Germany: A Ticking Time Bomb of Rage

From the Spectator:

Merkel’s policies have some pretty serious implications for Germany in the future. I’ve read many people arguing that it was actually a clever, shrewd policy to admit one million migrants because Germany has a low birth rate and needs more people. Yet the education levels and skill sets of most of the people who have entered in the past 18 months are, by German standards, extremely low; Germany has a fairly high-wage economy, especially compared to Britain, and there are not a whole lot of positions available for low-skilled men. 

The number of recent migrants who have found employment is exceptionally low. Employment rates among second generations migrants from the Middle East, mostly Turkish, are also considerably worse than ethnic Germans. On top of this, we need to look at what technology is coming our way: in the next ten years, for example, automated cars are going to be putting hundreds of thousands of men out of work just in Britain. 

All the Uber drivers I’ve spoken to have come from the Muslim world; all have been hardworking, courteous and obviously doing their best by their family; unlike me, they’ve made the effort to move country and have to put up with boring drunks like myself talking to them. But the low-skilled jobs they are currently doing are not going to exist for that long, and many of their sons will grow up with workless fathers, feeling confused about their identity in a rootless world, at far higher risk of mental illness, struggling to find work themselves, and feeling neither fully part of this country nor that of their father’s. 

In these circumstances an internationalist ideology rooted in a sense of brotherhood and rage at the rich, decadent, western world is going to appear hugely attractive. Because posterity is a concept that does not feature strongly in democratic politics an overwhelming aspect of the migration issue is ignored, that the real problems do not arise with the hard-working immigrants doing the nightshifts but with their sons who, contrary to what the likes of the LBC host James O’Brien hopes, will not thank Germany for their situation. 

But people react badly to these sorts of arguments, which is perhaps understandable. Ah, they’ll tell you, we’re far more likely to be killed in car crashes or by baths or in freak accidents. Of course we are, but none of these everyday tragic causes of death – all of which are in continual decline – have the same corrosive social effect as does having a section of the population out to kill the rest of us. 

I was in France this summer, which almost reminded me of visiting Northern Ireland as a kid; even in a village wine festival I counted three armed policemen and four soldiers with machine guns. Increasingly in England, too, there are heavily-armed police not just at railway stations but at religious sites; there is likely now to be more and more security at every event where large numbers of people gather. In Sadiq Khan’s words, such things are just ‘part and parcel’ of everyday city life, but they’re a very costly part of it and one that has a far larger impact than the relatively small death toll involved.

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