The greatly exaggerated report of the death of Europe

Cities as theme parks

The phenomenon of mass migration, the issue of our time, has provoked the degradation of the quality of life of the European. Petty crime has undoubtedly become an almost tolerated aspect of living in a large city. Housing has become largely inaccessible to someone working a “decent-paying job” due to the drastic increase in demand, as well as the accumulation of social services which weigh heavily on taxpayers.

It is therefore understandable that a feeling of frustration should take hold of those who desire a different state of affairs. One of the consequences of this frustration has been the proliferation of shock-style videos showing migrants loitering, littering, or even simply accumulating in the scenery of European cities. This is a very faulty tactic, one that stems from both a feeling of impotence as well as a misunderstanding of one’s position and power.

Notably, it places an undue emphasis on matters that are relatively trivial to solve without addressing the most profound and painful reasons why life in Europe, and elsewhere, feels more smothering to young people every coming day. For instance the recurring matter of the “cleanliness of streets” is of course a symptom of the lack of order that must be addressed. But the focus on this betray a petty vision of life, that desires the sterile sanatorium rather than a life of movement and action.

I posit that even if such problems were addressed head on, that legions of elderly were put to work on Sundays (as is for example done in post-soviet countries) to sweep the streets; that all migrants were sent back at once; there would be a realization that these things were but signs of decay rather than the cause. An underlying emptiness would remain.

The condition of the European today

The quality of life of the average European is without a doubt one of the highest in the world. Several weeks of paid vacation are guaranteed to virtually the entire working class. The access to travel across the continent is easy and relatively affordable. It is common to see working class families from all corners of Europe vacationing either in neighboring countries, or even as far as Japan or the United States.

These things cannot simply be taken for granted. It is an almost unfathomable amount of wealth, of social and material infrastructure that allows this. The next time you stroll around the architectural marvels that span almost any city in Europe, you would do well to remember the sheer material cost of it all.

Simply consider something like those green cast-iron and steel columns that you find around the city of Paris. They are pretty to look at, they generate revenue for the city in the form of advertisements, and the mere cost to build one is in the tens of thousands of euros. Think about the fountains, pavements, gates, fences, etc.

Whenever the polemic comes up of the “European lifestyle” consisting in lounging around outside with friends having a coffee, this is what is actually meant. The pleasant cityscapes, the business it generates, the ease of movement, all of this is the work of centuries.

And so it is simply inaccurate to decry the material condition of Europeans today. What they do suffer from, is that they are the stewards of innumerable assets that make their life more beautiful, but that also attract the entire world to come enjoy them too. To build anything new is an ordeal. It is a sacrifice. It is “erasing history.” The European has begun to worship his very own ruins, before they have even had a chance to appear and decay.

But this is an entirely different problem.

The causes of mass migration

I know that the discourse on the topic of mass migration has become increasingly ideological. From the Left we almost never see anything interesting anymore, because it’s become a pet project. However, on the Right we see either an identitarian lens, or a more worker-centric one that reminds us of the type of thing the Communist parties in the 80s were saying.

It is true that prior to that, we’d seen movements of especially Southern Italians, Portuguese to France, or elsewhere. There is also the matter of the Évian Accords, which established free movement of workers from Algeria to France. It’s worth dwelling on this as it often comes up. I must stress that this phenomenon had nothing to do with the immigration waves that we now observe.

There was no question of people settling with their families, acquiring citizenship, etc. It was entirely a question of work permits, and people going back when they were no longer needed. I would also invite everyone to look at the numbers and make a comparison, it is not even remotely similar. Besides, of the Évian Accords, there is virtually nothing that remains in French law as they were amended multiple times since then.

Moving on, the first truly consequent and relevant large waves of migrants were probably the ones seen in Belgium around the 1970s. As far as I can tell, it seems like they were heavily the project of business facing labor shortages. This was quickly copied in France to start, and elsewhere.

To give some more context, I remind that in the summer of 1973, after an incident involving an Algerian worker, Algeria suspended immigration to France, citing security concerns! A year later, due to economic crisis and rising unemployment, France suspended all work permits. These things were happening not so long ago, and yet they are today supposedly taboo and unthinkable. As if the entire world had since then acquired the right to settle in Europe.

