by Giulio Meotti
“Historical peoples in a number of cities, districts and departments feel they are in the minority. The demographic change in Europe is extremely spectacular”. So the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has just said. Maybe he was thinking of his neighbors.
Although women of foreign nationality are only one sixth of all women of childbearing age in Belgium, half of all children in Belgium are now born to foreign women. This is the picture that emerged from the Institute of Statistics. One third of Belgium’s population is of foreign origin and Belgians are already in the minority in Brussels. But the “Great Replacement” is just a far-right fantasy as everyone knows … A fantasy shared by Statbel.
As of January 1, 2020, the population of Belgium was made up of 67.9 percent Belgians of Belgian origin. Ten years ago, in 2010, the share of Belgians of Belgian origin was 74.3 per cent. The Belgian ethnic population is dwindling rapidly. In the Brussels Region, the share of people of foreign nationality is now at 35.3 per cent.
“In Brussels, indigenous Belgians represent a third of the population,” explains Rtbf. “They range from European civil servants to Afghan asylum seekers, passing through the Turkish grocer, the Moroccan social worker or the Congolese doctor. In Belgium, population growth is exclusively due to immigration ”.
What does the Belgian case tell us? That we need to think carefully before following the sirens of those asking for millions of economic migrants to enter Europe.
Arend Lijphart, a Dutch political scientist working at the University of California, has influenced generations of Western colleagues (in Italy the scholar’s work was published by the Mill) by praising Belgium for its “mild consensual democracy”. The consequences have been the explosion in the number of parties, hyper-proportionalism in Parliament, the domination of Parliament over the government and state multiculturalism. A “cold Bosnia” in the heart of Europe.
A first wave of immigration was organized under the pressure of heavy industry. First with European countries (Italy, Spain, Greece). Then, from 1964, with the countries of Muslim culture (Morocco, Turkey, Algeria) to facilitate the reception of foreign workers. Regardless of any cultural considerations, family immigration was encouraged to cope with the aging population (remember anything?).
More than one million entered Belgium legally between 2000 and 20101. In the 2009-2011 period alone, family reunification, which represents half of the residence permits, allowed 121,000 foreigners to settle in Belgium.
Since 2007, the annual number of foreign arrivals to Belgium has invariably exceeded 100,000. In 25 years, the immigrant population (of foreign or Belgian nationality) has doubled. On 1 January 2018, of the 11.3 million inhabitants of Belgium, 16.7 percent were born abroad (1.9 million people). These data do not take into account illegal immigrants or asylum seekers.
The city of Antwerp, the second largest in the country, now has more immigrants than natives. And as a deputy revealed, “78 per cent of children aged 1 to 6 are foreigners”. The 2020 data show that Brussels will formally be the capital of the European Union, but by now it has very little European. Mohamed, Mohammed and Ahmed are the three most popular names in the whole Brussels region. “The city has a high percentage of Muslims and in some neighborhoods they are even the majority,” explains Le Figaro. “41 percent of public school students take the Muslim religion course”.
“Belgium will become Arab”. This prediction does not come from a dangerous right-wing conspirator, but from a journalist, Fawzia Zouari, on the pages of the daily Jeune Afrique to summarize “the Islamization of minds”. And so the country par excellence of national fusion is disappearing, the melting pot of identities that had to annihilate them all, the homeland of any European man who has become terra nullius.