‘In ten years, people will be grateful to Chancellor Merkel’

Thus migration researcher Prof. Bauböck (EUI) in October 2015, and boy, that nonsense didn't age very well

It’s the ten-year anniversary of the what shapes up to be the death knell for Collective West: the 2015 Migrant Crisis, as it is de facto officially known.

In less than a decade, Western societies underwent what is arguably a disruptive and major transformation without parallels in the annals of human history. That is, with perhaps the direct effects—really, aftershocks—of the 1917 revolutions—both the democratic™ February and the Bolshevik October iterations—being close, if not entirely apt, comparisons to this historian.

It’s not ‘just’ o’er here in Europe where the effects are most visible, but this revolutionary transformation also affects the other offshoots, so to speak, of Euro-American (‘Western’) civilisation: primarily Australia and New Zealand, but increasingly so societies that are less prone to adopting these policies, such as Japan and South Korea.

Here’s an apt summary of what transpired, courtesy of the above-linked Wikipedia entry (emphases mine)

The crisis had significant political consequences in Europe. The influx of migrants caused significant demographic and cultural changes in these countries.^[11] As a consequence, some politicians raised concerns about the challenges of integrating migrants, and the public raised discussions about potential effects to European values.^[12] Paired also with rising cost of living and other complex social problems, political polarization increased,^[13] confidence in the European Union fell,^[14] and many countries implemented stricter asylum policies. Right-wing populist parties gained support as immigration became a key political issue and became significantly more popular in many countries. There was an increase in protests regarding immigration and the circulation of the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement.^[15]

Oh, the Great Replacement, which is, of course, a ‘white nationalist conspiracy theory’.

By which are probably meant official gov’t data from, e.g., Austria showing that my small Heimat took in 3.5m migrants in the past quarter-century:

Is Population 'Replacement' a 'Conspiracy Theory'? No, it's an UN-Endorsed Program

And then there’s Eric Weinstein’s recent paper, entitled ‘Migration For The Benefit of All: Towards a New Paradigm for Migrant Labor’, commissioned by the UN’s International Labor Organization, that firmly endorsed mass immigration. Honi qui mal y pense.

Here’s part one of this anniversary series:

'All Taboos' Having Gone, Vandalism of Churches is Increasing

And now for the main course: a 2015 interview with Prof. Rainer Bauböck, a ‘migration researcher’, then a visiting fellow at the European University Institute outside Florence, Italy (don’t worry, it’s not a real university: it’s one of the EU’s primary think tanks that also doubles as archive of the EU) and normally found on the premises of the Vienna-based Austrian Academy of Sciences (faculty profile).

Back then, he spoke to Austrian leftoid daily rag Der Standard’s András Sigetvari, and re-reading that interview in 2025 shows how far standards, both academic and journalistic, have fallen.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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Migration Researcher: ‘In ten years, people will be grateful to Chancellor Merkel’

Countries that open their doors to refugees will also benefit economically, says migration researcher Rainer Bauböck [who taught at the European University Institute in outside Florence, Italy]

By András Szigetvari, Der Standard, 27 Oct. 2015 [source; archived]

Der Standard [hence Standard]: The flow of refugees to Europe is unceasing. Is there an upper limit to how many new arrivals welfare states like Austria can absorb?

Prof. Rainer Bauböck [hence Bauböck]: If you take into consideration how many people have been taken in in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, you have to say that actually only a few refugees have come to Europe [relatively speaking, that may or may not be true as the migration expert™ doesn’t offer any data]. But the paradox is that developed welfare states are much more severely affected by the shock of a large number of new arrivals than countries in the Middle East. This is because the demands on social systems and the labor market are higher in Europe [demands, such as literacy, respect for other people, in particular women, or the notion that people are working for a living?]. Refugees here are entitled [sic] to state assistance and housing [they are not to the same degree in the Middle East, hence the pull-effect of Western countries]. When they are released from welfare, they must be given access to the labour market [where they then compete with local labour, thus depressing wages; while countries in Europe do have much stronger enforcement policies vs. ‘illegal labour’ than the US, esp. California, in Europe it is the gov’t that is waving many requirements that must be met by citizens].

Standard: There are experts [sic] who say that the European-style social market economy can only function in a society that is as homogeneous as possible.

