Migration - the real coming EU crisis

Italy has closed her ports to the NGO taxi service, and to the earnest young westerners with access to enough wealth to buy small merchant ships who have operated it, ferrying hundreds of thousands of Africans from both the maghreb and sub-saharan regions from the Libyan coast to the Mezzogiorno. And since it is not only these idiots but the Italian coastguard and Navy that has transferred migrants from their spanking-new Chinese rubber rafts for the trip across the Med, one wonders what orders they have now. Sailors are under an international legal obligation to respond to those in peril, but the law doesn't require us to go looking for them - so most likely their patrols have been restricted to the Italian coast, or even more wisely, they are now steaming to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations. 

I have printed before a version of the UN graphic below. Youth unemployment in Africa is between 25% and 70%. Over the next ten years the number of young Africans 15-24 will soar from 250m to over 300m - and the best guess is that some 50m of those will drift north, seeing their only future as recipients of European wealth. 

This bulge in the number of young Africans is coming at a time when global opportunities for uneducated and unskilled young men is approaching a nadir; robots have replaced them as factory fodder, and even the traditional entry-profession of taxi driving is now under threat from AI. We have seasonal opportunities in the UK for fruit pickers and horticultural workers, but want the workers to go back home when the work ends. These folk want to stay. 

What the nations of Europe must now decide - and the six-month Austrian presidency of the EU is determined to ensure they do - is how to tackle the people smugglers and thousands of giant-sized Chinese rubber rafts. The only realistic solution that I can see is European enclaves in North Africa in which we maintain migrant camps that can hold a million or more Africans - feed them, keep them safe from enslavement, provide basic medical care. And then send them home. 

Summer migrant surge exposes multiple EU failures

Well, you've read about it here many times. The many millions of young, male, African economic migrants moving North to make the move into Europe, driven by low child mortality rates achieved 15- 20 years ago that have caused a massive population bulge of young men for whom failing, despotic and corrupt African economies can provide no work. Global 3G phones and cheap Chinese crocs and clothing have convinced these poor sods that, from their 8th century barrios, without work, educational or social skills, they can fit right into a 21st century Europe. Even the UN, an organisation now dedicated to the destruction of the old-world nations, admits they're just economic migrants.

So far this year 84,000 have reached Italy and Europe's southern sphincter is tightening. Austria is upping its Brenner Pass border control, France continues a state of emergency and the Visegrad nations continue to flip a middle finger to Brussels. It's five years too late, but just about everyone now realises just how badly the EU has failed in controlling migration. Everyone except the deluded morons in the Berlaymont, of course, who even now see nothing wrong. Any fix at source - in Libya - is also now likely to be achieved by an informal group of European nations as the EU continues to be paralysed by hubris, failure and delusion.

Michael Gove generally visits the prestigious Mayr clinic on Lake Wörthersee each year to have his colon flushed out and to eat weed soup, and I'm sure Sarah Vine appreciates the work he puts in to keep his bowel in good condition - she writes in the Mail that she fears 'dark forces' rising in Italy over migration that may imperil the annual Gove arse-hosing. God save us.

The one key factor in EU migration

You will all be used by now to everything from constipation to Summer lightning being blamed on Brexit; the remoaners know no limits in seeking to establish Brexit as the cause of every ill. Cow dries up? Crop fails? Late hail? Ewe aborts? Brexit. A few hundred years ago the same people blamed witches for everything that went wrong with their lives. Today they blame Brexit. 

EU staff are fleeing the NHS in terror, apparently. If you read the Guardian, you'll get a picture of the UK as a fearful panic nation in which stoic Hungarian nose-surgeons brave being spat at on the bus for talking funny. It's utter rubbish of course; the Guardian is an open sewer and its content just as palatable. Now the Indescribablyboring runs its own 'Brexit panic fear brain-drain exodus'  made-up news story. Sigh.

There's really only one factor that determines more than any other the level and pressure of inward EU migration to the UK; the £ - € exchange rate. When it stood at €1.35 - €1.43 to the £, every raspberry was picked, every ward swabbed and every bathroom tiled. Now it's €1.13 and housing costs in London and the South East are through the roof, EU workers are asking 'what's the point?'

If politicians had known they could reduce EU migration so effectively by weakening the pound, they would have done it before.  If the Peso hit $0.50 rather than $0.05 then Mr Trump would not have to build a wall. People simply don't uproot and migrate unless it's worth it. Until Greece defaults, the entire Italian banking system folds, Deutsche Bank drops or Spain goes bust, and so long as the pound is weak, our EU gastarbeiter will drift home.

It's time to jail Rupert and Fenella

Back in the early 80s Rupert and Fenella's conspicuous hipness was pretty innocuous; they would open a baked potato stand in the newly renovated Covent Garden or build an accessible recording studio in a disused Methodist Church hall. Imbued with money and a desire to demonstrate their fashionable altruism they would tag these adventures 'community' or 'open' or 'collaborative' and the more astute amongst them would later sagely turn them to sound profitable investments when the reputational kudos was exhausted. 

