Back in November, the US State Department warned that ‘mass migration poses an existential threat to western civilisation and undermines the stability of key American allies’. In February, in his address to the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expanded on that theme.

After the Berlin Wall fell, Rubio noted, many in the West thought that ‘the end of history’ had finally arrived. Utopia was nigh. Western nations opened their borders, forsook spending on defence in order to bolster the welfare state and ‘outsourced’ their national sovereignty. This was, Rubio warned, to ignore both human nature as well as the lessons of ‘over 5,000 years of recorded human history. And it has cost us dearly’. He continued:

[W]e opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.

Britain and Europe’s leaders would be well-advised to heed the warning

That is the goal: a new western unity shaped by a frank acknowledgement of past folly.

Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old university student in Southampton, England, was murdered by Vickrum Singh Digwa, a British Sikh, last December. Nowak encountered Digwa after leaving a pub. An altercation ensued. Digwa stabbed Nowak five times. He then filmed Nowak, taunting him as he bled. When the police arrived, they took Digwa’s side: he had falsely accused Nowak of uttering something ‘racist’. Nowak told the police nine times that he had been stabbed. ‘I don’t think you have, mate,’ said one officer. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Nowak moaned. The police handcuffed him and read him his rights. Then he died.

If this happened in early December, why is it only in early June that Nowak’s murder made international headlines, sparked demonstrations across England and shook Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government to its core? Because it was only in early June, following Digwa’s trial, that the police bodycam footage and Digwa’s video were released.

The public outrage was immediate and extreme. Digwa was convicted of murder. But where was the government? When the career criminal George Floyd died while resisting arrest in Minneapolis in 2020, Starmer hopped on the maudlin bandwagon of politically correct liberal guilt and publicly took the knee.

So far, Starmer’s most prominent response to Nowak’s murder is anger at J.D. Vance for criticising the policies that foster such crimes. ‘Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies,’ Vance said:

Abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.

When an interviewer asked David Lammy, Starmer’s deputy prime minister, whether he would take the knee for Nowak, he gibbered for a moment and then said no. All across England, however, ordinary citizens have been flocking to local police stations to demonstrate and take the knee. They see the reality. If you are white, you are, de facto, a second-class citizen. The law will bend over backwards to favour migrants and minorities. Hold a Bible, a Union Flag, or be ‘conspicuously Jewish’ in public and you risk arrest.

Of course, this double standard is not confined to England. In Sweden, an Eritrean migrant convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl was allowed to remain in the country after a judge ruled that the incident was not an ‘exceptionally serious crime’. In Germany, nine men – several of whom were migrants – were convicted for the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl. A German woman who insulted one of the rapists online was given a harsher sentence than the perpetrators.

A 4 June bulletin from the US State Department cut to the chase: ‘Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilisational decline. They must be rejected across the West.’ Only thus can the West be won anew.

I would urge the leaders of countries such as Great Britain, Spain, France and Germany to read Jean Raspail’s dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints. It might do politicians like Starmer some good. Published in French in 1973, the book is about the consequences of unfettered immigration from the Third World. Between us, it is not very good. But as a piece of social-political prophecy, it is gimlet-eyed in its admonition.

In the novel, France falls. Then European civilisation as a whole, including the US, is overrun. The West is a victim in part of the onslaught of untrammelled migrants and in part of its own fecklessness – what the psychologist Gad Saad calls ‘suicidal empathy’.

That pairs well with Marxist-inspired fury. Scribbled outside a parish hall in one deserted city: ‘MONEY IS A MORTAL SIN!’ On the villas where the bosses used to live: ‘KILL THE CAPITALIST BOURGEOIS PIGS.’ ‘Carpet-like,’ Raspail wrote:

The great migration was beginning to unroll. Not the first time, either, if we pore over history. Many a civilisation, victim of the selfsame fate, sits tucked in our museums, under glass, neatly labelled. But man seldom profits from the lessons of the past…

Yes, but this time the museums themselves are likely to be smashed and violated, leaving behind not records but ruins.

It has been to forestall this fate that the Trump administration has been sounding the alarm, in Europe as well as in the US, about open borders and unassimilable migrants. Rather than carping about US politicians ‘interfering’ in their domestic politics, Britain and Europe’s leaders would be better advised to heed the warning.