Hey, Germany. It’s legitimate to limit immigration

Just weeks after far-left candidates have won surprising victories in Democratic primaries for Senate and House in the United States, in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, and New York City, the Alternative für Deutschland party has won a widely predicted victory in the election last Sunday for the legislature of Sachsen-Anhalt, one of Germany’s 16 federal states. Most Democratic officeholders have rallied around their far-left nominees even as the Democratic Socialists of America national platform calls for abolishing police, prisons, and immigration enforcement agencies. In contrast, Germany’s long-established parties — Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and Greens — have promised to continue to regard AfD as a “right-wing extremist” group and not to support any coalition with it. Germany, in its commendable efforts to prevent any recurrence of or sympathy for its Nazi past, imposes limits on political activity Americans would find appalling. And the AfD in its beginnings in the 2000s, as Christopher Caldwell explains in First Things, had members and leaders with disturbing views. Currently, some of its leaders have views many may consider odious, like supporting Russia over Ukraine, but it appears less likely than some leftist European parties to transgress the boundary between criticism of Israel and incitement against Jews. The traditional parties’ case for isolating the AfD today is based on one issue, the same issue that has enabled the AfD to sprint ahead of the traditional parties in national polls—immigration. As Caldwell explains, “The Sachsen-Anhalt AfD was classified as ‘proven right-wing extremist’ for its ethnic conception of German citizenship.”The AfD is not the only European party characterized as “far right” for its advocacy of limiting immigration by establishment organs like the London-based Economist and most dominant news organizations on the continent. The establishment has looked benignly on immigration, including from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, as an economic boost for a Europe whose low native birth rates have reduced economic growth down toward zero and jeopardized the financing of its generous old-age pension and medical care systems.Voters have not been persuaded. In Germany, the AfD, though its strength is concentrated in the former East Germany, leads in national polls over the Christian Democrats, who have led the government most of the time since 1949, and the Social Democrats, whose roots go back to the 1880s.In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, though sidelined by an establishment-rigged court ruling for months, leads by wide margins in polls for the first round and runoff in the 2027 presidential election. One issue that may help her: Aid for air conditioning, scorned during this hot summer by intellectuals as an American abomination.In Britain, the newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham, boosted by his popularity in Manchester, has seen his party leap ahead of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But his party, despite its name and history, is still losing many working-class areas and is reliant on support from high-income, high-education, high-immigration metro London.As for Italy, the fourth most populous European democracy, its Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, initially labeled a far-right fringe candidate, celebrated early this month her achievement of the longest-serving head of government in the republic. What do Le Pen, Farage, and Meloni have in common? Their objections to immigration, and especially Muslim immigration. For which they have some reasonable basis. MICHAEL BARONE: WHAT A STALIN BIOGRAPHY TELLS US ABOUT OUR TIMEIn Germany, Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally opened the doors to more than a million migrants, most of them young men, in 2015, and, to protests, insisted “Wir schaffen das,” we can handle this. But as Germany’s foreign-born population has increased from 8.1 million in 2014 to 13.4 million in 2022, violent crime has soared (despite news media attempts to hide it), and immigrants have dragged down high school student test scores. Nor has the influx of Muslim immigrants spurred economic growth, as Germany’s economy suffers from self-imposed high energy costs and Chinese competitors threaten its auto industry. The establishment’s economic arguments for high immigration are in shambles. What I find most puzzling here is the evident feeling of the European establishment — and one might add that of their American counterparts as well — that opposition to mass immigration from culturally dissimilar sources is somehow morally equivalent to the Holocaust. Why is excluding arguably unassimilable people from your country morally equivalent to murdering millions and millions of people?Yes, both policies may be sparked by a dislike of characteristics which those excluded and those slaughtered are presumed to share — call it bigotry if you want, and make your valid point that not all members of any group share the characteristics of the group’s average. But when those characteristics tend to undermine the generally and increasingly improving ways in which the peoples of Europe and America have lived together over the lifetime of those of us born during World War II, is there not some reason people might want to exercise caution in changing the cultural mix?Especially in Europe, where populations haven’t had the success in assimilating newcomers that Americans have had. And perhaps in America as well, where we have been in danger of forgetting or denigrating our forebears’ accomplishments along those lines.Good counsel, in my view, comes from the liberal San Francisco-based economist Noah Smith. “Liberalism,” he writes in his Substack, “needs a new philosophy of immigration.”AfD voters, he argues, with American Trump voters clearly in mind, are not just protesting COVID-19 restrictions or responding to “economic despair,” as some of his liberal confreres have argued. It’s “anger over immigration.” But liberals need to recognize certain principles, Smith argues. That “migration is not a human right.” That “immigration law is legitimate.” That “immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans.” The European establishment lost sight of these principles when it cheered Merkel’s admission of more than 1 million, including tens of thousands of young men who consider it morally permissible to rape women not clad in hijabs. The American establishment lost sight of these principles when the Biden administration’s open borders policy allowed the nation’s foreign-born population to increase (as the Census Bureau has reported) by 8.3 million in four years, compared to 6.3 million in Barack Obama’s eight years and 1.6 million in Donald Trump’s first four. That leaves an uncomfortably large number of people illegally here. I’ve often made, while advocating legalization of many, though not all, illegal immigrants, that it’s a bad thing for a country and for the individuals involved to have a large number of people living here illegally. I continue to think that’s a valid argument today.MICHAEL BARONE: DEMOCRATS TRY TO BRUSH ASIDE ‘WOKE 1.0’And perhaps that view is having some effect. In the first 20 months of the second Trump administration, the Census Bureau reports, the U.S.’s foreign-born population has been reduced by 2.8 million. ICE enforcement doesn’t account for half that; obviously, some illegal immigrantss are choosing to leave before they’re forced to.Plus, as Noah Smith informs his fellow liberals, Germany is making it harder to get citizenship, France and Italy are tightening border controls, the European Union is toughening asylum rules, Canada is cutting back immigration, and Sweden is paying money to migrants who leave. It no longer makes sense for Germany to cordon off the AfD, as if it were bent on sending migrants to the gas chambers. And if anti-immigration parties have unsavory members, well, that’s a problem with other (all?) political parties as well.