Bauböck: You have to distinguish between two things: are societies culturally homogeneous, and do they therefore find it difficult to accept culturally foreign immigrants, or are societies not sufficiently prepared for this in terms of welfare? [this is nonsense: the first part has a false premise (cultural homogeneity) that leads to the second aspect; both are wrong—all data we have points to social-cultural compatibility being highest across ‘the West’ (Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and perhaps Taiwan), and there’s not a lot of issues with immigrants going to and fro; the issue is the importation of masses of non-Westerners]. Currently, countries that are particularly reluctant to accept immigrants are those where the prevailing perception is that they are culturally homogeneous nation-states and want to remain so [once more, the issue isn’t so much ‘are there too many, e.g., Japanese in Malmö, Sweden, or Austrians in Portugal; the issue is how do these Western immigrants act/behave/integrate where one can observe distinct differences as measured by, say, what jobs they work, how many taxes they pay, and how often Western immigrants appear in crime statistics].

Standard: One example, please [only one?].

Bauböck: That certainly applies to Hungary and Slovakia, but also to Denmark [muahahahahaha; I admit I didn’t expect Denmark to be mentioned (but it’s true)]. At the same time, one can see the opposite development in Germany. For a long time, the Federal Republic was considered a prime example of a cultural nation conceived as homogenous, in contrast to the nation-state of France, where there has been a great deal of immigration since the 19th century. But since the turn of the millennium, Germany has officially acknowledged itself as an immigration society [orig. Einwanderungsgesellschaft].¹ This has also been reflected in public consciousness. That doesn’t mean there are no conflicts there. But the social consensus in the political centre has [been] shifted.

Standard: Does that mean that fears of the welfare state being overwhelmed are irrelevant?

Bauböck: No. On the welfare state side, the challenge is huge everywhere in Europe. On the other hand, there’s the argument that the welfare state needs immigration like butter on bread. In the long term, European welfare states can only reduce their aging problem by relying on immigration [that’s an interesting proposition, epistemologically speaking, for the origins of the welfare state are a) industrialisation and its discontents (who shouldn’t turn socialist) and b) more or less careful deliberation of how to provide a social safety net (valve) to avoid the discontents to turn to socialism: hence, calibrated measures, such as accident and unemployment insurance, COLA (cost-of-living-adjustment) contracts, collective bargaining, etc., all of which relate to economic growth permitting funding these schemes; whatever one’s sentiments of—and resource limits to—growth, there used to be a relation between social security and the productivity; I suppose it’s fair to say that the idea of social security-morphing-into-welfare is a perversion of these ideas]. That’s what most demographers say [dunno about you, but this reeks of a) shifting blame to demographers (what is it that ‘migration researchers’ work on, by the way?) and b) something that’s about as epistemologically sound as the mantra-like invocation of 97% of experts™ holding similar views about (pick and chose) climate change, pandemic policies, or the Russian-Ukrainian (NATO) conflict]. However, immigration is especially helpful against the consequences of aging if it occurs steadily and in a controlled manner, and if the destination countries can choose the immigrants [that may or may not be true, but it’s at least a proposition that can be tested against real-world data from the past 10 years: Western societies did the exact opposite, hence migration™ may be an even bigger FAFO moment than the climatology™ grift].

Standard: That’s not the case at the moment [see what I mean: ‘even’ leftoid rags such as Der Standard were perfectly fine saying that—back in 2015].

Bauböck: This [policy failure] results in the huge discrepancy between the current crisis situation and the long-term benefits that host countries like Germany will have. In ten years, people will probably be grateful to Chancellor Merkel [now it’s ten years later: incidentally, former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz published an op-ed in Die Welt on 24 Aug. 2025 with the header ‘We can do it? No, the Open Border Policy was a Mistake’, which I’ll provide you with tomorrow]. Not only because she acted correctly from a humanitarian perspective [maybe yes, maybe no], but also because she did something that was beneficial to Germany as a business location [I think the data is clear: it was not, and Ms. Merkel also committed various other blunders of comparable proportions that year, incl. the faking of the Minsk Agreements with Russia over Ukraine]. But in the short term there are problems because the social systems are geared to a smaller number of arrivals [i.e., the entire welfare model depends on productive people paying into the system; by taking out massive amounts of funds to accommodate masses of people who will, by all accounts, never pay into the system commensurately, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the premise (of mass immigration) is not just wrong, it’s a proven fact].

Standard: An important question is whether there will be cut-throat competition in the labour market [cut-throat effects there are, yes, but not in the labour market].

