The New World Order – The Civilization
of Love. It is truly beyond our powers. Yet, it may be taking place.
Global Development depends on placing Christ at the global center. As
St. Paul writes in Colossians 1, 15-18, “He is the image of the invisible God, the
firstborn of every creature. For in him were created all things in the heavens
and on the earth, things visible and things invisible…All things have been
created through and unto him, and he is before all creatures and in him all things
hold together.”
Bishop Robert Barron
comments:
“Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets and the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him… Jesus is not merely the symbol of an intelligibility, coherence, and reconciliation that can exist apart from him; rather, he is the active and indispensable means by which these realities come to be.[1]
“If in Colossians the
particular figure Jesus of Nazareth is identified with the creative power of God,
in the Johannine text the process is reversed: now the transcendent Logos of God
is appreciate d as the one who became concretely available in this Jesus: ‘The Word
became flesh.’”[2]
The Dynamic of this ontologic centrality of Christ is His
parable of the Good Samaritan. After expounding the core of the Old Testament
that You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, whole soul,
whole mind and whole strength, and your neighbor as yourself, Christ
responds with the Good Samaritan to the question, “And who is my neighbor.”[3]
A Migration Juggernaut Is Headed for
Europe - Eduardo Porter
NYT B1 p. 12: SEPT. 15, 2015
Migrants,
mostly from Syria and Afghanistan, who crowded a train platform in Budapest
this month were prevented from going to Germany.
European
leaders probably don’t want to hear this now, as they frantically try to
close their borders to stop hundreds
of thousands of desperate migrants and asylum seekers escaping
hunger and violence in Africa and the Middle East. But they are dealing with
the unstoppable force of demography.
Fortified
borders may slow it, somewhat. But the sooner Europe acknowledges it faces
several decades of heavy immigration from its neighboring regions, the sooner
it will develop the needed policies to help integrate large migrant populations
into its economies and societies.
That
will be no easy task. It has long been a challenge for all rich countries, of
course, but in crucial respects Europe does a particularly poor job.
Perhaps
it’s not surprising, as a recent
report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found, that
it is harder for immigrants to get a job in European Union nations than in most
other rich countries. But that doesn’t explain why it is also harder for their
European-born children, who report even more discrimination than their parents
and suffer much higher rates of unemployment than the children of the
native-born.
Rather
than fortifying borders, European countries would do better to improve on this
record. The benefits would be substantial, for European citizens and the rest
of the world.
Over
the summer, as Hungary hurried to lay razor wire along its southern border and
E.U. leaders hashed out plans to destroy smugglers’ boats off the coast of
North Africa, the United Nations Population Division quietly released its
latest reassessment offuture population
growth.
Gone is
the expectation that the world’s population will peak at nine billion in 2050.
Now the U.N. predicts it will hit almost 10 billion at midcentury and surpass
11 billion by 2100. And most of the growth will come from the poor, strife-ridden
regions of the world that have been sending migrants scrambling to Europe in
search of safety and a better life.
The
population of Africa, which has already grown 50 percent since the turn of the
century, is expected to double by 2050, to 2.5 billion people. South Asia’s
population may grow by more than half a billion. And Palestine’s
population density is expected to double to 1,626 people per square kilometer
(4,211 per square mile), three times that of densely populated India.
Over the
next several decades, millions of people are likely to leave these regions,
forced out by war, lack of opportunity and conflicts over resources set in
motion by climate change. Rich Europe is inevitably going to be a prime
destination of choice.
“With
Africa’s population likely to increase by more than three billion over the next
85 years, the European Union could be facing a wave of migration that makes
current debates about accepting hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers seem
irrelevant,” wrote Adair Turner,
the former chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and now chairman
of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Europe’s
initial reaction to the flow has been mixed, at best. Germany, notably, has
committed real resources to help cover the basic needs of hundreds of thousands
of refugees it expects to welcome this year. But that is hardly the spirit
across the board. And Europe is still mostly focused on steeling its borders,
even to the point of closing many of its once free-flowing internal boundaries.
Better
options exist. The rich history of immigration around the world suggests that
new migrant populations could be integrated into the European social fabric to
the benefit of Europeans, the new immigrants and even the regions of the world
they left behind.