I can probably trace the beginning of “mass migration” in France to the late 1970s. In 1977, during the term of President Giscard d’Estaing, the government introduced “family regroupment.” Under certain conditions, self-sufficiency, the prohibition of seeking work; family members of workers could come and live with them, for the duration of their work period. It’s worth noting that the case of Algeria remained separate, as the French and Algerian government had already established rules concerning Algerian workers in the Évian Accords mentioned above, subject to specific quotas. Algeria naturally hoped for workers in France to send back remittances to their home country.

In 1978, the Groupe d'information et de soutien des immigrés (a human rights NGO) summoned the Conseil d’État to review some of the provisions regulating family regroupment. The magistrates then produced a legal innovation, namely “the right to live a normal family life.” This consisted in the abrogation of the aforementioned government decree regarding the prohibition of seeking employment in France for families of migrants. This transformed family regroupment into chain migration, and also into the first emanation of the rule of judges in France.

Thus, we began to experience large waves of migrants who were coming not simply to seek employment, but to establish themselves permanently in France. It is likely that other European nations experienced similar ordeals at the same time.

There are thus two forces at play. Business which seeks cheaper and more available labor, and a human-rights motivated political class that will import any and all peoples seeking a better life for various humanitarian reasons. It is arguable which of these forces are dominant. I think that you can make a case for either depending on the situation and the specific country. What is however clear, is that those who are working in the civil service administrations are overwhelmingly of the latter camp and this regardless of the wishes of elected officials.

A faulty attempt to conduct propaganda

In response to this, we’ve seen different attempts to mobilize public opinion against the results of mass migration. You won’t be too shocked to hear that many of the prominent rage-bait producing accounts are actually run by politically involved people. For instance, one infamous one is run by a staffer working for the Rassemblement National party.

The strategy seems to be that the more videos of migrants loitering or degrading public infrastructure, the more votes there will be for right wing populist parties. I think this strategy has largely failed.

The reality is that most Europeans living in large cities simply don’t see mass migration as an existential threat. They may occasionally witness troubles to public order, but it largely doesn’t affect their daily lives. You can call this denial, but it’s simply that the narrative painted by such videos isn’t materializing in the vast majority of public spaces and remains mostly isolated.

Therefore, what has actually been the result of this strategy? Demoralization, loss of credibility, self-corruption. Telling Europeans that their cities are overrun by migrants in the midst of a political system entirely dedicated to bringing more in, creates a sense of impotence and victimhood. Additionally, if you live in Paris or Rome and you see a “right-wing account” spamming videos of migrants pretending that the cities in question “have fallen,” well if you’re not terminally online you’ll probably stop listening to it and consider them to be propagandists.

Naturally, if such videos were broadcasted 24/7 on national TV, then it would be a different story. This is simply not the case. Peddling lies has consequences, especially when one is not actually in charge of mass media. What it does do is paint a certain message to those sympathetic to you that don’t actually experience those realities.

Hence why we have seen that American conservatives largely consider this to be the state of European cities today. We have also seen very prominent public figures repeat these things, and with consequences to American-European political relations, trade policy, etc.

The death of the European city

Meanwhile, European cities are indeed decaying. But not simply because there are groups of migrants loitering in front of city hall. This is not ideal but I’ll remind readers that during the Paris Olympics this all disappeared within the span of a couple of weeks. If a liberal democratic government can take care of the problem so fast, then you could assume that this would also be the case in a different state of affairs (or perhaps not, and maybe that’s the problem).

European cities are increasingly becoming sterile tourism hotspots. The example I always have in mind is Florence. Easily the most beautiful city in Italy, with priceless architectural marvels, the work of a long gone republic that shook the entire world with its struggles and its art. Today, it is as pretty as ever, but it’s dead.