Bauböck: Labour market economists generally conclude that immigration does not necessarily result in cut-throat competition, and that wage pressure rarely actually increases [so much for these experts—no peep about, say, inflation or the fact that if your nominal wages increase below the (official, and hence fake) inflation numbers, one’s real income declines, which is what we’ve been seeing across Western economies for more than 10 years now]. What does exist, however, is cut-throat competition in the low-wage sector [which, in the case of Germany, former chancellor Gerhard Schröder conceived of as Agenda 2010 (Wikipedia write-up), overseen by Ms. Merkel, that created a massive low-wage sector in Germany (working poor) into which these teeming masses of Third Worlders are coming: as a thought experiment, how many (‘native’) retirees do you see checking trash cans for recyclable cans and bottles vs. more recent arrivals?]. This is a phenomenon triggered not only by immigration, but also by technological innovation and the outsourcing of jobs in the wake of globalisation [which itself isn’t a force of nature; it’s man-made]. There is a general problem for low-skilled groups of natives and earlier waves of immigrant workers—including in Austria.

Standard: What should wise [sic] policymakers do in this situation? [why aren’t we talking about existing legislation that provides for obligatory public schooling?]

Bauböck: The answer can only be to invest in education [which has become so crapified over the past decades due to the rise of UNESCO-inspired Agenda 2030-themed BS like ‘social-emotional learning’ masquerading as learning; moreover, the advent of digital technology across the West has led to a generation of young people who don’t read and can barely write]. Investments in scientific research are important for the location. But the most massive investments are needed in basic education, especially in elementary schools and preschool education. This doesn’t just help refugees. Countries like Great Britain show that native white working-class people are slipping into the lowest social positions [that’s also due to the gov’t prioritising immigrants over British citizens while, at the same time, massively discriminating against any sentiment that reeks of patriotism: just look at what happened in Scotland or (northern) Ireland]. There are certainly immigrants who were previously heavily discriminated against, such as those from Bangladesh, who are overtaking the native working class because they are more entrepreneurial or risk-taking [picking one exemplary group over the other isn’t hard: there’s a few thousand of Japanese immigrants in, say, Germany, and they never cause any problems as regards crime, socially destructive behaviour, or the fail to pay taxes: a good case for much more massive Japanese immigration over, say, that from sub-Saharan Africa, isn’t it (that is, if we’d apply that logic™)].

Standard: Why are some countries like Slovakia, Hungary, or the Baltic states so strongly opposed to refugees coming to them?

Bauböck: This largely has to do with how the transition from a communist to a post-communist system took place in these countries. In almost all countries, a strongly nationalist ideology was stirred up in the early 1990s, which also occupied the middle of society. These countries have had to reinvent themselves as nations, and the elites have often resorted to old nationalist ideologies [as if that didn’t happen during the Cold War²: this expert™ Bauböck is either ignorant or plays the journo™ for a fool (my money is on both)]. When a crisis situation arises, it is very easy to reheat this national-populist soup [this stance betrays the expert™’s firm pro-globalist stance], whichthen manifests itself as a display of sovereignty against the unreasonable demands of European solidarity. We can see how this is succeeding in Hungary, but also in Slovakia. Especially since many people feel that they have not benefited from the systemic change as much as they were promised upon joining the EU [now, that reason given hasn’t aged particularly well, did it, eh?]

Standard: How do you view Poland?

Bauböck: Poland is partly a counterexample: European integration has been largely successful, and accordingly, there is a strong pro-European attitude [not ‘even’ in Poland are the EU and its kleptocrat minions, such as Donald Tusk, well-liked]. But at the same time, there is an almost equally strong right-wing nationalist camp, for which Poland is still primarily a Christian nation [see, the main issue for collectivists of all stripes is, and always has been, the strong sense of European identity and heritage, which, for better and worse, derives in no small part from Christianity]. The idea that Poland is a country of immigration has not yet reached the political center [perhaps because the majority of the populace rejects this idea™? That is a thought that has not entered the expert™’s mind yet…]. If you consider how long it took in Germany to convey that all European states are, in the long run, immigration nations, and how difficult this still is to convey in Austria, then you can understand how lengthy this process is for countries that only made the transition to democracy 25 years ago [this is about as stupid and wrong a statement as could be made: democracy isn’t to become an ‘immigrant nation’, but to conflate these two notions is both highly disingenuous and simply wrong; in fact, an argument could be made that a democratic-republican régime must be exclusionary to non-citizens (in terms of political participation), yet it also points towards the age-old problem of clientelism: who do you think wards of the welfare state will vote for?]

Standard: Why is the majority attitude in Germany positive? Is this society, or is Chancellor Angela Merkel the real driving force?

Bauböck: I was surprised by Angela Merkel’s attitude. In retrospect, this is certainly easy to explain: she is in a position of domestic strength and does not have to contend with a strong right-wing populist opposition [AfD polled at below 4% ten years ago]. In Europe, Germany has been thrust into a leadership role, partly due to the defection in Great Britain and the economic and domestic weaknesses of France, and Merkel is the first chancellor to attempt to fill this role [so, here’s the expert™ telling everybody that the pro-immigration stance is a feat of political engineering: it’s not that we didn’t know, but it goes a long way towards showing how shitty mainstream journalism has become in the past decade].

