[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

One of the consequences of the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, was this: they reminded native Europeans that a good many of the millions of Muslims who live in their countries are not necessarily the friendly bearers of cultural enrichment that politicians claim them to be. After Gazans massacred Israelis on such a terrifying scale, native Europeans were compelled to recognize that the same thing could happen – tomorrow morning – on their own turf. Little wonder that anti-immigration parties have won more support.

And nowhere in Europe, perhaps, has awareness of the danger of mass immigration spiked more than in Britain. A handful of brave souls have been talking about the Muslim rape gangs for years, but even now precious few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice. A not inconsiderable percentage of Muslims in Britain admit to pollsters that they’d like to see the country subjected to sharia law. A long list of major British cities have Muslim mayors. Even as native Brits struggle to find decent, affordable housing, the government is putting Muslim illegals up in luxury hotels.

Those who dare to complain publicly about any of these things risk arrest and prosecution. Indeed, while people are allowed to march in the streets waving Hamas flags, displaying the Union Jack or the St. George’s cross – the flag of England – is treated as a crime. For years, both the Conservatives and Labourites have repeatedly promised to reduce immigration and repeatedly broken their promises. Reform UK, the party whose electoral fortunes have skyrocketed as a result, seems too timid to do what’s necessary to rescue the UK from full Islamization.

Perfect timing, then, for an article in the Guardian arguing that Britain, and indeed all of Europe, needs to increase immigration levels. “Those wanting to shut Europe’s borders,” avers the British journalist Alex Clark, “must contend with a stark demographic reality: the continent’s native population is expected to fall sharply over the next century in an era of low birth rates.” So if anti-immigration parties take control in Europe and actually succeed in reducing immigration rates, it “could speed up the population decline of Europe, creating economic shocks including slower growth and soaring costs from pensions and elderly care.”

Clark (not to be confused with a conservative American commentator of the same name) approvingly quotes John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, a pro-EU think tank, who approvingly notes that mainstream politicians “recognise that immigration is needed to ease demographic pressures” but are being challenged by the “radical right.” What a way to put it. In fact most Europeans oppose mass immigration, especially from the Islamic world, and have been opposed to it for a long time. The problem is that the politicians who are supposed to represent their interests have utterly ignored their wishes and have allowed the flow of immigrants to continue unabated.

Those politicians, and “experts” like Springford who stand up for them, would have you believe that mass immigration is really in the best interests of the people of Europe, whether those foolish ignoramuses realize it or not. They point out that a large cohort of the European population will soon reach retirement age, and will require more medical services and, perhaps, placement in old-age homes, and that the continent will need more doctors and nurses to provide that care, not to mention more working-age people whose taxes will fund that care. Absent mass immigration, goes the argument, the tax burden on working-age Europeans will rise appreciably. “Tax burdens are already rising across Europe,” warns Clark. Yes, and a major reason why they’re rising is that a disproportionate number of the Muslims who have flooded Europe during the last couple of generations, far from being added to the work force, have been added to the welfare rolls.

Yes, in some European countries a surprising number of the health-care professionals are Muslims. (According to Clark’s chart, the European country with the most foreign–educated doctors per capita is Norway, at 43.6%.) But the felons, prisoners, and – yes – welfare recipients are also disproportionately Muslim. The unfortunate fact is that while not a few of the Muslims in the U.S. are educated urbanites, an alarming number of those who’ve settled in Europe are semi-literate folks who come from remote villages, who are extremely pious and traditional (which is to say barbaric) in their cultural practices, and who – harboring a profound hostility toward the West, toward Christianity, toward Jews, toward gays, toward individual freedom, and toward any concept of social tolerance or sexual equality – are highly resistant to integration. On the contrary, far from wanting to assimilate into European society, more and more of these Muslims have been less and less shy about acknowledging that they expect native Europeans, in the fullness of time, to submit to Islamic governance.

To her credit, Clark does (late in her article) include a comment by Alan Manning of the London School of Economics that challenges her rosy thesis. “For immigration to help,” says Manning, “ it’s got to be that immigrants are actually in work, and many European countries have quite low employment rates among a lot of immigrants….So it’s really important that they’re going to be in work, and that has been problematic in some cases.” That’s putting it mildly. European welfare states, which were originally established so that natives who’ve been paying taxes all their lives could get help in times of financial crisis, are now ATMs for immigrants, some of whom have just arrived and others of whom have been around for decades but never bothered to look for work. In Britain, according to one source, 78% of Muslim women and 63% of Muslim men are unemployed and on benefits.

Check this out: in Norway, where I live, one of the things you have to do in order to become a citizen is to pass a test in “social knowledge.” I expected queries about Norwegian history, culture, and values; instead, a ridiculous number of the questions were about the many different welfare schemes of which immigrants can take advantage. The point, in short, isn’t to test immigrants’ knowledge of their adopted country but to encourage them, when preparing for the test, to discover yet more ways of acquiring free money.

So yes, increased immigration from the Islamic world could keep the European population growing. But eventually Europe wouldn’t be Europe anymore. Many Londoners and Parisians – not all of them right-wing extremists or bigots – already say that those cities are no longer what they used to be. They’re no longer English or French – no longer European. Increasingly, Islam is taking hold. An increase in mass Muslim immigration might or might not solve some employment and taxation problems – although every indication is that it wouldn’t – but it would most assuredly accomplish one thing: it would speed up the continent’s Islamization and hasten the introduction of sharia law. Moreover, as Europe becomes increasingly Islamized, native Europeans will surely flee in growing numbers.

Some statistics. At current immigration levels, says Clark, the EU’s population, which is currently 447 million, will fall to 419 million by the year 2100. If immigration were reduced to zero, the population would drop even further, to 295 million. In order for the EU population to rise significantly during that period, then, it would require at least a couple of hundred million immigrants – probably more, given that many millions of natives would at the same time be leaving. There’s one word to describe this phenomenon: replacement. If people like Springford have their way, native Europeans will be replaced by foreigners, the overwhelming majority of them from the Muslim world.

Replacement? Where have we heard that word before? Well, in 2011 the French writer Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement, in which he contended that Europeans were gradually being replaced by immigrants from Africa and Asia and their descendants. The left reacted to the book with outrage. They called the idea hogwash and labeled Camus a racist. They still do. Wikipedia, which can always be relied upon to present a tendentiously progressive view as if it were the perfect objective truth, describes the Great Replacement theory as “a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory.” But a great replacement is precisely what Clark and Springford — and other political, academic, and media elites who think they know better than the people – are calling for. Just don’t use the word replacement.

Yes, population decline is a problem. Part of the reason for Europe’s population decline is that Europeans have – with good reason – lost their faith in the continent’s future. People are getting married much later than previous generations did, and are having fewer children. There may be effective ways of addressing this problem. Under a law that took effect this year in Hungary, for example, women who have two or more children will be exempt from paying taxes for the rest of their lives. Whether this policy, or any other, will have the desired effect remains to be seen. But one thing’s for certain: accelerating the continent’s Islamization is no answer.