Waves from the South

About half a million migrants—as best we can count—have arrived on European soil this year. No one has a clear idea of what to do with them. They are landing at the rate of 1,000 or 2,000 a day on the Greek island of Lesbos and rioting outside the Budapest train station. Hungary alone has stopped 172,000 of them. Last week Denmark sealed its border to trains from Germany, and Austria stopped rail traffic from the east. Broadly speaking, these migrants are of three types:

• The first group are refugees fleeing the violence and destruction of the ISIS-controlled zones of Syria and Iraq, traveling overland on an artery that runs, generally, through Turkey, Greece, Serbia, and Hungary. They are mostly heading for three target countries: Germany, Sweden, and Britain. The first two have made public statements of welcome, German chancellor Angela Merkel even anticipating 800,000 migrants this year. Britain, meanwhile, has a reputation as a strong economy, and nearly all young people can speak at least a bit of its language.

• The second group of migrants are Africans for whom the anarchy in Libya has suddenly opened a corridor from the most destitute and violent societies in the world to the (for now) richest and safest. These travelers tend to move by boat across the Mediterranean, making landfall in Italy or Greece and proceeding north, sometimes after having applied formally for asylum.

With regard to these first two groups, over three-quarters of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, and Eritrea have their claims approved, and those whose claims are rejected are rarely sent back.

• The third group in the present wave are opportunists from all over the world—Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, you name it—who are following a well-established migrant route.

And it is this third group of economic migrants that is key. There now exists a major smuggling route, an economy of people-moving that responds to forces of supply and demand, an efficient Ricardian trade system connecting countries that lack food to countries that lack both labor and political will. With guides and mafias charging somewhere around $2,000 a head, this is a billion-dollar business, and it could well run into the tens of billions if nothing is done to stop it.

Almost all European leaders hopelessly confuse the two phenomena—the humanitarian emergency in the ISIS “caliphate” and the huge economic migration. The former is the business of nuns and doctors, the latter of regulators and border guards. Yet the humanitarian emergency is being used to squelch any public misgivings about the economic migration. An atmosphere of propaganda prevails. Daimler’s CEO, Dieter Zetsche, told London’s Financial Times that young, well-educated refugees are “just the sort of people we’re looking for.” These are the wretched of the earth when it comes to their claims on the European conscience, but the cream of the crop when their advocates are describing their effect on the European economy. Of Western European governments, only David Cameron’s appears to understand the distinction between refugees and migrants. Britain is welcoming 20,000 people from refugee camps in the Middle East—the truly needy, not those already on the European continent.

The present human wave is not primarily about the “lessons of history” or the moral grandeur of European statesmen like Mr. Juncker. Middle Easterners and Asians and Africans can exercise their reason, too, and when they do, this is what they see: Their lands are places of sickness, violence, penury, corruption, and early death. The per capita income of dozens of sub-Saharan African countries is still well below $1,000 a year. The lifetime value of the welfare benefits associated with Western citizenship (retirement, health insurance, etc.) reaches over $1 million per capita—and that citizenship is heritable! As long as the route to Europe is possible to anyone capable of borrowing a couple thousand bucks from the village elder or some relative in the West, no conceivable inconvenience, humiliation, or risk will deter whole families from coming—not even the sight of drowned children in the Mediterranean. These migrants are not stupid or heartless. They are rational. Hard as it is to look at the photos of the body of poor, 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, these migrants understand that their own children have a greater chance of dying from the bullets of ISIS or from diseases easily curable by Western medicine than they do on the riskiest northbound route.

After lecturing the world about human rights for the past several decades, Europeans are learning that you cannot behave the same way on a cultural and military frontier that you can in a sleepy suburb far from the border. Europe has judged, berated, ostracized, and sanctioned Serbia, Israel, and Russia as if the dangers those countries faced were no different from the ones faced in Luxembourg or Wales. Many of the European Union’s visionaries seemed to believe that the continent owed its stability to its genius for neighborliness, to the project of building the EU itself. Of course, the postwar peace was brought by American arms, and the EU was a symptom of this peace, not a cause. It should now be clear to Europeans that the despotism of Arab regimes was the real buffer between them and the poor peoples of the Global South. Europe must now provide the force to defend its own borders. Europe does not need to indulge in brutality, only to show resolve.

It is surprising how hard Europeans find it to tell the two apart. As we went to press, Hungary’s premier, Viktor Orbán, was warning that he would close and militarize Hungary’s border on September 15. While there is no telling how it will work out in practice, it is a reasonable course of action, given the emergency with which his country is now faced. Complicating matters still further, the migrants are predominantly Muslim, at a time when Europe feels, with good reason, under threat from Islamic radicalism. It has outraged Juncker and other Brussels authorities that Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland have all expressed a preference for Christian over Muslim refugees. Hungary’s premier Orbán expressed his feelings eloquently in a speech at a summer camp in July:

Juncker, in laying out his Brussels plan for assigning 160,000 migrants to various countries, insisted this was only a small percentage of the continent’s population. Nothing could be more disingenuous. The number is only a small fraction of the migrants who have already arrived in this year’s “class.” And Europe’s inability to stop—or even to manage—this year’s wave of migration will next year alter the calculations of Middle Easterners and Africans as they weigh whether to stay put or go for broke. Europe’s politicians ain’t seen nothing yet. They are trying to pass off a migration crisis as a humanitarian crisis. It may be on the verge of turning into a military crisis.