While all political elites in European capitals know that there can be no solution to the refugee problem at the nation-state level [this points to the massive epistemological issues at-play here: the EU is a chief obstacle, and its élites are part of the problem (as are their camp-followers, such as Prof. Bauböck)], there is still resistance to the distribution of refugees within the EU. Merkel would not have been able to push through a European solution in this situation if Germany had simultaneously isolated itself—because that would have legitimised the same behaviour by all other states [remember, a few moments ago the expert™ told everybody that Germany was de facto in charge and pushed these insane migration policies: talk about bad intentions]. Therefore, she took a daring, statesmanlike step and de facto suspended the ill-fated Dublin Agreement [that would be ‘primary law’™ in the mould of the various other EU treaties, which simultaneously shows everyone just how much these élites *love* the rule of law™] which renders the problem insoluble [nope, the Dublin Agreement envisioned a clear solution: asylum must be applied for in the first EU country one arrives in, which is problematic as these would be Mediterranean countries, like Greece, Italy, and Spain who stand to be swamped; at the same time, free movement (I know) renders it impossible to actually enforce any connected residency obligations in the same way as, say, Texas cannot enforce anything in neighbouring states; unlike the US with its federal superstructure, however, the EU isn’t a state]. Germany can now use this stance to exert moral pressure on the other states and to support the Commission [which is a clear-eyed commentary on how Germany is moving above the EU treaties (primary law™) and rules its partners™]. However, the window of opportunity for this is very narrow and already appears to be closing.

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Bottom Lines

That was quite…something, eh?

A few concluding thoughts in no particular rank-order:

First, while I think that academia is circling the drain by now, I wouldn’t suggest that we should abolish the universities as such. Higher education, however, needs significant changes, in particular as regards lower, merit-based admission rates and way less administrative overhead.

This won’t change every issue that bedevils academia, and it won’t do that over night; yet, fixing these two things would go a long way towards restoring sanity, first in the proverbial ivory tower and subsequently in society at-large.

Second, the same, although in different contexts, should be done with respect to what passes for journalism these days: the two main issues here are a) editorial monkeying with what gets pushed and what doesn’t and b) the continued pretence of journos™ to ‘deliver the news’, which is a fool’s errand, at best, in the age of instant (social) media communications (at worst, it may be considered agit-prop plus censorship). I suppose that leaving the delivery of news (in the classical sense of the term) to crowd-sourced platforms and/or AI™ while (true) journalist would be experts in 1-2 fields and deliver careful, long-form analytical pieces would be ideal (I know, ain’t gonna happen, if only because legacy media suffers from quite comparable administrative-editorial bloat and a yuuuuuuuuge influx of less-than-qualified individuals with the right credentials, as opposed to, say, competence).

Next up, whatever TF happened to the overarching principle of sanity: the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop, colloquially known as the ‘rule of holes’?

It follows, logically, if one accedes to that notion, one would have to also ponder, logically, the second law of holes—‘when you stop digging, you are still in a hole’—and reflect on what TF should be done now.

‘Now’, of course, means that both demographers (who consider fertility among recent immigrants is below 2.11, i.e., replacement fertility) and the proverbial ‘normative weight of the factual’ (Georg Jellinek) show that even (sic) virtually unrestricted mass immigration from the greatest shitholes of this planet isn’t going to resolve the underlying problem excessively big fiscal commitments (social security, in short) vs. a declining population.

Call me a cynic, but what we’re observing with these migration-related shenanigans—whose siblings elsewhere in terms of failing and/or failed public policy propositions incl., but aren’t limited to, ‘pension reforms’ (a bandage at best, on a gaping chest-wound, or, as I like to call it, a unilateral abrogation of the social contract by the same politicos™ who enabled the plundering of retirement coffers by the globalists), the ‘digital transformation’ (which is really a virtual prison camp-in-the-making to manage the resulting uproar resulting from ‘pension reforms’), or whatever shitshow is thrown your way by one or another increasingly desperate corner of the globalist régime, be it a Pandemic™, the Climate Catastrophe™, or, which is the agit-prop du jour, the threat™ by Russia! Russia! Russia!

Note, though, the last-listed war fever has none of the shortcomings of the other nightmares mentioned above: unlike the Pandemic™ or the Climate Catastrophe™, there’s a real™ enemy to fight, which also solves™ the issue of clamping down on rising domestic anti-régime sentiment due to the imposition of (de facto) martial law.

