Opinion Columnists |

Rachel Marsden: Western leaders are panicking after setting off a ticking time bomb

PARIS — US President Joe Biden isn’t alone in being mugged by reality and by Senate Republicans insisting that he reduce options for asylum seekers as a condition of further fueling the conflict in Ukraine with more cash. When people are fleeing foreign countries, you’d better have a good plan for when they arrive on your doorstep. Unfortunately, our establishment elites don’t.

Western leaders from US President Joe Biden to French President Emmanuel Macron are now grappling with migration in a race against the clock to head off a looming catastrophe, particularly before it becomes a major political liability for them.

Speaking in Europe alongside Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni last week, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said of migration that if Europe didn’t “tackle this problem, the numbers will only grow. It will overwhelm our countries and our capacity to help those who actually need our help the most.”

That sounds exactly like what former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi predicted would happen ahead of NATO’s invasion and regime change of Libya in 2011.

Gaddafi’s words have proven to be prophetic time and again. In one stunning example, over a 48-hour period, migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa via Tunisia — an estimated 8,000 of them — landed unabated on the little Italian Island of Lampedusa, between Sicily and Tunisia, while the European Union dithered. The migrant population quickly overwhelmed Lampedusa, outnumbering the locals.

Another resounding success for the big- brained bureaucrats in Brussels. Meanwhile, the European commissioner for Migration was caught on camera doing some knitting in Parliament at the exact time this migratory crisis was unfolding, and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the de facto Queen of Europe, was otherwise occupied talking about China and Ukraine.

You’d think that Italy would have just stepped up and defended its own borders, especially since Meloni was elected largely on the promise of stemming migration. But a refusal to let the migrant ships dock in Italy led to drownings. So Brussels took Meloni by the hand and basically said, “Hey look, it’s a really bad look when Italy defends its own borders and the result is a disaster, so let us handle it. We’ll make a deal with Tunisia, pay them a hundred million euros to outsource our own border defense to them, so they can deal with the traffickers and the influx of migrants.” They had an African leader who was very effective in keeping migrants from reaching Europe: Gaddafi. But France and the UK led the way for NATO to take him out. Whoops.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, by the summertime, more than 13,000 migrants had made it up to France and across the English Channel. So the British government set up a barge called Bibby Stockholm, the size of a football field, off the coast of Dorset to house 500 of them. From there, they could travel back and forth to the shore and enjoy excursions and all kinds of activities, including sports. But migrant NGOs gave bombastic side-eye to the holiday-like marketing and blocked migrant transfers to the barge.

So Team Sunak came up with another suggestion — just send the migrants to Rwanda! (Would the Ukrainian asylum seekers have to go there, too?) Unsurprisingly, the UK Supreme Court blocked the move last month.

So while Sunak tries to breathe life back into the initiative, the Tory government has come up with a new law to bump up the minimum income that a British citizen must earn before they can sponsor a spouse’s visa from the current £18,600 ($23,601 USD) to £38,700 ($49,106), as of 2024.

Across the pond in France, Macron’s lawmakers are struggling to pass a migration bill that’s seen as too strict by the left and too lenient by the right — giving it a net rating of “useless.”

In Canada, federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser said just last week that the Trudeau government should “continue to look at reforms to our temporary residency programs,” amid the Canadian housing cost and supply crisis that’s driving a reverse migration trend. Immigration Minister Marc Miller has already suggested “significantly limiting visas” for international students.

Here’s a thought, brainiacs. Maybe just don’t start or enable wars that can serve as a pretext for mass migration as a result of your own long-standing wokey-woke immigration policies? Maybe then you won’t panic and end up taking sudden, drastic measures that make people wonder if you had a brain or personality transplant. While there may be economic advantages to war for certain special interests, it also sets off a social and economic time bomb here at home — entirely of the inept Western establishment’s own making.

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English.