Asylum seekers are Europe's greatest defence threat, say Syrian refugees

My Syrian Christian friends - refugees themselves in Bucharest, though affluent refugees- strongly oppose admitting Muslim immigrants to Europe. They have reasons.

Quite by chance, one just called me, on business. He is an intelligent man of good family. (Christians make up much of the middle class in Syria.) He didn't call to talk politics, but he did anyway. 

His parents are in Syria, in a place which is pretty safe, close to the Lebanese border. But the forces of law and order have no power. If you were to commit a murder in Syria no-one would arrest you. Yet life goes on. 

He is horrified by the influx of refugees into Europe. He says it is caused by the people smugglers dropping their prices from $10,000 to $2,000 per person. He thinks the waves of refugees, if unchecked, will lead to 'civil war' in Europe.

The refugees are not poor, nor in fear of their lives, he says. They all have money to pay the smugglers, they all want to go to rich countries, not countries like Romania or even Hungary, and quite a few of them are ISIS supporters. He fears Muslims gradually taking over Western Europe.

Of course he exaggerates.

We all feel so very, very sorry for the 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian child, the picture of whose dead, cold body, lying on the shore, has gone all round the world. 

We all feel very sorry for his grieving father, Abdullah Kurdi. He said he simply wanted to give his children a better life. He is absolutely admirable and brave and reckless - and an economic migrant, not a refugee fleeing danger. By his folly he is responsible for his sons’ and wife’s deaths. He must live with this.

The family were not in Syria, but in Bodrum in Turkey, a pleasant seaside town where there is no war and where rich people whom I know choose to holiday. Mr. Kurdi worked as an odd job man. The family had been in Turkey for three years. They were in no danger till they boarded that boat.

They were Kurds. Turkey, which has a very large Kurdish community, is a much better place than the other countries where Kurds live, Syria, Iraq or Iran. As Kurds their life should have been much easier in Turkey, where millions of Kurds spoke their language and shared their culture, than had they been Arabs. They could have integrated much better into Turkey than into Europe. But for very understandable reasons Mr. Kurdi wanted to join the burgeoning Kurdish communities in Western Europe instead.

Beside the Turkish-Syrian border is Hatay province which includes Antakya (Antioch). Turkey stole Hatay from Syria in 1939, when Britain and France were preoccupied, and it always had many Arabs. It has huge numbers of Syrian refugees now and it seems a good place to house Syrians, rather than in Europe.

Yet 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany last month and over 800,000 this year, part of a revolutionary change not only in Germany but in the whole of Europe. 

The Australians insist asylum seekers move on after three years. For some reason that I do not understand in Europe asylum seekers are not given asylum for a year or two and then asked to leave but allowed to settle permanently, which is why centuries from now Germany will always have large Arab and Kurdish minorities. This will be irrevocable.

Refugees have every reason to want to live in Europe. It is Europe's duty to the refugees and, more importantly, to future generations of Europeans to stop accepting any asylum seekers from other continents. No-one drowns trying to get to Singapore because Singapore accepts no asylum seekers. This is the only way the drownings will stop.

We can pay poor countries to take them for us. I wonder how many Syrians and Libyans will accept refuge in Bukino Faso. We can try the experiment and see.

About half of the Vietnamese 'boat people' who managed to reach Hong Kong during the 1980s were repatriated by the British to the Communist regime – somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand. Many went to the United States. Many others were kept cooped up in squalid conditions for the best part of a decade. My feeling is that times have changed and Europe will take many of the tidal wave of asylum seekers and economic migrants. As more are taken, more will come.

Some think the population of Africa alone may grow by one billion over the next thirty years. As populations grow and developing countries grow richer the numbers of migrants, legal and illegal, will increase by leaps and bounds. The only alternative to indigenous inhabitants becoming a minority in each Western European country is to do what former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently said we must not do – create a Fortress Europe.

Admiral Christopher Parry, one of the Royal Navy’s cleverest strategists, warned in a paper in 2006 that Britain and Europe faced being overrun by mass migration from the Third World within 30 years, because of population growth and environmental destruction. The Internet, cheap flights and free international phone calls would hinder assimilation. (Is there anything left to assimilate to, nowadays?)

He compared the plight of the West to that of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The Blair Government liked to encourage senior public servants to indulge in blue sky thinking but Admiral Parry had taken it too far. He was silenced and accused of racism.

Nine years have gone past since then and he seems prescient.

What is clear now is that while Vladimir Putin is bad news, and ISIS much worse news, the real threat to Europe is not from Russia but from asylum seekers.