People will be shoehorned into signing new war bonds (they’ll bear different names, though, such as ‘liberty bonds’ or whatever, and if they don’t do that voluntarily, the EU stands ready to do…well, whatever is necessary (source):

We’ll turn private savings into much needed investment.

Yet, there’s ample precedent for that in Central Europe, as the German-only Wikipedia entry ‘Gold gab ich für Eisen’—which translates into ‘Gold I Gave for Iron’—succinctly emplains:

‘Gold I gave for Iron’ was a wartime advertising slogan calling for donations of gold and jewellery to finance the war effort. In return, the donor received iron jewellery.

While it originated in the context of the so-called ‘Wars of Liberation’, or Befreiungskriege (Wikipedia) against Napoleon after his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812—yet another uncanny parallel here—this notion held firmly throughout the nineteenth century:

The appeal was repeated during the First World War.[2] Wedding rings, brooches, and decorative rings were distributed to citizens willing to donate. Some were decorated with the Iron Cross.

Despite (or because of) its voluntary nature, the campaign generated considerable social pressure. Social control was simple: those who wore the iron jewellery had proven themselves patriots; those who continued to display gold lost prestige.

Needless to say, the highlighted paragraph is the key to understanding where Von der Leyen’s consideration comes from.

And, since there’s no more taboos left, here’s what the ‘Gold I Gave for Iron’ campaign also did:

The appeal also affected the assets of clubs, churches, and government agencies…

From 1916 onward, the Reichsbank rewarded the donation of jewellery or the exchange of gold for paper money (which quickly lost value) with a medal.

I submit that, in true EU fashion, all anyone stands to receive for giving their own gold (savings) for yet more iron (financing the next war vs. Russia) will be—the ECB’s digital euro token.

All other things being equal—that CBDB will also quickly lose its value—those who so apparently remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

1. I don’t want to overdo this here, but I suppose that the relevant entry on Germany in the The Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities (Cambridge UP, 2011) is worth your time; here’s the summarising chart from p. 76 that shows the sheer magnitude of these engineered changes:

In the less-than-20 years since 2007, the total number of foreigners (Nichtdeutsche, as the Federal Statistics Office calls them) doubled to 12.4m as of 2025.

Do note that this does not relate to all those immigrants who became naturalised since then.

2. I don’t mean to bore you with historical particulars, but the case of Czechoslovakia is pertinent here: the bourgeois-nationalist master narrative of foreign oppression and domination by 400 years of Habsburg rule from 1526 through the First World War was resolved in early November 1918 by the declaration of the republic in Prague. By then, the academic and other bourgeois élites were virtually in agreement that the Czech nation predated Habsburg rule and would endure until the eventual restoration (sic) of independence.

When that happened in November 1918, no adjustments of the same bourgeois-nationalist master narrative was required; the major break in terms of shifts in said narrative did not (even) occur in 1938/39 when the Czech nation once more became a province of the German Empire (until 1945), and not even the end of the Second World War broke that particular bourgeois-nationalist master narrative: it was changed in the wake of the Communist take-over in 1948 whose proponents then re-wrote Czech history™ to fit the Marxist-Leninist gobbledygook masquerading for ‘scientific socialism’.

The main problem with that approach was—that it was both so inaccurate and, frankly, false that it didn’t work. Although politically expedient, then-Minister of Education Zdeněk Nejedlý (in office 1945-46, 1948-53) essentially had the entire curriculum rewritten to incorporate—amalgamate—Marxist-Leninist gobbledygook with the preexisting bourgeois-nationalist master narrative.

All these things massively complicate the argument™ advanced by the simpleton expert Bauböck, as can be seen in the write-up by Wikipedia:

These crucial years saw the implementation of a statewide curriculum at all levels of education: his revisionist stance toward Czech history was given the force of law. This included down-playing the achievements of the vanished democracy as a series of bourgeois trends that were ultimately damaging to society.

If you’d like to learn more about the Czech particulars, I’ll invite you to check out my book, in particular the introduction (pp. 11-21) and parts of chapter 1 (pp. 33-53) for a survey of Bohemian history from the late middle ages to around 1700.

The standard textbook on Czech history is A History of the Czech Lands, eds. Jaroslav Pánek et al. (2nd ed., Karolinum Press, 2019), although a wonderful survey essay on master narratives across the former Habsburg Empire was written by Gernot Heiß, Árpád von Klimó, Pavel Kolář, and Dušan Kováč, ‘Habsburg’s Difficult Legacy: Comparing Austrian, Czech, Magyar and Slovak National Historical Master Narratives’, in The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, eds. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 367–404.

I do have PDFs of both, hence if you’d like to read them, drop me an email.