New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
French riots just a start Thursday, November 17th, 2005 The French authorities have announced that the recent spasm of rioting by North African youths is over and done with - a bit of political face-saving that amounts to wishful thinking. France and most other European nations will likely see similar ethnic tension and outbreaks of violence in the coming months and years because of a collision between the the continent's desperate need to attract immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Mideast, and the cultural pride of European nations that assumes those immigrants can only be assimilated if they drop their cultural identities and become European. France's ghettos filled with angry, disaffected North African youth show what can happen when assimilation fails. But immigration remains critically important all across the continent because of what statisticians call Europe's "demographic collapse." Any population begins shrinking when women of child-bearing age have, on average, fewer than two kids apiece. With the sole exception of mostly Muslim Albania, every nation in the European Union has birthrates that fell below the population-replacement level years ago, triggering a shrinking of the population in European nations that grows more pronounced with every generation. "What is happening now has simply never happened before in the history of the world," is how Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, described the situation to the New York Times in 1998. "In a generation or two there may be countries where most people's only blood relatives will be their parents." Think about it. If everyone in a family has one child and that continues generation after generation, eventually the extended clans of uncles, aunts, and cousins disappear. Italy's birthrate is so low that the country is expected to shrink from 57 million in 2000 to 41 million by 2050, a plunge of 28%. Germany's population is expected to drop by 27% in the same period, and Latvia is expected to lose 44% of its population, in what the London Telegraph calls "the most sudden demographic collapse seen in peacetime since the Black Death of the 14th century." The causes of Europe's shrinkage include factors most people consider positive, such as the availability of birth control and the rising status of women that allows them to pursue professional careers rather than raise lots of kids. But the empty and half-populated towns that increasingly dot the European countryside are warnings of a grim day of reckoning that is fast approaching. Soon, there won't be enough workers in Europe to staff the factories, man the armies, sweep the streets - or pay taxes to support the vast numbers of aging retirees. Enter the immigrants. Europe needs waves of newcomers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to survive. But European nations, particularly France, remain bastions of cultural chauvinism and often refuse to lay out the welcome mat for people arriving with their own customs, history, languages, religions and cuisines. The irony is that North African immigrants and their children, whom the French have funneled into bleak urban hellholes, are literally the continent's salvation. If Europe can't face up to that fact, expect to see more riots in the future, from Amsterdam to Austria.