Take
Britain, where the government of Prime Minister David Cameron came into office
promising to cut net annual immigration from “the hundreds of thousands to the
tens of thousands.”
Researchers
at Britain’s National Institute for Economic and Social Research and the
University of Ottawa estimated
that carrying out the policy would cut Britain’s income per
head, increase public spending and raise income taxes to pay for it. All things
considered, by 2060 Britons’ wages would be 3.3 percentage points lower than
had the government left the immigration rate alone.
These
dynamics apply across the developed world. Frédéric Docquier of the Université
Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Caglar Ozden from the World Bank and Giovanni
Peri of the University of California, Davis, found that immigration from 1990
through 2000had a
positive effect on the wages of native workers — including
low-wage workers — in virtually all the 34 countries in the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development.
Rich
countries with lower fertility rates and older populations benefit from young
migrants of working age, who help rev up their
slowing labor supply. From 2000 to 2010, migrants accounted for
nearly two-thirds of European labor force growth. Immigrants bring diversity to
complement the attributes of domestic workers: different levels of education
and productivity and different consumption patterns.
They
spur business investment to take advantage of the additional labor supply. They
prompt domestic workers to switch into occupations that leverage their language
skills and other comparative advantages.
Despite
popular perceptions to the contrary, migrants are often highly educated, and
they generally do not burden the public purse. Stefano Scarpetta, director of
the department of employment, labor and social affairs at the O.E.C.D., said
immigrants often contribute more in taxes than they draw in public benefits.
What’s
more, the countries sending migrants abroad often benefit, too.
“Remittances transfer some of the gains
from the increased productivity of migrants back to the natives that remained
in the home country,” wrote Julian di Giovanni of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra
in Barcelona, Andrei Levchenko of the University of Michigan and Francesc
Ortega of the City University of New York.
Of
course, the most sensible response to large-scale immigration must include
helping unstable, impoverished countries in Africa and beyond overcome the
demographic pressure that stunts their development, as Mr. Turner advocates.
Investment in human and physical capital simply can’t keep up with population
growth. Neither can job creation.
Achieving
the demographic transition to lower mortality and fertility rates will require
not only investing in women’s education and encouraging contraceptive use but
also freeing women to make their own reproductive choices.
In the
meantime, Europe’s challenge is real. Receiving millions of migrants of
different races, religions and cultures from far-flung lands will pose
political, economic and social challenges to European countries that remain to
this day fairly homogeneous.
Social
scientists have acknowledged the importance of Europe’s racial and cultural homogeneity
in building political support for expensive welfare states with
robust safety nets. It was easier for white, Christian Europeans to tolerate
high taxes if they went to pay for benefits for white, Christian Europeans like
themselves.
Access
to jobs is a critical precondition for success. But the overall task is
greater, to eventually close the socio-economic gaps between immigrants and
their descendants and native Europeans. “What matters is the integration
of the migrants in receiving countries,” Mr. Scarpetta said.
“This will not occur by itself.”
In the end, the choice is
clear. Europe’s best shot at prosperity is to build upon the diversity that
immigration will bring.
[1] Robert
Barron, “The Priority of Christ,” Brazos Press (2007) 134-135.
[2]
Idem, 135.
[3]
Charles Taylor, in agreement with Ivan Illich, lays the blame for the
secularization of the West at the feet of a corrupted Christianity which has
erected a system of categories, rules and regulations in place of personal
relations which are the heart of imaging the transcendent God of Jesus Christ,
the Trinity. Taylor wrote: “Corruption occurs when the Church begins to respond
to the failure and inadequacy of a motivation grounded in a sense of mutual
belonging by erecting a system. This system incorporates a code or set of
rules, a set of disciplines to make us internalize these rules, and a system of
rationally constructed organizations – private and public bureaucracies,
universities, schools [hospitals] – to make
sure we carry out what the rules demand. All these become second nature to us.
We grow accustomed to decentring ourselves from our lived, embodied experience in
order to become disciplines, rational, disengaged subject. From within this
perspective, the significance of the Good Samaritan story appears obvious: it
is a stage on the road to a universal morality of rules.’ (Taylor Foreword to “The Rivers North of the
Future – The Testament of Ivan Illich,” Anansi
(2005) XII).
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