Europe’s ruling establishment is currently engaged in policies which go so radically against what ordinary Europeans want that a dangerous rift is growing between the people and those who govern them.
There are conspiracy theories that hold that Europe’s political establishment is deliberately attempting to replace the continent’s population by an entirely different one. Though conspiracy theories are rarely true, Europe’s political establishment is making it extremely hard for the sceptics to refute them. Take, for instance, the recent Belgian amnesty for illegal aliens.
Last July, the government of Belgium announced a collective amnesty for illegal aliens. It is Belgium’s second general amnesty in barely a decade. When the previous one was approved by the Belgian Parliament in 1999, the government promised Parliament that it would be the final one and that henceforward people who entered the country illegally would be sent back. Nevertheless, there has been no crack-down on illegal immigration in the past ten years and hardly any illegal aliens have been sent back.
Last July, immediately after the parliamentary recess had begun, the government of Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy decided there should be a new amnesty to “regularize” illegal aliens who can demonstrate that they have “integrated sufficiently” into the country, e.g. by having children at school. The government took the decision unilaterally, without approval from the Parliament. This is against the law; the Belgian government cannot unilaterally grant a collective amnesty. Only Parliament has the power to do so.
The parties of Van Rompuy’s government coalition shrugged their shoulders. They refused to react against the usurpation of parliamentary powers because they did not want to open a public debate about immigration. Polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of the Belgians opposes the new round of regularizations. The Vlaams Belang, Belgium’s main opposition party, however, went to court. It requested the Council of State, Belgium’s highest administrative court, to annul the amnesty – which it did on December 11.
The government’s reaction to the annulment is astonishing. It announced that the court ruling would make no difference and that the illegal aliens need not worry. Mr. Melchior Wathelet, the Secretary of State for Immigration, said that, instead of collectively regularizing the 50,000 illegal aliens with one single signature, he will sign 50,000 individual regulations, granting each of them an individual amnesty.
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