It may not be only the economic statistics that are fictional:
Flying in the face of the traditional image of a country seen as the land of good living, ‘France, A Clockwork Orange’ claims that mainstream politicians and the media have long masked a far more disturbing reality: it is rapidly descending into mindless violence and incivility. “Nobody should ignore the reality,” the book claims, namely that “every 24 hours 13,000 thefts, 2,000 attacks and 200 rapes” take place in France – figures far higher than official national statistics.
Now, I don’t spend much time in France, so I have no way of verifying who is telling the truth and who is hiding or exaggerating it here. But the fact that the book has become a national bestseller tends to indicate that there is something amiss with regards to the reported French criminal statistics, especially since we know that the FBI’s criminal statistics are less than entirely consistent where racial matters are concerned.
But it is worth noting that just as cultural integration tends to split the difference between the criminal tendencies of different cultures, economic integration tends to split the difference between living standards. The intellectuals on the Left are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they have made an epic mistake of historical proportions, in devaluing and ruining their own cultures under the mistaken impression that this would somehow be of benefit to the rest of the world.
The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.
It’s not a question of fault. It’s a question of actions and consequences. The best thing the West can do for the rest of the world is to preserve itself and serve as a positive example towards which it can aspire, not ruin itself in a futile attempt to transform other cultures through the magic of mass geographic relocation.