The Immigration Crisis

...and its most beautiful solution.

This is something leftists all knew until class consciousness got replaced with the false enlightenment of social justice. Immigrants are not the enemy, but disruptive mass immigration is one of the enemy’s weapons. When a large group of us (remember — I’m an immigrant) move into a place, we will change it no matter whether we want to or not. This is even more true if the communities into which we move have already begun to fall apart through cultural erosion or economic damage.

The tiny ancient village in which I live, named for the iron-rich springs which burst through its hills, is having an immigration crisis.

Well, no. Not really. Not like what you think. There will be no riots on the three tiny streets here, nor on the two kilometers of the main road which passes through here on its way to Germany. No one will be breaking the windows of its only business just next door to my house, a tavern whose only menu item is a raw steak served alongside a scorching hot stone upon which you’re to cook that steak. No one will be breaking up the gravestones in the tiny churchyard — where the bones and ashes of the eight root families of this village are interred — to use as projectiles against police.

No. There will be no violence, or protests, or even anything more than a few muttered words and a look of deep, resigned sadness. But it’s a deep crisis nevertheless, and I’m part of it.

I’m not from here, of course. I’m from a land far across an ocean, born into a different culture formed by a different religion. I didn’t come here speaking this language, and though I’ve been here five years already, I’ve only now just started to try to learn it. And more so, specifically because of my presence here, four more immigrants — my sister and her family — are moving into this village, too.

I’m changing this place merely by my presence. Things happen here that didn’t happen before. I’ve brought the worship of my own “strange” gods with me, cook unfamiliar and strong-smelling foods with spices from other lands, and grow foreign plants which have never until now taken root in this soil. And merely by being here, I have changed the actions and values of others, especially of the family into which I married.

I’m not the only immigrant here. Others moved in soon after me, and even more will soon arrive. Parcels of ancient farmland have been sold off and paved over to make way for this new wave, and nothing can stop this irreversible change to the character and soul of this place.

The tectonic shifts in demographics shaking up the rest of this continent were rumbling the earth of this village long before I arrived. The well-studied collapse in birthrates across Europe hit this place quite hard. Families stopped having enough children to replace the dying generations several decades ago, and many of the children they did have moved far away. Without this wave of immigrants — of which I have been a significant part — this village would have died out by the time I myself die.

Already, the centuries of religious devotion and social cohesion which shaped this village is dying out. Perusing the photo albums of my mother-in-law, I’m constantly struck with both confusion and sadness. I’ve stared at her pictures of large groups of women dressed in their finest, celebrating a yearly village festival, and shaken my head in disbelief. That hall no longer exists, nor does the week-long festival, no do many of those women.

The village church, rebuilt several hundred years ago to accommodate an increase in the village’s population, no longer holds weekly masses. Its caretaker, a woman in her mid-eighties, pays for yearly masses to be performed there so to prevent it from being sold off by the Catholic church. Few of the immigrants arriving in the village even believe in the god the church was built for, let alone attend those masses.

This village is dying and becoming something else. And I, an immigrant partially responsible for its death, have been trying to figure out ways to save it. Some of its ancient community rituals might never be resurrected, but at least two of them, the Kiermes and the Buergbrennen, might be.

The Kiermes is the yearly celebration of the founding day — or in some cases the patron saint’s day — of the village church. It was a week-long affair, with the best hams and the best desserts cooked by all the women of the village to feed not just the villagers but all the distant relatives who traveled back to celebrate with them. As with the other festival, Buergbrennen, its history likely extends far back in pre-Christian time, and it would be a great loss to the world to let it die.

To resurrect these, though, I’ll need the help of both the oldest generation who remembers these rituals and also the other immigrants like myself. The first group won’t be too hard to convince, because I’d only need to convince my mother-in-law and she’d easily convince the rest. That second group will be much harder, because they have even less connection to this village than I do. They didn’t marry into the village, they bought into it. They don’t know its history or the people here, and like all new immigrants they cling tightly to their previous cultures to orient themselves in these new surroundings.

It’s absolutely worth a try, though. If I’m to live out the rest of my decades, years, and days in this village, it would be a great horror to watch what it once was die along with me. I’ve no desire to be haunted by the ghosts of this still-living oldest generation when I reach their age, their spirits and those of their ancestors no longer knowing the land they once knew.

I’ve told you — this is a tiny village. There’s barely over 200 people here. But I think it’s a perfect microcosm for what is happening in other villages, towns, and cities throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the “developed” world.

Here, the effects of demographic change are quite easy to observe directly. I can see the physical changes in the land here, hear the bulldozers ripping up the earth to make way for new foundations, watch the increased traffic, daily notice the increased litter on the ground, notice the increase in noise, and learn the names of the new immigrants.

And no, we don’t all get along. One of them, a Ukrainian I believe, sneers viciously at me whenever we both wait for the bus at the same stop. I don’t know why she does this. Maybe she doesn’t like the way I dress, or the way I smell, or that I’m a man. Or maybe she’s not actually sneering at me at all, but at her life. Maybe she’d really rather not be waiting for a rare village bus in this new land. Maybe she misses her husband who wasn’t allowed to leave Ukraine because of the compulsory draft. Maybe she hates Luxembourg, or its language, or the fact that she cannot get Ukrainian food in any of the restaurants here. Or maybe she’s just wrinkling her nose against the sweetly putrid smell of cow shit from the dairy by the bus stop.

Other immigrants are nicer but quite standoffish. Someone’s two children ride their bikes often in front of our house— we overhear them admiring our garden but they never speak to us. Another nods distantly when I pass him on his jogs. One actually stopped by to ask my husband about some of our plants. Besides a woman who lets her dog shit in front of our house and doesn’t clean, and the new couple who moved in and then immediately started a really cruel property war with one of the sweetest old ladies of this village, and whoever the fuck it is who keeps leaving their trash everywhere, the other immigrants all seem pretty okay.

But we’re not from here, and we’re changing this place, and only rarely in ways that are actually respectful to the land and the people who were here already. I notice this, and maybe some of the other immigrants notice it also, but I’m certain the older residents cannot stop noticing it. We’re changing their village, their home, the place their great-grandparents and their great-grandparents lived.

Worse, we’ve arrived at a time when the centuries of cultural forms and communal relations they inherited had been already weakened by economic change. The people here used to be farmers, and woodcutters, living from the land and what lived there. Each family, even four decades ago, raised their own pigs for hams and grew their own vegetables for food. But there’s only one farm family left, and they now exclusively raise dairy cattle. The sawmill in a neighboring village was closed decades ago, and now all the wood that is still cut is shipped far away for processing. That’s why so many moved away, and why the village rituals died out, and also why the land becoming new housing for us immigrants was available for development.

When it happens in cities, this kind of replacement process is usually called “gentrification.” And the poor in those neighborhoods experiencing those changes are certainly right to try to resist it. In those instances, it’s also quite easy to directly notice the changes, especially when old community businesses close and are replaced by hipster yoga studios or international coffee chains.

But the cultural shifts that occur are much harder to track and explain, since there’s rarely any kind of culture that could be called “ancient” in the cities. Instead, the culture that does exist is more a general feeling of familiarity, the sense you and your neighbors have something in common that you could not possibly name. When it starts changing, there’s suddenly an urgency to find a name for it. As, for example, the residents of a neighborhood calling it a “Latino neighborhood” or a “black neighborhood” to explain their anger at Chinese-owned convenience stores displacing older bodegas or white-owned hipster cafes replacing soul food diners. But these racial identifications are mere products of false enlightenment, feeble attempts to use pre-packaged ideological forms like race to name the deeper loss of something they don’t know how to name.

I don’t know how the older generation in this village names their loss, or if they even try to name it. But you can see on their faces they know the loss is there, and that they feel it constantly, and that I, along with the other newcomers, am somehow connected to it.

