The West Is In the Midst of a Migration and Identity Crisis

Excerpted from an article that first appeared at The Orange County Register.

As the economy has improved, popular concern, both here and abroad, has shifted to issues of migration and identity. Just last year, immigration, according to Gallup, was seen as the most important issue by barely 5 percent of the population, while the economy was cited by more than four times as many. But now, immigration and undocumented aliens is now the biggest concern to 15 percent of the population, equal to that of the economy.

You can blame Donald Trump, and his focus on that issue, for some of this. But Trump did not create the long mounting migration pressures — including 200,000 unaccompanied children during President Obama’s last term. Nor is he responsible for growing opposition — almost three-to-one — to mass migration among Europeans.

Unrestricted EU migration helped drive Brexit in the U.K., upended Italian politics and sent many traditionally centrist voters elsewhere flocking to anti-immigrant parties, including some on the extreme, quasi-fascist right. The move towards what the Guardian ominously calls “fortress Europe” could even dethrone the current queen of the EU, the much praised “great humanist,” Angela Merkel.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Elekes Andor [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons