A number of readers have sent in this article from Der Spiegel:
New [French] immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, confirmed on Wednesday that the government is planning to offer incentives to more immigrants to return home voluntarily. "We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that," Hortefeux said in an interview with RFI radio.
Under the scheme, Paris will provide each family with a nest egg of €6,000 ($8,000) for when they go back to their country of origin. A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families.
Hortefeux, who heads up the new "super-ministery" of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development, said he wants to pursue a "firm but humane" immigration policy.
The new ministry was a central pledge in Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign, who had warned that France was exasperated by "uncontrolled immigration."
I outlined a similar, although much more lucrative, program in two VDARE articles in 2005: first and second. I suggested that $25,000 per person would have a sizable effect.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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8 comments:
You are correct Steve, though IIRC France had some sort of offer like this some years ago. Probably both thinking on the same subject.
But ... it won't work.
1. No payout scheme will pass the "corruption problem," i.e. immigrants know that corrupt officials back home will simply steal all their money. Therefore ANY money in France beats no money (after it is stolen) back home.
2. If this is what the Government offers now, what can be extorted later on in an extended bargaining/haggling session? Only a sucker would take the first offer. Leading of course to forever bargaining. Because the infidel can always be persuaded to make even bigger payments.
3. Paying someone to go away is a sign of weakness. Steve your operating assumption and Sarko's are the same: that the world is made up of nice middle class people who won't use violence to simply take what they want. What this payout is aimed at is mostly Muslim immigrants. Who would see this as a sign of weakness by the infidel. Why leave when you can simply SEIZE BY FORCE what you want in France? Which in any event has a better climate and infrastructure than back home? Why not be a ruler in France through violence and intimidation than a mere village headman (if that) back home?
Fundamentally paying people off when there is no over-arching authority to go away is a sign of weakness and invites aggression. It's good business to dispose of lawsuits in some cases, perhaps. But bad decision making against an armed rabble determined to separate yourself from your wealth. Diaspora Jews and Chinese have done this because they were weak militarily, and hoped at least some of them would survive the riots/pogroms.
IMHO if anything the offer to get paid to go away will only invite further attacks, perhaps even calling in Tehran as patron/protector of Muslims in France and perhaps the "Independent Islamic Republic" or somesuch. A goodly portion of the Army is Muslim and can hardly be expected to fire on it's co-religionists if Muslims stage some separatist action. The Left would surely support it (because they are stupid). Tehran has made noises about being the "protector" of Muslims in Europe. They'll soon have nuclear weapons to match their missiles which can hit now to most of Southern Europe.
Meanwhile, I commend to your readers the French movie "Red Lights," about how a Frenchman gets his manhood back by killing his wife's rapist near Poitiers, driving down from Tours. The rapist is never explicitly identified as Muslim, though he is bearded, but the choice of geography is instructive (since it's where Charles Martel beat back the Arabs). The movie was a huge hit in France and presaged Sarko's victory. Available on Netflix. [Guy's wife is highpowered attorney, he's a sort of neer do well who finds meaning in killing her rapist.]
I think there is a significant portion of French public opinion that wants Muslims out. That sees traditional French culture (note Sarko's ringing defense of the French Revolution, itself revolutionary in the post-modern/morally-equivalent/PC era) under attack by PC post-modernism and Islam allied. That wants no amnesty for illegal immigrants (Sarko has said no to this proposal).
However, politically Sarko is much weaker, the ENArchs remain strong and entrenched, and the post-modern left committed to France's destruction in favor of ... some idiot utopia.
Have to agree with the first post: I can't see a whole lot of immigrants taking the offer. Those who do take the offer were probably going back for some other reason. Besides, they probably receive that much in welfare in 3 months, anyway.
Expulsion is a perfectly reasonable option, and the one Europe will have to resort to, ultimately (if all the natives don't die of old age first.) I think Western democracy is approaching the next threat to its existence. The first one happened when the US ultimately couldn't reconcile the conflict between freedom and slavery. The second related to the industrial revolution and the massive numbers of unemployed or underpaid. The third led to World War 2.
