Immigrants always head toward freedom

Victor Davis Hanson asks the question:

Why Do Migrants Always Flock to the West?

After just a few paragraphs, Hanson answers his own question:

...its uniquely Western menu — free-market capitalism, private property, a free press, meritocracy, consensual government, religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, and individual freedom — draws in people, while the antitheses repel them.

But, there are problems:

Many ordinary middle-class Westerners oppose massive influxes of immigrants. These citizens do not like seeing laws rendered null and void. They fear that their schools, health facilities, legal systems, and social services will be overwhelmed and left unable to effectively serve their own middle classes and poor.

The masses in the West have learned such caution from experience. The sudden appearance of huge numbers of immigrants — when coupled with poverty, lack of language facility, and little education — for decades afterwards has impeded easy integration, assimilation, and intermarriage within Western society.

As a result, a divisive, salad-bowl multicultural separatism often arises.

Should Harvard or Oxford open their ample campuses to migrant tent cities, should the wealthy in Malibu and Monaco allow their beaches to become refugee campgrounds, should the Vatican turn its vast plaza into beds and soup kitchens for thousands, then a member of the elite might not be so jaded about the vast abyss between what is lectured and what is actually done.

...Non-Western countries are even more two-faced about immigration. Saudi Arabia, for example, has not used its trillions of petrodollars to take in fellow Muslims from neighboring countries. But it has offered to build 200 mosques in Germany. The Saudis logically assume that unassimilated young male Muslim immigrants in Europe will be ripe for the Saudis’ own brand of extremist Islamic chauvinism and resistance to Western modernism.

In the case of Mexico, it expects that the United States would never treat immigrants in the manner that Mexico deals with migrants.

Read more here.