The streets are constantly full of tourists, the daily entertainment consisting of street musicians playing the vacation soundtracks in the evening. An active life is difficult for any local inhabitant, as motor vehicles are banned inside the city. Any local restaurant that gets placed on a tourist guide immediately becomes inaccessible, with crowds of tourists waiting hours just to tick it off their checklist. An overall lack of quality in clothing, food, etc all powered by a migrant worker class. The streets are increasingly cramped to create the most quaint pedestrian experience possible for this city turned historic theme park. And yet even around this theme park of a city, we find some of the most prolific and unique companies, with less than a hundred employees, creating products exported all around the world and used by the largest multinationals.

Rest assured, many of Europe’s capitals are still very much alive and we can easily cite examples such as Paris, Madrid, or others. But there is a constant impulse from authorities to turn these cities into museums. Climate objectives are cited to progressively forbid the use of cars within the “historic centers.” More and more cheap souvenir shops line their most prestigious avenues.

A city is attractive to young people because it’s a place where you can meet widely different people and do all sorts of exciting things. Movement is crucial. You should be able to be a vagabond for the entirety of the night. To get in a car, and drive around aimlessly. To have a meal or a drink at unreasonable hours and plan exciting designs with friends. A city that turns into a daycare or a walkable museum, where all work and infrastructure consists in tourism services, is simply dead. The Florence of today will not produce a Machiavelli or a Michelangelo.

Exodus

By making cities difficult and increasingly more expensive to live in, young people seeking to have families will simply leave. We observe this in Paris, where droves of people are leaving every year for some time now. If you can’t drive a car, then you can hardly afford to sustain a large family.

This is often encouraged by populists harboring anti-elitist sentiments. The message is to leave the cities to the decadent, and to build communities away. This is a completely losing proposition. The important jobs are in large cities, and that is where the centers of power are. By leaving, you are automatically taking yourself and others like you out of that equation.

So people are leaving, but housing remains out of reach? Where is the demand coming from then? It’s an interesting question and I don’t want to elaborate on this further here, but it’s worth thinking about. Perhaps something can be derived from the fact that we are importing a significant amount of people willing to work for lower wages, but also willing to live in lower quality accommodation.

All throughout European cities, there are Facebook groups where students, or young workers will practically beg for short-term second-hand rental contracts (which is mostly illegal but often tolerated due to the lack of alternatives). You see that in Amsterdam, Stockholm, and many other places. The availability of housing is so low, and the demand so high, that young people are resorting to posting humiliating resumes with their most attractive pictures for potential landlords.

In many cities, property viewings are a sight to behold, with dozens if not more people lined up with binders of their entire life history just to get a chance to rent an apartment. Here we can also point the finger at laws that are friendly to squatters, or the derisory accumulation of rent-controlled social housing arrangements that strangle landlords and discourage them from renting property. Not to mention the unbelievable environmental laws prohibiting rentals with less than satisfactory energy consumption grades. As a consequence of all this, the availability of rental property in Paris for example, has fallen by around 70% in just a few years.

Renewal

Europe is not a museum. The most sophisticated industrial products, used all over the world in critical sectors, hail from this continent. Whether in some factory employing a couple dozen people in Lombardy, or an R&D lab in a relatively unknown Swiss canton: there is still much done here. The much decried bottle caps, the much derided privacy regulations, these things will end up being copied anyway due to the importance of our markets. It is thus in everyone’s interest to have a strong, healthy Europe.

Europeans enjoy the highest quality of life probably ever achieved in human history. A plethora of social benefits made available to a population which is slowly spending away the capital accumulated by its ancestors. It is the envy of the world, and that is why it is so painful to see it squandered away by a ruling class that has no imagination, little competence, and no vision.

Were it evident that everything had already been spent away then perhaps it would be acceptable to surrender to the inevitability of decaying civilizations, to simply yield and die. But there is so much left to do. Our greatest cities still remain unconnected by high speed trains, our highways still present byzantine, separated, and antiquated methods of maintenance, our automobile and steel industries are yearning for unified regulatory regimes allowing them to crush their competition.

The migrant issue is not a fatality. Solving it is not the end goal, it is merely the stepping stone to unlocking the potential of European renewal.