We Don't Have To Live Like This

The Magdeburg Christmas Market attack should remind us that these atrocities are a consequence of government policy, and that preventing them is only a matter of political will.

On Friday, the 20th of December, a rented BMW was driven into a crowd of families at the Magdeburg Christmas Market in Germany. Over 200 were injured, and an adult and toddler are among those confirmed dead. The perpetrator, arrested at the scene, is a fifty-year-old Saudi Arabian national, granted indefinite leave to remain in Germany in 2006. He has lived there ever since, working as a doctor — making him, until yesterday, a poster child for high-skilled, integrated migration that any European leader has in mind when they say, “Diversity is our strength.”

I discussed the implications of this attack the following morning, for Courage Media.

Much consternation happened during the BBC’s live coverage of the attack, with two guests speculating as to if marital status or lack of job prospects might explain why a man of fifty would do such a thing. Conspicuously, the suggestion of any connection to Islam was absent. These guests also failed to explain why, prior to the mass immigration of millions of men from the Middle East, and North and Sub-Saharan Africa into Europe, attacks on Christmas markets were not commonplace. There were no mass stabbings at Christian festivals by native Dusselfdorf divorcees; nor did impoverished East Germans, out of work behind the Iron Curtain, drive cars into crowds of children. There was no need for concrete barriers around Christmas markets only a decade ago.

Rather, they are perpetrated by a particular kind of newcomer: like the 37-year-old suspect from Iraq, whose attack on the Augsburg Christmas Market in Bavaria, also involving a car, was foiled by police earlier this month. Or 29-year-old French-Algerian Chérif Chekatt, a convert to “rigorous Islam”, who killed five and injured 11 when he shot and stabbed shoppers at the Christkindelsmärik, in Strasbourg, France, in 2018. Chekatt had 27 previous convictions, and was radicalised while in prison in 2015. Only last week, a mob of Syrians took over a Christmas market in Essen, Germany, chanting “Allahu akbar” in celebration of the fall of Bashar Al Assad.

Almost eight years ago to the day, on December 19th, 2016, Tunisian jihadist Anis Ben-Mustafa Ben-Outhman Amri drove a lorry into the Christmas market beside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Breitscheidplatz, in Berlin. 12 people were killed, and 49 injured. Amri had procured the lorry by murdering the Polish driver, Lukasz Urban, in a hijacking. He then fled the scene, and was killed in a shootout with Italian police, after exclaiming “Allahu Akbar” and opening fire. Amri was scheduled for deportation in June, 2016, but this was delayed due to a lack of paperwork confirming his identity. He had previously broken into Italy via small boat in 2011, following the Arab Spring, and then served four years in prison for arson.

You can read the full article here.

Even if the suspect is an anti-Islam atheist activist, it remains incontrovertible to say that, had this man not been in Germany, hundreds of families would not be agonising over the fate of their loved ones this Christmas.

Angela Merkel said, in 2015, that, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed. It won’t be the Europe we imagine.” Ever since, Europe has been drowned in a deluge of foreign criminals and welfare dependents from the third world. Of the ten stabbings recorded in Berlin each day, more than half are committed by non-Germans. More than half of all welfare recipients in Germany are foreign nationals. Despite the oft-repeated slur against native Europeans, “Diversity is our strength”, becoming the credo of our time, one would be hard-pressed to argue that mass immigration has been a net benefit for the host majorities who repeatedly voted to reject it.

After the Solingen attack, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised to resume deportation flights to Afghanistan. However, it transpired that the 28 criminals sent home were paid €1,000 each to return; and that many more “refugees” had been holidaying in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, while claiming asylum in Germany. This broken system culminated in the collapse of the “traffic light” coalition government last week.

With February’s snap election looming, insurgent populist party the AfD may campaign on a promise to deport all foreign criminals and “Imams who stand out for anti-constitutional agitation” to their nation of origin. They have already won Elon Musk’s support, who last night called for Scholz’s resignation. But it is unconscionable that so many have died while German politicians refuse to solve the problem they imported.

September’s Thuringia state election victory may foreshadow the AfD’s prospects in the February Parliamentary election.

When the status quo parties break their promises and fail to deliver on issues that voters care about, populist insurgents stand to gain.

The same issues with mass immigration, welfare dependency, and foreign crime also blight Britain.

This week for Courage Media, I wrote about the recent ONS record net migration revelation, and how the “Boriswave” of post-Brexit immigration constitutes a demographic revolution.

1.1 million foreign nationals were added to the population every year, since 2021.

