The dominant issue in the West is immigration. The ruling elites are obsessed with filling up our lands with people from other lands. It’s nearly impossible to get members of the elite to discuss the matter, much less explain their reasoning. A politician or party that embraces immigration reform, even mild reform, is treated like a Holocaust denier. Even climate change, which is pretty much a religion at this point, is more open to debate than immigration.

Wholesale, uncontrolled immigration has become a spiritual good. It’s not a means to an end, as is often argued by critics. There’s no doubt greed drives some of it, but money is the not the goal for most open borders fanatics. Across Europe and now in the US, immigration is scrambling the political calculus, hamstringing the major parties as fringe parties surge. Yet, they refuse to debate the topic. Yet, the topic remains a taboo.

There’s an old line about fanatics that they cannot change their mind and they won’t change the subject. A corollary to that, with regards to immigration, is that immigration fanatics won’t change their mind and will never permit the subject to be raised in their presence.

That’s what comes to mind when reading a story like this one if the Imperial Capital Gazette:

In a gesture of German goodwill, the administration in this medieval city leased a newly renovated apartment building here to humanely — even comfortably — house dozens of desperate ­asylum-seekers. The newcomers from Syria and other war-
ravaged nations would enjoy freshly redone floors, cute balconies and shiny, modern appliances in a cheerful building near a timber-framed pub.

Then Meissen’s goodwill went up in smoke.

On a cool night six weeks ago, suspected right-wing arsonists struck the building, scorching its interior and rendering it uninhabitable days before the ­asylum-seekers were to move in. The attack added Meissen, a gothic castle town of 30,000 on the Elbe River, to a string of German cities caught up in an escalating rash of violence against refugees.

The acts include an ugly spate of arson targeting refugee centers as well as physical attacks on refugees themselves, marking the return of what critics say is an unnerving brand of xenophobia to Western Europe’s most populous nation.

A normal person would look at this and think, “Maybe it is not such a great idea after all to import tens of thousands of aliens and plop them into unsuspecting neighborhoods.” Of course, normal people would wonder why the locals never got a say in this great social engineering program launched by their government. What good is democracy if you don’t get a say in who is and who is not allowed into your country?

Immigration is one of those issues that exposes the big lie of democracy. There’s nothing more important to the life of a nation than deciding who is and who is not permitted to settle in the nation. The whole damn point of having countries is to keep the other people out. If the people are going to have a say on anything, it is the question of whether or not a country is going to remain a country.

Yet, the elites say that is not permitted. The rubes can vote on who gets to move some commas around the tax code. The rubes can vote on who will run the regulatory state. You can pick your own breakfast cereal, but the people in charge run the store, set the hours and decide what’s on the shelves.

The reason for all this is the people in charge believe, with the fanaticism of a convert, that they have a moral obligation to help the poor on your dime. This interview of Bernie Sanders is revelatory:

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …

Ezra Klein: But it would make …

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me …

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

In other words, open borders is about getting grace on the cheap by, on the one hand, bringing in the world’s poor, but avoiding the cost by dumping them into the proletarian neighborhoods. Sanders, for all his faults, should be lauded for leaving his religion in the synagogue and sticking with the economics.

You see this in the Post article:

The attacks are undercutting Germany’s image as the country leading the effort to aid a record flow of refugees into Europe, highlighting the rising social tensions in the region amid the avalanche of asylum-seekers. At the same time, the violence has ignited a heated national debate over what pundits here say is a rise in overt racism and intolerance — in a nation highly sensitive to both because of Nazi-era atrocities.

All this is happening as Germany takes in more asylum-
seekers than any other nation in Europe — a number set to reach an estimated 500,000 this year alone — while quickly running out of places to house them. As a result, the national government in Berlin is turning to insular and almost wholly white enclaves to take in the newcomers, who are mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

The creepiness here is that they don’t give a damn about the immigrants getting the business from the locals. What matters is the goodthinkers in Germany are being embarrassed by the conduct of the bad thinkers. Again, it’s a spiritual exercise, not a political or economic one.

The mistake immigration patriots make is in thinking the motivation behind open borders is simply monetary. There’s no doubt that greed-heads like Mark Zuckerburglar are in it for the cash, but most of these people are in it for salvation. They no longer believe in God, but they still believe in salvation and their brand of salvation is communal. To save themselves, they must save the world, however much it cost you.