The fourth deals with multiculturalism & the Ponzi scheme known as the welfare state. The US cannot simultaneously have a massive welfare state and a higher quality of life so long as it grants birthright citizenship to anyone and everyone who manages to slip across the border before giving birth. The current interpretation of the 14th Amendment has created a Constitutional threat to our democracy and way of life. We cannot survive an executive branch, overextended in so many ways, that willfully and deliberately ignores the law for its own purposes.
I pray our leaders handle this crisis better than they've handled the last ones, but it ain't lookin good so far
It will still be nice to point to France, the left's favorite country, and say "see how your idols are doing it" to lefty's everywhere.
I get a kick out of doing this on the nuclear power issue and noting the blank, uncomprehending stares of the pinkos when I tell them that France gets nearly 80 percent of her power through nuclear energy, breaking their Marxist hearts.
I'm the first poster, I'll note that Denmark has elected (by Danish standards) a conservative government that has cracked down on welfare and immigration, particularly bringing in arranged spouses from abroad (Stanley Kurz's work in NRO on cousin marriage among Pakistanis in the UK cementing Pakistani culture and preventing assimilation in the UK has been eye-opening).
The UK has seen nice, respectable ballerinas in the National Ballet join the BNP (the ballerina in question lives with a Chinese-extraction boyfriend and has a son by him, hardly a racist). Her membership was revealed by some lefty activist and a witch-hunt primed but AFAIK it had no results and she's still dancing. The growth of the BNP and UK Independence Party has been almost entirely the result of both Labor and Conservatives failure to address the immigration problem.
You might even argue that the failure to address that has provided more fuel to Scotland's independence movement. From fringe it has grown to electoral strength. They might even win the next regional election.
There does seem to be in some European countries a sense of urgency about Muslim immigration and cultural surrender. If I had to pick a nation that would riot first over this issue I would pick Britain which has awful political leadership.
This is great news in large part because trends in France usually have large influence in the rest of Continental Europe (Britain tends to copy political and cultural trends in the US, for good or ill).
If France starts making more hay out of paying immigrants to repatriate themselves, you can expect other politicians, like the Italian Northern League, to propose similar measures.
Hopefully other countries will increase the level of payment per person so that more immigrants will take up the offer.
Old Right
Good luck to the French, I hope it works although I personally am pessimistic. I am certainly of the opinion that our biggest problem in Europe is Muslims who cannot be integrated. Unfortunately, here in the UK our media tends to get most animated about Eastern European immigrants - an issue that has been handled badly to be sure, but really a distraction considering that Eastern Europe has a damn sight more in common with us than any Muslim nation. The idea of a Muslim Europe scares the hell out of me.
An ounce of border control is worth a ton of "incentives" to persuade immigrants to return home.The ruling elites in both Europe and the US haven't changed substantially in the last couple of decades,and rulers too corrupt or incompetent to enact and enforce sensible immigration laws won't have what it takes to shift several million unsuitable people back to their countries of origin or ancestry.
Besides, any financial incentive offered to immigrants to return home is in effect an incentive for would-be immigrants to come to that host country in the first place.
Applying this to our own situation in the US, I'm having a hard time seeing this as a solution. A payout for illegals who have lived here many years and made a life here would be a nice way to address the humanitarian cost of a crackdown. But so would amnesty. In both cases, the problem is not so much what happens with the current crop of immigrants, it's the incentives we create for future immigrants.
I mean, trying to send any substantial fraction of the 12 M people here illegally back really is going to be a humanitarian catastrophe. It really will rip apart familes and communities, and have a huge economic impact. Softening that impact makes a lot of sense. But how do we do it without creating exactly the wrong set of incentives? We don't want to send, say, six million immigrants back home with a check and a better future, and then have another six million stream across the border to take their place.
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