In 2023 – 2024, new 1,207,000 immigrants arrived in Britain. That means a foreign national was granted a non-visitor visa every 30 seconds. This included: 295,000 students; 80,000 study dependents; 184,000 work visas; and 233,000 work visa dependents. 86 percent (1,034,000) were non-European; 10 percent were EU nationals (116,000); and 5 percent (58,000) were British nationals returning home. The most numerous nations of origin were: India (240,000); Nigeria (120,000); Pakistan (101,000); China (78,000); and Zimbabwe (36,000). This is a complete inversion of the ratio before Brexit: when much lower annual net migration was 80 percent EU citizens. Between 2013 – 2020, net migration added 2,570,000 people to the population (1.69 million EU nationals, and 880,000 non-EU. Since 2021, over 2.5 million non-Europeans have been added to Britain’s population.

To put this into context, here is a graph by X user @AylmerTH:

The British government has imported a city the size of Birmingham every year, for the last four years; meaning 18 Birmingham-sized cities will need to be built by 2046 just to accommodate new immigrants alone. […]

As for the argument that immigration is an economic necessity: the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) admitted that over 60 percent of migrants on skilled worker visas make less than the median British salary. (Both the Centre for Policy Studies and the Centre for Migration Control estimate >70 percent.) This means most “skilled” workers are net-tax recipients. Half of all skilled workers earn less than half the average salary — and cost the British taxpayer £151,000 each by age of retirement. If they live to life expectancy (81), they cost taxpayers £465,000 each. (This presumes they arrive aged 25; but studies from Denmark and the Netherlands show second-generation non-EU/EA immigrants repeat the economic patterns of their parents and are, on average, never net tax contributors either, while costing more through state-funded healthcare and education.) Rupert Lowe MP has discovered that 40 percent of the immigrants who arrived in 2022 – 2023 are already claiming state benefits. Karl Williams of the Centre for Policy Studies calculated that just 5 percent of all visas issued between 2022 – 2023 were given to immigrants likely to be net tax contributors. For every £1 paid to the Treasury in tax by these high-earning immigrants, the more numerous net-dependents take out £1.60.

You can read the full essay here.

Suffice it to say, Boris Johnson remains unapologetic for his part played in this unprecedented demographic, economic, and cultural experiment run on an unwilling British public.

This unprecedented influx of non-European dependents has been dubbed the “Boriswave”. (It even has a Wikipedia page.) They are more identifiable than non-EU migrants by appearance, behaviour, and sheer quantity in a short space of time. Their sudden presence in the service industry, and transport and venue security jobs, is conspicuous. Unusual cultural practices, such as high levels of littering, playing music aloud on public transport, shouting into speakerphone, and wearing unsuitable clothing for Britain’s climate demarcate them as strangers. By importing people en masse from the third-world, Britain is recreating the conditions of the third-world. Indeed, Douglas Murray has repeatedly remarked: “If you import the world’s people, you also import the world’s problems”. […]

Johnson defended the increase in immigration on his watch by saying he, a self-styled anti-establishment populist, had acted on the advice of the Migration Advisory Committee: that increasing migration was the only way to control inflation. With the money supply increased, through quantitative easing, to pay for consecutive COVID lockdowns, Boris needed bodies to spread the excess cash more thinly. This has been called “Human Quantitative Easing” by a number of commentators — and has both failed to curb inflation, while fraying what remains of our social fabric.

We won’t know the true scale of this demographic change until the next Census is released in 2031, as the Boriswave of mass non-European migration didn’t begin until after the 2020 Census was taken. However, the Census showed that London was only 36.8% white British already — meaning the native population are already a minority in their own capital city.

As does Priti Patel: with Shadow Foreign Secretary, refusing to apologise for liberalising immigration laws while Home Secretary under Johnson’s government. As I wrote in an essay on immigration for The European Conservative in August:

Like the last soldier to surrender stationed on a remote Japanese island, the former home secretary, Conservative leadership candidate, and self-described ‘progressive’ Dame Priti Patel continues to defend her record as the architect of unprecedented levels of Third World immigration. She insists that mass immigration is an economic necessity, asking if we would turn away more students, doctors, and nurses?

