It’s unjustifiable to spend vast resources on educated and able migrants while their homelands crumble
It is tempting to dismiss the global refugee crisis as an “unsolvable” issue – a politically toxic but oddly immutable permacrisis that will continue to foam and seethe in dynamic equilibrium through endless political cycles. In fact, it is arguably escalating into a super-catastrophic risk to Western liberal democracy, on a par with Putin’s Russia, the rise of China and global pandemics.
For if there is a single volcanic problem that threatens to erupt into a populist uprising that reduces the European liberal tradition to ash, then it is the “unsolvable” issue of illegal immigration. It’s strange, then, that politicians on neither Left nor Right have come up with anything that remotely resembles a serious solution.
On the one hand, liberals continue to stick their thumbs in their ears, as they pompously spout 1950s refugee law and lecture on the need for “compassion” in a “global world”. Even more disturbingly, the ruling class still hasn’t got the memo that liberal democracies are existentially threatened by the rise of simple-wicked problems.
Simple-wicked problems are so explosive because, on the one hand, solving them appears scandalously simple. Stop the boats. Send them back to France. Crush the smuggling rings. Leave the ECHR. Take back control.