It’s Little Reported in the US, But Liberal Enlightened Europe Is Talking About Walls and Immigrant Crackdowns, Too

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Glenn Reynolds:

From following the news, you’d think that immigration was strictly a U.S. problem, one brought to the fore by Donald Trump. But although Trump has certainly moved the debate to a new level here at home, other parts of the world are facing an immigration crisis that is, if anything, worse. And there are lessons in that.

The European Union, for example, is now beset with a flood of “migrants,” mostly from Africa and the Middle East. Some of them are fleeing war and civil strife; others are heading for a place with more economic opportunity or, at least, with welfare benefits that dwarf what they could earn at home through hard work.

Most of Europe operates under what’s called the Schengen Agreement, which abolished border controls among 26 European nations. Once within the Schengen Area, “any person, irrespective of nationality, may cross the internal borders without being subjected to border checks.”

This worked tolerably well for a while, but now, with hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of migrants in Europe or on the way, some European nations are beginning to have second thoughts. These have redoubled in the wake of last weeks attempted terrorist attack on a Paris to Amsterdam train, staged by a supposed Moroccan migrant. Although the European Union has so far ruled out any change to the Schengen agreement, officials from France, Germany and Belgium are talking about changes. The problem is that, right now, once migrants get into the EU, they can easily travel to where benefits are the highest, overwhelming locals. Germany, the most popular destination, is straining to accommodate all the arrivals. It’s reached the point that a German mayor, Boris Palmer, is talking about seizing private homes to accommodate migrants, a measure that is about as popular among citizens as you might expect.

One nation that isn’t part of the Schengen Agreement is Britain; to get from the rest of Europe into Britain you still have to show a passport and (depending on your home country) a visa. This policy, combined with Britain’s better economy, has led to refugees piling up across the Channel in France.  Refugee camps (The New Republic refers to a migrant “jungle”) have bloomed in Calais, where the Channel Tunnel connects to Britain, and migrants have rioted, broken into trucks, and stowed away on trains in an effort to get to the English promised land.

This has led the British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, to suggest that they need to be sent home. With the gap in living standards between Europe and Africa, Hammond said, the motivation to migrate would otherwise be insuperable. (Histories of the 19th-century colonial era talk about “Europe’s scramble for Africa.” That has led wags, such as Ross Douthat, to talk about today in terms of “Africa’s scramble for Europe.” In both cases, the motivation is money.)

Meanwhile, as Americans talk of a border fence, Bulgaria is building one, with razor wire and steel 12 feet high. And Slovakia is flat-out refusing to accept Muslim migrants, viewing them as dangerous and destabilizing. Migrants have massed at the Macedonian border and are creating tensions between Serbia and Hungary. Hungary is building a fence too. Norwegian politicians are suggesting that Norway should do something similar to Australia, which is sending unwelcome refugees to New Guinea or to prison.

As the numbers of migrants climb, and countries become weary of accommodating them, expect these tensions to grow.

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Useful idiots alert.

As many as 50 refugees were found dead in a parked truck in Austria near the Hungarian border on Thursday, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the discovery had shaken European leaders discussing the migrant crisis at a Balkans summit.

Yes, somebody trapped those migrants in a truck then let them die then decompose as a PR stunt to stun European leaders.
And they will do it again and again until and unless Europe capitulates to unbridled immigration from Africa, Syria and other Muslim hot spots.
65 countries have erected fences on their borders as governments try to hold back the tide of migrants./a>
Click the link to compare Israels West Bank wall to
Belfast’s ”Peace Wall,” Spain’s wall with Morocco, The Cyprus wall between Greek Cypriots and Turks, the Greek-Turkey wall, the Syria Turkey wall (see a pattern?) , the the India- Bangladesh wall.
Note, as you go down the page some walls have land mines, cameras, armed patrol trucks, watchtowers, motion detectors and so on.

Leftists are leftists, no matter which side of the Atlantic they are on. In Europe, they denounce our “inhumanity” to illegal immigrants, because it does not affect them. However, once it DOES affect them, they put on a display of how to harshly address the issue.