Firstly, only 3% of immigrants that arrived in 2023 were doctors or nurses. Just 17% of NHS staff are foreign-born, which explains why it functioned just fine before 1997. The need for this small share of immigration could be eliminated too, by lifting the cap on medical school places for British students and providing competitive salaries to retain home-trained talent. The cap was imposed for fears of ‘overproducing’ doctors and ‘devaluing the profession’—something which importing doctors 2.5 times more likely to be reprimanded for malpractice, or Nigerian nurses committing “industrial-scale qualifications fraud,” somehow does not. Neither is importing staff improving the quality, availability, or price of care. Costs keep climbing, abuse is rife, and a study of 70,000 of the 350,000 visas issued in 2023 found they filled only 11,000 positions.

While health and social care visa applications have fallen 76% since January 2024 due to a ban on bringing dependents, skilled worker visa applications have risen by 50% in the same four-month period,— nullifying the restrictions. Since 2011, the foreign-born share of the UK workforce has risen from 14% to 21%. 74% of all new jobs in that time were given to immigrant workers.

Has this made us wealthier? Patel’s Home Office originally set the skilled worker salary threshold at £25,600—lower than the average salary in the UK. She also changed the composition of migrants: from 80% EU pre-pandemic, to 80% non-EU since 2021. Data from Denmark and the Netherlands shows that these Indian, Nigerian, and MENAPT (Middle Eastern, North African, Pakistan, and Turkey) immigrants are, in aggregate, never net tax contributors across their lifetimes. Disconcerting for those who insist that the problem is purely one of integration is that their children, the second-generation immigrants born in the host countries, are not net contributors either. They retain the culture, criminal proclivities, and work patterns of their parents. Non-EU migrants and their descendents in the Netherlands were an annual cost of €27 billion between 2016 and 2019; €400 billion net between 1995 and 2019. By contrast, Western European, East Asian, and Anglosphere migrants were annual net contributors to the tune of €1 billion.

You can read that essay here.

Well, a new essay by Mike Jones of Migration Watch UK for the Critic this week explains Patel’s ethnocentric motivations for bringing a quarter-million Indians here each year, since 2021:

Reviewing the archives of the Foreign Affairs Committee reveals how immigration policy was deliberately tied to this agenda.

For instance, during a session titled Global Britain and India, former Home Secretary Priti Patel posed a revealing question to Mark Field MP:

You have mentioned Prime Minister Modi a couple of times. He is the architect of the term “living bridge”, and effectively[sic] usage of the Indian diaspora community around the world, not only in the UK, but more broadly, has helped to strengthen ties with key countries. Do you think our own Prime Minister understands the significance of the living bridge and why, domestically, diaspora communities matter when it comes to bilateral relationships?

Patel’s framing is striking. By quoting Modi’s vision of migrants as “living bridges,” she makes it clear how immigration is linked to the UK’s foreign policy goals under the banner of Global Britain. Once in power, Patel brought this vision to life with vigour. Loosening visa rules and expanding opportunities for migration from Commonwealth nations became cornerstones of her tenure.

It’s clear that Priti Patel saw the en masse importing of Indian people into Britain as a way of leveraging demographic, thereby democratic, pressure on the British government for decades to deepen ties with her nation of heritage. The same can be said of Kemi Badenoch, who, declaring herself a “first-generation immigrant” in Parliament at every available opportunity, personally lobbied for loosening restrictions on work and student visas.

Sitting politicians were personally culpable for these dire straits that European peoples now face. Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel, too, should not evade blame for this, just because they no longer hold elected office.

As for the problems of the third world imported into Britain:

This week on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, I catalogued the recent cases of immigrants — illegal and legal alike — committing violent crimes, and then absconding from their court dates, in the UK.

These include:

• Ayodele Jamgbadi, charged with Section 18 GBH, affray, and possession of a prohibited offensive weapon, in relation to the death of Elizabeth Line customer experience assistant, Jorge Ortega.

• Criminology student Nasen Saadi, charged with the murder of sports coach Amie Gray, 34, and the attempted murder of her friend Leanne Miles, on a beach in Bournemouth, ‘because he wanted to know what it would be like to take a life and how it would feel to make a woman feel afraid’.

• Bibby Stockholm Barge occupant, illegal migrant Adnan Ahmed, charged with attacking a woman in Portland, Dorset, in August — and failed to turn up to court.

• Fellow Bibby Stockholm Barge occupants Kenson Noel, drug and violent offences, and Ahmed Haffa, convicted of theft after her stole a £60 jacket from TK Maxx in Weymouth and then assaulted two security guards who chased him — both of whom went on the run before their court hearings, and have outstanding arrest warrants.

• Moffat Konofilia, living in a hostel for asylum seekers in Coventry, accused of assaulting a woman on Weymouth beach — who refused to show up to court because ‘he does not drive and has no money’.

