predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity.18 By the time we got there, they wound up with a little more than that, the demographers having failed to take into account such icing on the
That would come as no surprise if you recall that statistic about Egypt’s economic decline relative to South Korea. And Mubarak’s thug state was considerably less decayed than Sudan and other Islamic hinterlands where by the dawn of the third millennium they had done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. Nevertheless, they are one in three of the global citizenry. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Niger, which is over 90 percent Muslim, increased its population by almost half—from just over 10 million to just over 15 million.20 In 2000, half a million of its children were estimated to be starving, but that was no reason not to add a few million more.21 Its population is predicted to hit just under 100 million by the end of this century—in a country that can’t feed a people one-tenth that size. Was it ever likely that an extra 90 million people would choose to stay within Niger? Samuel Huntington, in
Within a few years, Germany would be semi-Muslim in its political character. That doesn’t mean a majority of the population is Muslim, but the prevailing culture is. Recently, I saw an old film called
Though less bibulous, the new Europe is an unhealthier continent. I am not speaking metaphorically. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the city of Bradford, 75 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to their first cousins.24 Even the Neanderthal racists warning against the horrors of after mass immigration in the late 1960s never thought to predict that in the Yorkshire grade-school classes of the early twenty-first century a majority of the pupils would be the children of first cousins. Yet it happened.
The western elites stuck till the end to their view of man as homo economicus, no matter how obvious it was that cultural identity is a primal indicator that mere economic liberty cannot easily trump. If a man is a Muslim mill worker, which is more central to his identity—that he is a Muslim or that he works in a mill? So the mill closed down, and the Muslim remained, and arranged for his British-born sons to marry cousins imported from the old country, and so a short-term need for manual labor in the mid-twentieth century led to Yorkshire adopting Mirpuri marriage customs. Beyond Bradford, in the nation as a whole, 57 percent of British Pakistanis were married to their first cousins by the turn of the twenty-first century.25 If, like most of the experts, you were insouciant about that number and assumed that the seductive charms of assimilation would soon work their magic, well, in 1970 the percentage was half that. But back then there were a lot fewer cousins to marry.
Many non-Pakistani Britons were a little queasy about the marital preferences of their neighbors but no longer knew quite on what basis to object to it. “The ethos of relativism,” wrote the novelist Martin Amis, “finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.”26 That was why, even though the marital customs of the Pakistani community of New York were little different, you heard not a peep on the subject from brave American urban liberals still cheerfully making sneering cracks about inbred fundamentalist redneck southern hillbillies.
British Pakistanis were then officially less than 2 percent of the population, yet accounted for a third of all children born with rare recessive genetic diseases—such as Mucolipidosis Type IV, which affects brain function and prevents the body expelling waste.27 Native Scots families aborted healthy babies at such a rate they’re now all but extinct; Pakistani first-cousin families had two, three, four children born deaf, or blind, or requiring spoon-feeding and dressing their entire lives. Learning disabilities among this community cost the education system over $100,000 per child. They cost the government health system millions of pounds a year. And this was the only way a culturally relativist West could even broach the topic: nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the jolly old health-care budget. Likewise, don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against the polygamy, it’s just the four welfare checks you’re collecting for it. An attempt to confine spousal benefits to no more than two wives was struck down as discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights.
But this was being penny-wise and pound-blase. When 57 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to first cousins, and another 15 percent were married to relatives, and a fair number of those cousin couples were themselves the children of cousins, it surely signaled that at the very minimum this community was strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self- segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites, and so on. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self- segregation is of a different order.
A combination of entitlements and demography would cripple much of the developed world both fiscally and physically. The new Europe is sickly, and its already unsustainable health systems have buckled under the strain.
Unless you are in the government nomenklatura, or a member of an approved identity group with an effective lobbying organization, or a celebrity, “universal access to quality health care” means universal access to an ever lengthier, ever more bureaucratically chaotic waiting list.
As for the aging native populations, they were the ones who found it increasingly difficult to self-segregate. There was an entertaining Swedish public health professor called Hans Rosling who liked to use his “Trendalyzer” software to present zippy four-minute demographic computerizations of how the world had progressed over the last two centuries.28 He used to pop up on YouTube back before the “gatekeeping” or whatever euphemism the Chinese owners now use for their “family-friendly filtering.”
Professor Rosling produced fun stuff, showing how Botswana by 2010 had advanced, on major socioeconomic indicators, to where Portugal once was, and how Singapore had overtaken Scandinavia. But it would have been interesting to see him apply his Trendalyzer to parts of his own country.
Founded as a dock for the Archbishop of Lund, Malmo was one of the first Christian cities in Denmark. In our time it would become the first Muslim city in Sweden. In the old days, around 2011, 2012, I sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square in the heart of town. Aside from a few modernist excrescences, it would not have looked so different in the early days of the Lutheran church. I got lucky, and fell into conversation with a couple of young Swedes. Fine-looking ladies. They’re not entirely extinct, not quite, but already I miss Nordic blondes. At dusk, and against their advice, I took a 20-minute walk to Rosengard. As one strolled the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grew longer, and the gaps between fierce, bearded Muslim men grew shorter. And then eventually you were in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around were Muslim, and every single woman was covered—including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they emigrated to Sweden, where it was de rigeur, initially in Rosengard but increasingly throughout. Even then, ambulances and fire trucks did not respond to emergency calls without police escort. What was the rationalization Israel used at the Oslo Accords? “Land for peace”? In Sweden, about as far as you can get from Gaza and the West Bank, they would also trade land for peace, and wound up with neither. The Jews were the first to flee Malmo: soon it was just another town with a weed-strewn, decaying “old Jewish cemetery.” Nevertheless, it was not merely the Jewish graveyard that was destined to be abandoned, but the Lutheran ones, too.