What the European left/center-left needs to do yesterday is to hire the best damn PR people and spin a massive bipartisan thing about integrating immigrants better - something that’s both massively important as a long term policy and to move away from the awful no-win one-dimensional debate, “holy shit just let people in” vs. “they are scum and should keep languishing Over There”.

Jesus fuck. Integration needs INVESTMENT. You don’t just fucking dump people on the ground, give them meager welfare and expect most of them them to adapt somehow. The horrible flaw of liberalism appears to be the unwillingness to convince people that investing in migrants is both better and safer, and instead ending up with a compromise that might well blow up in their faces.

Yes, immigrant crime/etc is not statistically That Bad, but still there’s no way to win on it when your position is not having a position + vague appeals to humanitarianism. If you could outflank the Right on “oh yes, we agree, better law and order, better employment programs, strong communities”, then you’d have something to go on without actually being horribly evil.

Immigration is *not*, historically, a threat to nations - the Goths being an exception that proves the rule. And Europe is wealthy and stable and powerful. This fucking shit should be easy.

Instead, we’ll most likely get a creeping compromise with the Right: less access *and* less funding for helping migrants already here. Which is fucked up.

(p.s. I’ve seen so much concern trolling along the lines of “like it or not, this nice bleeding-heart liberal experiment is something people hate, and it’s with a heavy heart that I call for more barbed wire”. I fucking hate that. The Left needs to save open borders, and the only way to do that is to improve/reframe the whole toxic debate. Not just fucking capitulate.)