Fortress Europe

As Europe comes increasingly under siege by asylum-seekers, refugees, economic migrants, jihadists, and others, it inevitably will put up walls, create military forces, and in other ways hunker down. One key development in this process is being revealed today by Franco Frattini, the European Union's justice commissioner. Called the European Maritime Border Guard Corps, it will be a EU-wide funded and staffed force in the Mediterranean Sea to hold back the flow of Africans. If EU governments accept Frattini's plan, the corps could start work in early 2006. Its two main missions will be to detect boats leaving African ports via satellites and rescue ships in distress. Immigrants picked up at sea will be transported to European ports, processed in a fast-track asylum procedure, and those rejected summarily deported. Frattini sees in this maritime force a step toward creating a European Land Border Guard Corps.

	Franco Frattini

Comment: I predicted in 2001 that the military response by the Australian authorities to illegal immigration was "the start of a trend." Expect to see much, much more along these lines as the West protects its patrimony. (November 27, 2005)

June 11, 2006 update: For an apocalyptic vision of Europe in a decade, listen to the UK's Rear Admiral Chris Parry. Warning that Europe could be "like the 5^th-century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals,"

He pointed to the wave of mass migration that disaster in the Third World could unleash. "The diaspora issue is one of my biggest current concerns," he said. "Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned ... (the process) acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet." The direct effects of Third World instability would soon lick at the edges of the Western world as pirate gangs mounted smash-and-grab raids on holidaymakers. "At some time in the next 10 years it may not be safe to sail a yacht between Gibraltar and Malta."

Comment: It's interesting to recall that another British leader, Enoch Powell, in 1968 gave his famous "Rivers of Blood" speech, in which he predicted that immigration to the United Kingdom would lead to problems: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood'." This speech aborted Powell's political career. Today, far more detailed scenarios raise hardly a murmur.

Aug. 14, 2006 update: When writing the above about Europe inevitably putting up walls, I was thinking of the external kind, such as those that have gone up surrounding Ceuta and Melilla, and not internal walls between parts of a city. But at least one of the latter now exists, in the fabled Italian city of Padua, blocking the 273 apartments spread out over six blocks of the Serenissima development project, with its many immigrants, from the rest of the city, population 210,000.

Six, seven or eight immigrants shared each space and slept in shifts to reduce the rent even further. Unable to work legally, and with little money, the new arrivals hung around with nothing to do. Petty crime flourished and prostitutes and drug dealers targeted the area. Italians who couldn't afford to move out became too scared to open their doors at night. In a recent editorial, Corriere della Sera described the area as "the worst possible example of failed integration" and said it was an example of what can happen if ghettos are allowed to form. …

Matters came to a head last month, when a pitched battle raged for several hours one night between gangs of Moroccans and Nigerians wielding clubs, machetes, knives and crowbars. Tear gas was used to break up the fight and the incident shook the citizens of Padua. The city known for its artworks by Giotto, Donatello and Mantegna, and which is home to Italy's second-oldest university, where Galileo was once a professor of mathematics, had the distinction of having the most dangerous housing development in northern Italy.

Now Padua has another dubious claim to fame. A large and ugly barrier has been erected to help protect local residents from the run-down apartment blocks, largely filled with immigrants. Stretching for 84 metres, three metres high and made of thick steel panels, there is a police checkpoint at the entrance as well as CCTV cameras. The project has been welcomed by local people but is highly controversial. …

Of particular note: the mayor who constructed this wall around the so-called Padua Bronx, Flavio Zanonato, belongs to the "Democrats of the Left" (Italian: Democratici di Sinistra) party, the renamed Communist party. In contrast, the right-wing Northern League party called for the city to "raze the casbah of foreign delinquency to the ground." It will get its way, as three of the Serenissima's apartment blocks are already emptied of tenants and sealed, with current plans calling for everyone else to move out within two years.

The wall built on the outskirts of Padua to seal off Serenissima.

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