But here, at least, there is no economic competition between us. I am not taking a job their sons or daughters might have taken, because their children have mostly all left the country. Luxembourg anyway never invested in training the kinds of workers needed to run its economic growth, which is why there are so many immigrants here. As with other European nations, the government decided to globally source its labor force rather than educate its own citizens. That has meant importing tens of thousands of people a year into a country of less than 700 thousand people.

80% of the population growth in this country is due to immigration, and that kind of influx cannot help but alter the culture of the society. As with other European countries, a higher percentage of those immigrants are male than are female, and they are on average much younger than the average population of the native born. It’s not difficult, then, to see how theories like “The Great Replacement” appear in the rhetoric of the nationalist party (the ADR) here. They’re only half-right, though. The native-born population of Luxembourg is indeed being replaced, but it’s not primarily by Muslims from North Africa. Instead, it’s mostly by highly-educated foreigners from the US, the UK, Europe, and Asia, a class of people who are capable of wreaking much more havoc on a country’s culture than any jihadist could dream of causing.

Of course, Luxembourg is a rare case. In other countries, the influx of immigrants is pulled from the impoverished residents of former colonial territories (as in France, Belgium, and Netherlands) or the remnants of former empires (as in the United Kingdom and Germany). For those countries, the cultural differences between the native-born population and the immigrants is starker than it ever will be here.

And this brings me to the entire point of writing this essay, the matter of the recent riots in England.

I’ve read quite a few of the official explanations as to what’s happening there after it was first drawn to my attention by a friend there. The majority opinion from all the official outlets seems to be that it’s just “far right racism” that must be smashed out with the full force of the state and its Antifa handmaidens.

I’m not there. I’m here in a small Luxembourgish village as an immigrant who doesn’t yet speak the local language. I can only extrapolate from what I see here, what I directly observe, and from my memories of living in swiftly changing urban neighborhoods in the United States.

And from that, I suspect most of the people in those manifestations are experiencing the same ineffable sense of loss the elders of this village and the residents of a gentrifying neighborhood do. The culture they’ve known seems to be — is — changing around them, and they have no say in the matter and no power to stop it.

Also like these elders and those residents, they have already been subject to unstoppable cultural shifts which took from them anything that could be truly named “culture.” All that is left to them is that numb and unnameable sense of loss, a grief at no longer feeling at home where they are.

In US school shootings, it’s inevitable to hear neoliberal politicians and Democrat activists claim the event was caused by the gun in the child’s hand, not by the child or the culture that created him. The few far right ideologues loosely related to these riots (no, not actually the cause nor the leaders of them) do the same thing. Disruptive immigration is a gun in the hand of capitalists, a weapon used to complete the social erosion they require to maintain control.

This is something leftists all knew until class consciousness got replaced with the false enlightenment of social justice. Immigrants are not the enemy, but disruptive mass immigration is one of the enemy’s weapons. When a large group of us (remember, us — I’m an immigrant) move into a place, we will change it no matter whether we want to or not. This is even more true if the communities into which we move have already begun to fall apart through cultural erosion or economic damage.

Immigration is a natural act of being human, and it is something that will only increase dramatically as capitalism’s crises accelerate. Some of us will leave for new lands no matter the circumstances, but many more of us will find ourselves forced to travel very far from the violence of places we once considered home.

And as immigration increases, the problems we immigrants cause will also increase. This is inevitable, and a lot more strife will be arriving everywhere soon. But since we do the most inadvertent damage in places with no real sense of community or culture in the first place, the most beautiful way to avoid the problems we cause is to rebuild community and culture before we get there.

This is much harder work than any of the other solutions offered. The best what passes for a left seems to offer is a moral chiding about how everyone needs to be more tolerant, without any blueprint for what tolerance means or any real idea of what culture is beyond their own hipster consumption habits. And certainly, there are some rather pathetic attempts by their shadow twin, the identitarian right, to replace cultural expression and communal relations with simplistic racial or religious signifiers.

But even worse than either of them is the neoliberal capitalist center, those who profit from both the displacement that causes immigration and also the societal breakdown that mass immigration causes. They, as always, are the true enemies here, and only a true solidarity among the lower class they exploit can ever stop them. And only strong cultures and true community can create that kind of solidarity.