‘He was invited to apply to change the venue of the court or to appear via a video link but he did not respond. A warrant for his arrest was also issued.’

• South Sudanese illegal migrant Deng Chol Majek, charged with the murder of asylum hotel worker Rhiannon Skye Whyte, after she allegedly intervened in a dispute between Majek and another migrant over a packet of biscuits — whose sentencing was delayed, because Majek cannot speak English.

And, after I delivered this segment, The Telegraph reported that a Turkish drug-dealer, jailed for 16 years for plotting to supply heroin across the UK, won a legal battle against deportation, arguing his removal from Britain would violate his right to family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

I wrote about how these antiquated international treaties and institutions were hamstringing national sovereignty in an essay for Courage Media, in October:

However, a third reason has emerged to revisit the events and aftermath of the Second World War. Carlson and Cooper lament how London, no longer majority English, has lost its parochial identity. I have lived here for a quarter-century, and can attest to how unpleasant my city has become. This is due to unprecedented demographic change: with 1.2 million migrants moving to a country the size of New York state every year. When a criminal foreign national is due to be deported, human rights lawyers frustrate the process with appeals to Article 8 of the ECHR. This same statute was cited in an ECHR ruling which compels all signatories to take costly climate action because hot weather violates the rights of pensioners who want to take “longer holidays”. The rights enshrined in different political and technological conditions have been strained beyond credulity, and that’s without mentioning the Soviet meddling with the UN’s Declaration. As David Starkey states, they exist now not to protect individuals, but to enable aggrieved ‘minorities’ to attack ‘majorities’. There exists a painful contradiction between the story Brits tell themselves: victors of the Second World War, but penalized by costly immigration and cultural degradation. Any complaint is met with accusations of being “Far Right”, a racist, and a Nazi.

You can read that essay here.

In the above report, I drew upon yet more data provided to the public, by the way of Parliamentary questions, by Reform UK’s Rupert Lowe MP.

In recent weeks, Lowe has revealed the number of social housing occupants by nationality, and crimes committed by illegal migrants. He has pressed the Home Office for an inquiry into crimes against women and girls committed by illegal immigrants — with their refusal to do so just as telling as any figures they could have provided.

Lowe recently told Winston Marshall that he expects the true number of illegal migrants to be much higher than the Pew Research figure of 1.2 million, from 2017 — and then insisted that they all need to be deported anyway.

He also went further than Reform’s current stated one-in, one-out policy of “Net Zero” immigration, and advocated a two-year moratorium on all inward migration while the government get to grips with deporting illegal migrants. Finally, he urged us to learn from Sweden’s experiment with remigration: subsidising unassimilated migrants to facilitate their voluntary return to their nation of origin.

He has retained this strength of rhetoric in a new interview with New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle.

"You come here, you commit crimes, you should be deported... My view is, firmly, that you start with the illegal migrants: that you detain them and deport them.”

When pressed on Net Zero immigration, Lowe also says he disagrees with Reform's policy: explaining that a one-in, one-out immigration policy leads to "losing your best people and replacing them with even more lower grade people… lots of people who are so strongly of the view that their culture is better than the Christian culture that they're coming to.”

"If you come to this country, you live by our laws, you speak our language…”

Lowe’s fellow Brexit Party MEP, Martin Daubney, joined Harrison Pitt and I on Deprogrammed this week, and said much of the same.

If all the Syrian "refugees" in Europe celebrating the fall of Assad's regime do not return home now, they must be sent back. Otherwise, we don’t have an asylum system: just another way for economic migrants to move to the West.

As Shadow Justice Minister, Robert Jenrick said, the solutions are simple:

End mass migration.

Revoke visas/deport those who hate us.

Give no quarter to extremists.

We don’t have to live like this.

It is not normal that we should have to erect concrete bollards and barriers around Christmas markets and monuments.

It is not desirable that hundreds-of-thousands of net-dependents and foreign criminals have flooded peaceful, prosperous, tolerant nations, and taken advantage of their host populations.

It does not have to be this way. We could ensure that atrocities like the Magdeburg Christmas Market attack never happen again. All it requires is the right policies, and sufficient political will to enact them.

Rupert Lowe is manifesting the courage to do what is necessary to keep the hard-working, law-abiding people of the UK and Europe safe. We need more like him, prepared to say and do what’s right.

And to those who say the logistics are too difficult, and enforcement of the law too illiberal, I say: “Wir shaffen das.”