These days Rupert and Fenella have to go a bit further afield to win youthful cachet. 

"Rupert's bought this old Scottish Trawler, yah, and he's re-purposed it to carry a couple of RIBs and built a mini clinic, all through this charity we've set up - 'Seaguard Rescue International' - we've had some pretty big donations including from you-know-who who's still using the billions he made on Black Wednesday ...yah, it's all terribly tax efficient and registered offshore; well basically Rupert patrols the Med just outside the Libyan territorial limit til he gets a satphone call from a refugee boat, meets it, takes the refugees off and lands them in Lampedusa. 

We've got a Facebook page with live Sat video feed and Rupert looks simply scrumptious and sooo dashing and we've saved hundreds and hundreds of lives yah and Tarquin and Penny Arsetrump are down there too in an old coaster with an onboard dentist - Tarquin's younger bruv, actshy- and they reckon the NGOs - that's what they call us - have landed nearly ten thousand refugees in Italy this year, yah, and we've got the peak season coming ..."

Of course what all the Ruperts and Fenellas and their socially committed financial backers don't realise, but what our government increasingly does, is that they're breaking the law - by knowingly making themselves part of the people smuggling chain facilitating unlawful entry into a EU country, they are quite possibly in breach of s.25 of the Immigration Act 1971 (as amended). Fenella's next phone call might be less hubristic.

"Mummy? Oh God it's awful I'm at Paddington Green police station and Rupert's been seized by the SBS and brought home and charged with people smuggling and they say we could get fourteen years! Oh Mummy please help; the Navy sunk our trawler with gunfire and Tarquin and Penny are on the run in Panama oh it's all such a mess ......" 

USA & Australia set the new standard for immigration

The majority of illegals held after trying to enter Australia are not Indonesians, Thais or Vietnamese but Iraqis, Iranians, Sudanese and Libyans. Australia's uncompromising migrant policy sees them held in camps on Nauru and Manus. They will not get in. 

Trump's measures, though they will result in many injustices for those who are true friends of America and who have the economic capacity to contribute, are no greater than the measures that Australia already has in place. Both nations now make it easier for the UK to make migration policy more targeted - excluding nationals of the 7 banned nations, but plus Pakistan and Bangladesh, from whence much of the UK terrorist threat comes.

The outcome is that Anglophone nations are now making the point that the world is not some free, open, ownerless place in which migrants hungry for wealth unavailable in their home countries can move freely en masse and without restriction . They are making the point that nations are already owned by the people that live in them and whose ancestors have fought, bled suffered and struggled to make them what they are. The message is 'Go and make your own'. The message is 'If we want you, we'll call'

The United Kingdom now has the opportunity to join two other great anchors of the Anglophone world. And despite Trudeau's words, migrants will find it a lot harder to get into Canada than they might imagine. 

2020 Migrant wave - and why Europe needs Russia as an ally

As a lengthy (45mts) but comprehensive briefing on the matter, the podcast doc by David Willetts now available from Radio 4, is reasonably good. Using the analogy of a python swallowing a pig, the blurb states 

"a big bulge makes its way slowly down the snake from the head end to the other end. That's a bit like what's happened to the UK demographically. The baby boom generation - which has changed Britain politically, culturally and economically - is now retiring. That means a large bulge of pensioners with big implications for the generations that come behind them. Other advanced economies face a similar challenge and emerging economies - most notably China - will be dealing with an ageing bulge themselves soon. But in Africa, the bulge is at the other end. A very young generation is about to make its way through the snake."

And it's the African bulge that is exercising minds in Europe. 

The current migration report of an Austrian intelligence service shows why the time for action is scarce: experts warn that 15 million young adults will be without jobs by the year 2020 in Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and seven other African countries And the masses want to emigrate to Europe.

Whilst the Middle East youth bulge is now passing through and will generally decline by 2020, two exceptions; Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza are both expected to rise to 29% by 2020, when Iran's will have fallen to 22%. Both flash points will continue to push migrants into Europe through Turkey and the Russian federal states. 

Only utter fools believe that the present policy of the world's navies providing a taxi service from points 3 miles off the North African coast to Europe is sustainable. For that's the range of the boats and the fuel now being used by the smugglers; it's cheaper to buy a VHF to make an SOS call just outside the territorial limit than 100 extra litres of diesel. No ship can ignore a distress call, and a nice NATO frigate will come collect you to take you to Italy.

But to contain the migrants in North Africa or the Middle East will need the active co-operation of Russia, both on the ground and at sea and at the UN Security Council. It may involve taking control of sovereign national territory in North Africa to hold (and feed) millions of migrants.

This is Europe's biggest challenge. And we need Russia as an ally to face it.