Malibu, California

Source: Bigstock

Here’s a speech I gave in Germany at an annual conference of European conservative philosophers. It’s not a secret symposium, but these days it’s best to keep a low profile.

I’m not sure what the assembled sages, who mostly reason from what Socrates said to Phaedo, thought about my practice of reasoning largely from gossip column anecdotes about Malibu celebrities, but they laughed politely.

Hi, I’m Steve Sailer. I’m an American opinion journalist from Los Angeles.

I was asked to give a talk on borders and nations, which sounded like something I could manage to opine on, until I remembered that my speech ought to have something to do with Europe, about which I know shamefully little. So I’ve been asking the assembled experts what’s been going on around here since Merkel’s Mistake in 2015. But don’t blame them for my mistakes.

I’m sometimes denounced by The Guardian and The Atlantic for being a wild-eyed extremist who shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public. But I can never quite see why.

“What is striking is how unthinkable the arguments for Europeans favoring Europeans have become.”

One of my beliefs is incredibly boring: that there are trade-offs between larger and smaller polities, so none are perfect for all purposes. Bigger entities, like the United States, can get pushed around less, which is nice. But the residents also have to put up with sharing decision-making with more people with whom they have less in common, which is not as nice.

Hence, there are advantages to localism, regionalism, nationalism, civilizationism, internationalism, and even globalism. As Ronald Reagan tried to explain to a puzzled and wide-eyed United Nations, he and the Soviet premier would work out their differences pretty damn quick if we were facing “an alien threat from outside this world.”

Conversely, Donald Trump began his second term by emphasizing some of the positive sides of nationalism by focusing on policies that might be good for Americans as a whole. But then he temporarily wandered off into embarrassing old styles of nationalism, such as how America is angry at Denmark, of all countries, for owning Greenland when we want it.

I think it’s useful to think about immigration policy in Europe and America in these terms. Allow me to offer the case for continentalism, one that is, unfortunately, still awfully theoretical for Europe.

To begin with the obvious, Europe is a continent of many nations, while the United States is one country. But the U.S. is a continent-size country spanning similar degrees of latitude and longitude as Europe.

Not surprisingly, Americans tend to get on each other’s nerves. So, America has a federal system that leaves some powers up to the states. And American states frequently delegate certain important powers, such as zoning controls over which buildings can be erected, to counties and municipalities. This dispersal of power has helped Americans hang together rather than hang separately for the past 249 years.

Still, this leads to some ironies. Some government duties, such as immigration policy, can’t be federalized well. The U.S. has always been, in effect, a Schengen Area, so once an immigrant gets into the U.S., he can move around easily. So, the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions have, not unreasonably, given the great majority of the control over immigration to the federal government.

Hence, much of America’s immigration control effort has been performed along its continental-scale border, where it doesn’t much impinge on daily life. It’s not particularly difficult to enforce America’s borders when there is enough will in Washington, especially if the U.S. carries out some level of internal enforcement to discourage new unwanted migrants from trying to sneak in. New illegal aliens have dropped to negligible levels once Trump started deporting old illegal aliens. The Border Patrol’s encounters with inadmissibles dropped from 171,000 in May 2024 to 12,000 in May 2025.

On the other hand, pro-open-borders polities within the United States have been busy declaring themselves sanctuary cities where the local government proclaims it will flagrantly ignore federal immigration laws.

Consider Los Angeles’ famous celebrity suburb of Malibu, with its 30 kilometers of beachfront. In 2017, the Malibu city parents declared themselves a sanctuary city after actor Martin Sheen, who played President Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing, seized the microphone at a council meeting and demanded that Malibu pay no attention to federal law regarding the literally countless illegal aliens who work as maids and gardeners in Malibu.

Yet, although Malibuites demand that Americans put up with national open borders (or, to be precise, many tend to be fanatically anti-anti-immigration, which is more or less the same thing as being pro–open borders), the leading citizens of Malibu, such as Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner, very much do not allow open borders for Malibu. The residents of Malibu are extreme localists when it comes to preserving Malibu’s exclusivity.

If Malibu were in Spain, a quarter of a million people would live in high-rises overlooking its twenty miles of ocean. But practically nobody in Malibu sleeps more than about ten meters off the ground. Hence, the population has actually declined over the past three decades from 13,000 to 11,000.

Very few illegal aliens reside in Malibu. The typical Malibu maid commutes 125 kilometers per day by bus from Compton, formerly the West Coast capital of gangsta rap, but now a Latino majority slum.

But what the movie-star residents of Malibu really fear is not that their undocumented domestic help will be able to afford to move to their neighborhood, but that affluent American orthodontists now living in the San Fernando Valley could someday move to the beach.

So, they’ve made it practically impossible to jump through all the hoops to get new houses built in Malibu, even if you are a fellow celebrity. U2 guitarist the Edge bought 63 hectares of ridgeline above Malibu in 2005 and then spent fourteen years trying to get permits to build five houses on it. The Edge is not a naive or unresourceful man. He even bought himself his own environmental NGO to endorse his compound proposal. But after fourteen years of bureaucratic hassles, he finally gave up.

Of course, the nice folks of Malibu would decry their kind of policies as nativist if used to favor the natives of the United States. But as much fun as I like to have at their expense, I can also imagine that if I inherited a beach house in Malibu, I’d also be worked up over the Encino orthodontist menace.

I’ve been writing about immigration policy since 2000, warning that it’s smarter to be prudent about how many people you let in because it’s easier to keep them out now than to throw them out later.

Few listened.

However, perhaps a turning point in the politics of the issue came during the recent Biden administration, when the White House pretty much invited in anybody who could wade the Rio Grande River.

But then border-state governors brilliantly turned the tables politically by offering migrants free transportation from dusty Laredo, Texas, to expensive New York City and Martha’s Vineyard. Suddenly, national media coverage of the immigration issue became slightly less one-sided as the taxpayers of New York City had to deal with the costs.

Lately, Trump has been having illegal aliens rounded up, especially targeting sanctuary cities like Los Angeles. Interestingly, the Trump administration is going about choosing illegal aliens in a fairly random, politically artless fashion.

If they had prioritized first deporting the very worst illegal aliens, the program would be vastly popular so far. On the other hand, rounding up guys looking for work in the Home Depot parking lot sends a message to people south of the border not to bother coming.

Deportations were widely predicted to lead to immense riots on the scale of the Mostly Peaceful Protests of George Floyd’s 2020. But after a few of Google’s robot taxicabs were burned in downtown Los Angeles, the riots seem to have petered out as the Trump administration sent in military units to quickly intimidate rioters.

Will it work?

I can’t say. Betting upon Trump’s competence has been as much of a fool’s game as betting upon his incompetence.

Will Trump keep it up, or pivot 180 degrees to mass amnesty?

Time will tell.

One thing that is clear so far is that 2025 has been a humiliating defeat for the sanctuary cities. It turns out that, just like it says in the Constitution, the Constitution gives the upper hand to the federal government over immigration. The mayor of Los Angeles and Martin Sheen can talk all they want about sanctuary cities, but when push comes to shove they aren’t willing to engage in armed insurrection against the United States Constitution in defense of illegal aliens.

In contrast, European institutions at the continental level have been worse than useless at organizing a perimeter defense of the continent against the immigrant inundation across the Mediterranean, leaving that largely up to the uncoordinated efforts of the several dozen national governments.

The problem seems to be largely sociological. The kind of people who go to work for pan-European institutions tend to see their mission in life not as working for the good of Europeans so much as warring on nationalists within Europe. Thus, importing millions of non-Europeans is seen by Brussels and Strasbourg, a lovely city on the Rhine that is home to the remarkably ugly European Court of Human Rights compound, as a truly Great Replacement of European nationalists.

What could possibly go wrong?

As I wrote in 2017, what’s striking about the ascendancy among the respectable classes of globalist fanaticism is how forgotten has become the middle ground between nationalism and globalism of continentalism.

Europeans can’t muster the will for self-preservation without developing some continental self-respect: the idea, now largely forbidden, that they deserve their continent.

The word “continentalist” barely exists today, even though what is now the European Union was founded on the lost notion that Europeans ought to be more neighborly toward one another than they are toward the rest of the world.

So let me briefly make the case for continentalism.

Europe’s not my continent, so I don’t have particularly strong views on how Europeans ought to arrange their affairs. But what is striking is how unthinkable the arguments for Europeans favoring Europeans have become.

The basic idea behind concentric degrees of territorial neighborliness is that you have more to gain from trade with those close to you and more to lose from violent conflict with them simply because, for good or bad, you can get at your neighbors more easily than you can the people on other continents.

Similarly, in the long run, you are probably better able to get along politically with those nearby than with those on the far side of the world because you have more in common with your neighbors. For example, the vast intercontinental empires of a century ago are nearly all gone, with only a handful of noncontiguous territories, such as French Tahiti and American Samoa, still controlled from a distant imperial capital.

The logic of concentricism is so obvious that it’s almost never articulated anymore. People in Peru, Mongolia, and Chad tend to feel the most duties and allegiances toward those whom they consider most like themselves, moderate amounts toward those moderately close to them, and so forth, outward and onward.

Instead, we in the West now celebrate the anti-logic of leapfrogging loyalties.

The Western liberal is noteworthy for feeling loyalty toward his inner circle, then skipping over a whole bunch of folks who are kind of like him but whom he more or less despises, in order to embrace The Other.

After all, European values require the sweeping away of Europeans.

It became necessary to destroy Europe to save it.

Please note that I wrote those last few bitter lines above eight years ago when Merkelism was still ascendant and only disreputable Europeans like Hungarians and Poles dared object to the chancellor of Germany imposing a million Muslim men on Europe on a whim.

Eight years later, however, times have changed. Even Sweden, the traditional bellwether of progressivism, has soured on mass immigration.

The notion that Europe’s continental institutions might someday help play a useful role in protecting the continent seems far-fetched today.

But strange things have been happening lately so I’m not ruling it out.