“[W]hether demographic, democratic or cultural, the central tropes of the ‘looming crisis’ approach are monolithism—migrants are African for Smith, Muslim for Caldwell, Mexican for Huntington—and scale: the unprecedented numbers that are about to set forth.” Some figures are crucial to dispel myths and misconceptions. “[T]he latest figures for international migrants—defined as those who have been dwelling for at least a year outside their country of birth—is just over a quarter of a billion, or 3.6 per cent of the global population. Around 60 per cent of these are ‘labour migrants’, roughly 20 per cent are people displaced by war, repression or natural disaster, while 6 million are international students. “[O]ver half the cross-border migrants in Europe—44 million, out of a total 87 million—come from other European countries, mainly in Eastern and Southeastern Europe; ‘irregular’ arrivals by land and sea totalled only 189,000 in 2022. “Economic migration has grown and changed, but the
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51