The current growth rate in Europe will not sustain its previous levels but one wonders if it would lower to a more comfy figure and then stabilize, absent immigration.

The phenomena of third world peoples rushing into to fill "open spots" in nations that have begun to lower their birth rates for various reasons is a troubling one. It more or less means that world population is unlikely to reduce itself short of serious calamity/widespread famine, etc.

Back in the 70s or 80s when Zero Population Growth was still a group that you heard about now and then, there was a bit of a stink over some speculation in those ranks that educated, more advanced people were more likely to voluntarily lower their birth rates that less educated, 3rd world peoples.

This brought charges of racism and so on. In spite of being true.

I'm not sure if population levels in Europe of say, 2001, couldn't use some serious reduction, for the sake of long term sustainability. Of course, assuming no growth through immigration, there would be a lot of hard transitioning involved in such lowered birth rate -- population bubble at the grey haired end of things.

2. It depends on what one's definition of "effectively" is. That's one of those definitional thingies. So far, whether by chance or design, terrorists have not been successful in the USA. To me that feels effective.

B

Populations are somewhat like gas diffusion, moving from higher concentrations to lower concentrations. Barriers are awfully difficult to maintain unless they are absolute. As both Europe & the USA make abundantly clear, barriers that are not absolute are not terribly effective.

IMO, the best way to decrease immigration is not barriers and jails and deportations. Those are politically the most effective since they delude the citizens into thinking something effective is being done. Nope, the best preventative is removing the imperative to move in the first place.

Why do Mexicans move north -- to be in a land where people look and talk funny, far from their relatives in order to struggle in the face of a bizarre culture? Or perhaps it is because things at home are hopelessly dysfunctional at all levels of society and upward mobility is stagnant?

The more effective solution is to deal with the motivators of migration.

I like how you take the time to include vague insults even when saying something that is completely obvious.I'm not aware of anyone making that accusation.

This thread has gone for several pages and I still don't see how the Mayor of London is like Chamberlain.

That's true.

Vague? Damn, I must be slipping.

I thought your vagueness was by design since your insult bore no relation to anything I or anyone else said.

Speaking of vague, are we ever going to see any facts to support the claim that the Mayor of London is like Neville Chamberlain?

Aside from a contemptible myopia, there's not much in common between them.

EJ,

I gotta agree with Bot. His job as mayor is to keep the lid on civil unrest.
I disgree completely with his position and I think his facts (if he has any) are wrong with respect to the statement about Muslim men being no more likely to use terrorism to acheive a political end than other classes of folks. Plainly false, imo. ( I freely admit ignorance in British domestic politics.)
The London subway bombings were a mere what: 3 or 4 years ago?
Contemptible myopia.
IMO: Criminally stupid, if he really holds these beliefs as opposed to making them for public consumption.

I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist
By HASSAN BUTT -July 2007
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=465570&in_page_id=1770

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.

For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"

But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.

They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.

Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.

For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.

But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.

Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

Yup. Trying to keep starving people away from a table laden with food is just not going to work.

Somehow doing subtle "engineering" work to improve the scene in Mexico (and elsewhere) is the only way, and will not be easy.

Global jihad?
 

Good controversial contribution!

It's really something.
Today I got to think about 'Third World' countries, who actually keep themselves open* to take our waste, just to make a few $$$ along with it ....

*edit: I should say: absorb a considerable portion of our waste ...

^^^^ It's a tough, unfair world out there. I've lived and worked in some of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. For the most part the people I knew and worked with were little different from people in the USA in terms of human qualities. Many were happy and content with the lives they led. A small proportion were very angry, frustrated, and bitter (who can blame them?).

All things considered, I'd rather sit on the toilet and under it.