Immigrants need us too

We can't talk about immigration without an oligarch raising his pious voice to remind us that we need immigrants. Do we? We do. We need caregivers, domestic workers, and couriers and drivers for transportation and distribution platforms. The Third World today is what the villages of our provinces were for the middle classes and urban entrepreneurs 70 years ago: a source of cheap labor. Yes, from this perspective, we need immigrants.

But it's worth reminding the oligarchs one thing: immigrants need us too. They need the market economy, the welfare state, and the rule of law that we have developed here, which have not been developed in most of the countries from which immigrants come. Once here, they need our schools, our hospitals, our police, our businesses. They therefore need us to preserve what made our societies attractive as migration destinations.

This is what, above all, is at stake in the sudden, uncontrolled, and massive migrations to which, by decision of its leaders, the West has been subjected in the last decade. The risks are many. The migratory flow, fueled by human trafficking networks, is large enough that it is not unlikely that it will exceed the capacity for reception. We are not immune to seeing our metropolises disfigured by the stains of poverty and violence that characterize Third World cities.

Integration, however, is not just a matter of logistics, of having jobs, housing, schools, and hospitals. It is also a political issue, of having a willingness to introduce migrants to respect for our institutions, values, and customs. In our politically polarized society, not everyone has this desire. The woke far-left hopes to use migrants in the war on liberal democracy, the market economy, and historical memory. And within immigration, there are political currents, such as Islamic radicalism, willing to collaborate in this subversion.

The marches against Israel in major Western cities are an example of what the combination of Wokism and jihadism can do. Since 1945, the West has tried to free itself from anti-Semitic ideologies and the popular prejudices that supported them. But the far left has not forgotten Soviet propaganda against Israel, and Islamic radicals can be confident that many migrants come from countries where hatred of Jews is officially encouraged, and that they have no inhibitions in this regard. This is how a great civilizational achievement—the end of anti-Semitism in the West—is being reversed. Today, Jewish students are threatened in American universities, and synagogues are burning in Australia, as they did in Nazi Germany.

Immigration, if uncontrolled and lacking integration, can simply be a means of importing into Western societies the problems that plague the immigrants' home societies. I can imagine the unpleasant surprise many Somalis in Sweden must have had upon discovering that armed gangs from Mogadishu had taken advantage of the migration chaos to establish themselves in Stockholm. Those who fled Somalia certainly didn't do so to find it again in Scandinavia.

Only orderly immigration, explicitly dependent on respect for the institutions and values ​​of Western societies, can safeguard the Western way of life for the benefit of all, both those already here and those arriving. Yes, we need immigrants—just as they need those in the West who believe in the principles that constitute it.