The low birth rate across much of Europe has been a concern for a long time.
Now, with millions of immigrants flooding into the historically Christian nations, changing not just the politics and economics but the culture, Europe faces a “crisis of survival.”
That’s according to Giulio Meotti, the cultural editor for Il Foglio, who observes in a commentary at the Gatestone Institute that Europe is in a downward spiral, “slowly dying out by failing to reproduce.”
For example, 42 percent of children under the age of 6 in Western Germany now come from migrant backgrounds.
Europe, Geotti wrote, could become “a museum or a cultural amusement park for the nouveau riche of globalization,” as the late historian Walter Laqueur expected.
But European leaders increasingly are expressing support for the one logical solution: have more children.
One leader Geotti cited was Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who said recently, “I’ve heard colleagues say that we need immigration because the population of Europe is getting older, but I have a completely different viewpoint.
“I believe that I’m in government in order to see that our young people have the number of children that they used to a few years ago and not to transplant the best of Africa’s youth to Europe,” Salvini said.
“Maybe in Luxembourg they need to do this, but in Italy we need to help people have more children, rather than bring in modern-day slaves (from Africa) to replace the children we’re not having.”
The Italian leader said he prefers “to keep Italy for the Italians and start to make children again.”
Meotti explained: “Europe’s establishment is therefore perfect divided between the so-called ‘Europeists,” who believe that new migrants are necessary to stop the EU’s demographic collapse, and the ‘Euroskeptics’ who want to overcome it on their own. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, for instance, has called on Europeans to stop the ‘demographic decline’ by investing more in traditional families.”
Salvini said a country “which does not create children is destined to die.”
“We have created a ministry of the family to work on fertility, nurseries, on a fiscal system which takes large families into account,” he said. “At the end of this mandate, the government will be measured on the number of newborns more than on its public debt.”
Catholic Bishop Andrew Nkew Fuanya of Cameroon also commented on Europe’s birth rates.
“It’s a very big thing. And I will dare to say that, especially with the backdrop of the Islamic invasion, if you look through history, where the church slept, got diverted away from the Gospel, Islam took the advantage and came in. This is what we are seeing in Europe, that the church is sleeping, and Islam is creeping in.”
The article noted French president Emmanuel Macron called Africa’s problems “civilizational” and lamented that they “have seven or eight children per woman.”
“Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight or nine children,” Geotti wrote.
“The question Macron implicitly raised is: How can Europe manage its own educated people with their low birth rates while confronting massive African and Middle Eastern fertility and immigration? It seems that Europe is in a demographic struggle with the of the world, and can only lose.”
“Time is running out,” Geotti concluded.
