The Times Strains to Credit France's World Cup Victory to Immigration
France’s win over Croatia in the World Cup vindicates an open-borders policy towards Third World migrants, according to the New York Times:
At a moment when Europe is strained by hostility toward dark-skinned migrants, the winning French soccer team’s nexus of African-origin stars is seen as an implicit rebuke to countries that have historically been less open to immigration.
“Croatia, the team that France defeated in the final, all of whose members are white, represented a country that has “forced back asylum seekers and migrants,” Human Rights Watch said on its website.
This is a desperate argument. Croatia beat Nigeria 2–0 on June 16. Did that win vindicate a Croatia-first immigration policy? In the 1998 World Cup, Croatia beat Jamaica 3–1; in the 2014 World Cup, Croatia beat Cameroon 4–0. Score more political wins, apparently, for national borders.
A soccer team is not a country, despite tribal team identification. The 15 meritocratically selected African-origin players on France’s soccer team are hardly stand-ins for the millions of African and Middle Eastern immigrants who form a vast, unassimilated underclass on the outskirts of European cities. A win at the World Cup has nothing to do with the reality of mass, unfiltered Third World immigration, and it shows the travails of the open-borders crowd, in the face of the rising rejection of their philosophy, that they need to make it.
This piece originally appeared at National Review Online
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online