Accepting thousands of migrants will change Britain and Europe forever, columnist Melanie Phillips has warned.
In an article for The Times, Phillips says that few seem have thought through the implications of allowing in many thousands of migrants into Europe. She also accuses the left of indulging in “virtue signalling” by holding up placards proclaiming migrants welcome.
“These people are merely telling us about themselves. Public expressions of compassion signify that a person is good. Their absence demonstrates heartlessness. This has been called “virtue signalling”, or mandatory emoting, and it has now reached its crazy apotheosis in the great migration crisis.”
She adds that many of the migrants are not refugees, as the left insists, but political and economic migrants.
“This is not a humanitarian refugee crisis. It is a political migration crisis: an enormous and unprecedented movement of peoples from the developing to the developed world which threatens to engulf Europe.
“It’s complicated. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone with a well-founded fear of persecution, which clearly doesn’t apply to the majority of these people who are not running for their lives.
“It is not Britain’s responsibility, Phillips says, to take in these migrants, especially as the Gulf States have so far refused to take a single refugee.”
It is not as if Britain can accommodate so many migrants anyway:
“According to the UN, by the end of last year almost 60 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes. Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum.
“Britain certainly can’t take them. Public services are already being stretched to breaking point, with a record population being further swelled by an unsustainable annual net immigration of a third of a million people.”
The consequences of all this will change Europe forever:
“The vast majority of this tide are Muslims. The UN estimates 70 per cent of these people are young men. If they settle in Europe, their families will probably follow.
“Europe’s culture will therefore be transformed. Angela Merkel has already admitted Germany will be changed by this “breathtaking” influx.”
To top it all, while Europe happily accepts so many Muslim migrants, it is keeping Christian refugees out:
“As Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has eloquently protested, Christians in the Middle East have been crucified, beheaded, raped, forcibly converted and ethnically cleansed. Yet our government has so far refused requests to grant asylum to Christians trying to flee Iraq and Syria. With few exceptions such as Poland and the Czech Republic, Europe’s Christian countries are shunning Christian refugees from Islamist terror while opening their borders to hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
“Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has said Europe should only let in Christians. For that, he has been denounced as a Nazi. But this lemming-like attitude will itself ensure that the spectre of fascism in Europe becomes a reality.”
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