Of Course, It Could Not Happen Here - By Roger Cohen
By Roger Cohen
Opinion Columnist
June 29, 2018
PARIS — The German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel falls, torn apart by demands from her conservative interior minister, Horst Seehofer, that refugees already registered in another European Union state be thrown out of Germany. The xenophobic Alternative for Germany, or AfD, enters a new nationalist governing coalition. The party’s cry of “take back our country and our Volk!” echoes through Berlin.
Congratulatory calls pour in from the nationalist leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Austria — and the United States. The American ambassador to Germany tweets his approval.
European Union leaders, buckling before the anti-immigrant tide, opt for the establishment of large detention centers for all migrants. Asylum seekers whose claims are verified will be admitted, while economic migrants merely in search of a better future will be evicted.
Riots erupt in these vast walled compounds. Rapid triage proves impossible. Conditions fester. Matteo Salvini, the rightist Italian interior minister, declares that a disastrous mistake has been made. The detention centers should have been located in North Africa. He defends his orders to the Italian Coast Guard to ignore calls for help from ships filled with migrants who, he says, may prove to be criminals and rapists.
The abduction of a Russian girl by Moroccan migrants at a Spanish beach resort causes an uproar. It turns out to be “fake news,” the work of Russian cyber-geeks deployed for information warfare, but not before rightist leaders across the European Union have denounced the “foreign animals” holding “little Tatiana.” Spain’s fragile government collapses.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/opinion/europe-immigration-trump-putin-germany.html
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