West. Mainstream politicians of the European Union and of the largest countries of the Union have thrown open their borders and admitted all comers. So too in North America. Canada has welcomed anyone who infiltrates the partially unguarded border as well as returning Islamic State terrorists. In the U.S., the Democrat Party increasingly opposes enforcing border protection and removing “illegal aliens” (to use the official government term), called “dreamers” by Democrats as they chant “abolish ICE” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

The writer finds “three lines of political thought”, flowing together, gave rise to “the new enthusiasm for open borders”. They are “multiculturalism, utopianism, and ‘social justice'” – each one of them in itself “ill advised”. He examines their respective effects on the disastrous “progressive” idea of open borders. The whole article needs to be read in full, but we are only concerned here with cultures – high, low, and forced into co-habitation.

Of multiculturalism in Canada he writes:

In the past, people in Western countries wished to protect and preserve their ways of life, their cultures. It was therefore common for immigration policy to encourage those from similar backgrounds and to limit those from different backgrounds. But in recent decades Western countries have shifted from “nationalism” to “multiculturalism.” The multicultural view, as the current prime minister of Canada has said, is that there is no mainstream culture in Canada, that Canada is a “post-national” state. The “progressive” elites of other Western countries, especially in western Europe, accept the multicultural perspective and have opened their doors to floods of Middle Easterners — most of whom bear cultures incompatible with traditional Western culture.

Western political and educational elites see multiculturalism as authorizing people of every culture around the world to come to Canada, the U.S., and Europe, and continue to live in their language and culture. Cultural relativism, the view that all cultures are equally good and valuable, is assumed and defended. So there is no reason to defend borders, or even to have them, because it would be fine to have unregulated flows of people from anywhere and everywhere. In fact, the “progressive” view is that the more people from many cultures that come, the better, because “diversity” is somehow “enriching”.

All of these arguments in favor of multiculturalism are false. First, different cultures — different languages, beliefs, values, rewards, and punishments — are incompatible and cannot exist in the same society. You cannot drive both on the left and on the right; you cannot have both male supremacism and gender equality. Some immigrants are actively hostile to European, Canadian, and American culture, and some have acted and others will act against their adopted society.

Second, immigrants in North America cannot live in the languages and cultures from their countries of origin. Canadian law and practice are based on European culture. The official languages are English and French. Every Canadian must speak one or the other, preferably both, to function effectively in Canadian society. Canadian law is based on British common law and French civil law. Furthermore, Quebec officially rejects multiculturalism in favor of “interculturalism”, which guarantees primacy of French culture.

Third, some 68% of Canadians expect immigrants to conform to mainstream Canadian culture. Canada and the United States are successful countries because their many immigrants, early and recent, have largely assimilated to mainstream Canadian and American culture.

Fourth, all cultures are not equally good and valuable, if considered by Western criteria of practical success and human rights. Are not immigrants leaving their home regions in favor of Western countries voting with their feet about which countries are better and which worse?

Fifth, exactly how “diversity” is enriching is rarely specified, and never demonstrated in any systematic or definite fashion. Was the Tower of Babel “enriching”? Nor do the champions of “diversity” ever advocate diversity of opinion — quite the contrary. Western universities no longer allow diversity of opinion, and have hired “diversity and inclusion” officers to suppress all but politically correct views. What the Western elites mean by “diversity” is a population of all colors, sexualities, and ethnicities, all saying exactly the same “progressive” things.

They inculcate their orthodoxy.

The ultimate aim of the globalists (“Glozis” is an apt word for them coined by our British associate, Chauncer Tinker, editor of The Participator) is world government.

As orthodoxy would need to be enforced, they would do their utmost to make it totalitarian world government.

But the problem of how any system of world government could actually be organized and administered is formidably challenging. Has any globalist tackled it? Not that we have heard.

So this man, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an American hippie and a Communist member of the Luo tribe of East Africa …

educated for a few years in an Indonesian madrassa …

then in America promoted through affirmative action to position after position beyond his abilities …

all the way to being elected to the presidency of the United States of America,  and so nominally to the leadership of the free world ….

has had, as a result of his inadequacy of understanding, his pusillanimity of character, his political puerility …

an enormous effect on the direction history is taking.

He has not just voluntarily but insistently surrendered the West to the mullahs of Shia Iran, empowering and enriching them to such an extent that millions of Sunnis are fleeing their homes and making for Europe in fear of them.

And the Europeans have no idea what to do about it. They dither about being humane, welcoming refugees, sharing what they have with their Muslim brothers and sisters. Christian-style. Self abnegation. Self-sacrifice. Not resisting evil. Forgiving. Not being racist. Caring. It  makes them feel good. They probably even expect gratitude …

… And, as nations, they are dying.

Already ISIS, who seized territory from the erstwhile and short-lived states of Iraq and Syria, has announced that Sweden will be the first European country to come under its caliphate.

This drift of populations, this overwhelming of the liberal democracies, is no longer hypothetical.  It is WHAT IS HAPPENING.

And it is not only changing geopolitical conditions, but also the very ideas on which Western political order and civilization are built.

The European leaders who are letting it happen, are all at sea. They don’t know what they’ve done or what the consequences will be.

Nothing anyone says will change their minds. But reality will. Reality has a nasty way of continuing to accrue consequences regardless  of whether it is reckoned with or not. The result is the end of the liberal democratic nation-state.

Who are the people who have let this happen?

They are the bien pensants, the Great and the Good; climate alarmists plotting world government; and the people who meet at Bilderberg get-togethers (like Peter Sutherland, the man we wrote about and quoted yesterday), who believe that they are the natural movers and shakers, the best qualified to steer the good ship Mankind.

They have steered it to shipwreck.

… to be tossed in the bowl of the world.

The Marxist Left has always – since the time of Karl Marx himself – wanted Communism to be international and universal. Through the greater part of the twentieth century, the Left hoped and expected that a Communist World would be ruled from Moscow. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United Nations became the favored HQ of universal tyranny.

Communism is gaining popularity now in the West. And Communist Internationalism is being promoted with enormous pressure by the most powerful of powers – the United States government under the Alinskyite (ie. Marxist) community organizer, Barack Obama. The method in use is not violent – but terrorizing all the same. The scare being propagated is that if we do not allow the self-annointed elite who know better than we ourselves what’s good for us, to rule absolutely and globally, redistributing wealth as they choose, in order to save the earth from destruction by heat (or cold, or floods, or drought), humankind is doomed.  

The nation state stands in the way of their dream. So the nation state must go. National borders must go.

And it is not only Marxists who desire that end.

Among those who bring intellectual weight to the Plan is Peter Sutherland, Chairman of the London School of Economics, and the brains behind UN migration policy.

He is very keen on migration. Getting populations on the move, shifting about, settling where they will, and taking their laws and customs with them. His contention is not that it will save the world from bad weather, but that it will make for greater economic prosperity, especially for Europe. 

He thinks that multiculturalism is working so well it ought to be the pattern for the whole world. 

He does not declare that nation states must go, though that will be the outcome of his policy.

Meanwhile the old countries of Europe must be in turmoil?

Yes.

The BBC reports:

EU should “undermine national homogeneity” says UN migration chief.

The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said.

Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural.

He also suggested the UK government’s immigration policy had no basis in international law.

He was being quizzed by the Lords EU home affairs sub-committee which is investigating global migration.

Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development, which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas.

So he would almost certainly characterize himself as a capitalist. One of those many capitalists who serve so well the ends of International Communism.

He told the House of Lords committee migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states”.

An ageing or declining native population in countries like Germany or southern EU states was the “key argument and, I hesitate to the use word because people have attacked it, for the development of multicultural states“, he added.

“It’s impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the other argument can survive because states have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them. Just as the United Kingdom has demonstrated.”

At the most basic level individuals should have a freedom of choice.

Sure. But – individual freedom under sharia law, which he would have prevailing in Islamic culture everywhere Muslims settle?

The UN special representative on migration was also quizzed about what the EU should do about evidence from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that employment rates among migrants were higher in the US and Australia than EU countries.

He told the committee: “The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others.

He apparently sees no difference between a “melting pot” and multiculturalism.

“And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”

Mr Sutherland recently argued, in a lecture to the London School of Economics, of which he is chairman, that there was a “shift from states selecting migrants to migrants selecting states” and the EU’s ability to compete at a “global level” was at risk.

In evidence to the Lords committee, he urged EU member states to work together more closely on migration policy and advocated a global approach to the issue – criticising the UK government’s attempt to cut net migration from its current level to “tens of thousands” a year through visa restrictions. …

He said the policy risked Britain’s traditional status as a “tolerant, open society” …

Mr Sutherland also briefed the peers on plans for the Global Migration and Development Forum’s next annual conference in Mauritius in November, adding: “The UK has been very constructively engaged in this whole process from the beginning and very supportive of me personally.”

Asked afterwards how much the UK had contributed to the forum’s running costs in the six years it had been in existence, he said it was a relatively small sum in the region of “tens of thousands”.

The EU has taken his advice. Third World – mostly Muslim – immigrants are pouring into Europe. No restrictions are applied.

It is hard to visualize how a plurality of legal systems will work with contradictory laws enshrining contradictory values. Will there be many police forces, enforcing different and clashing laws? Will individuals be allowed to declare under which law they would rather live? Under this one, murder is not allowed; under that one it is – as “honor killing”. Under this law homosexuals must be killed; under that law they must be treated with respect. Under this law women may be educated, drive cars, go bareheaded, move about without a male escort; under that law they may not. And so on. All within the same, nominally still existing, state.

“O brave new world that has such people in it!”

 

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, John Menary)