Permission from Gatestone Institute
Everyone now knows––even German Chancellor Angela Merkel––that she committed a political mistake in opening the doors of her country to more than a million migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It was, politically, a triple mistake:
- Merkel may have thought that humanitarian motives (the war in Syria and Iraq, the refugee problem) could help Germany openly pursue a migration policy that was initially launched and conducted in the shadows.
- Merkel mainly helped to accelerate the defense mechanisms against the transformation of German society and culture into a “multicultural” space — the “multi” being a segregated, Islamic way of life. The anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now a big player on the German political scene.
- Merkel raised anxiety all over Europe about the migrant problem. She might even have encouraged the United Kingdom to Brexit and pushed central European countries such as Hungary to the point of seceding from the European Union.
For many years, Germany was the country in Europe most open to immigration. According to Eurostat, the official data body of the European Union, between 2005 to 2014, Germany welcomed more than 6 million people.
Not all six million people came from the Middle East. The vast majority of them, however, were not from Europe. Clandestine immigration is not, of course, included in these figures.
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