EUROPEAN xenophobes regularly complain that too many of the migrants who have arrived are not genuine refugees and therefore are not entitled to stay. In Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy and now Slovenia, voters have been persuaded to elect governments dedicated to sending these economic migrants home. The new Italian right-wing coalition between the Five Star Movement and the League is already trying to start a program to repatriate migrants, especially from sub-Saharan Africa who have no grounds to claim political asylum.

League leader Matteo Salvini, the coalition’s interior minister was in Sicily on Sunday where he said the mass repatriation was hard but made common sense. He also said that by stopping the island of Sicily from being “the refugee camp of Europe” he would stop the people smugglers from sending more refugees on the too-often deadly crossing of the Mediterranean and thereby save lives.

This seemingly plausible argument however is plain wrong. The United States became the world’s greatest power on the back of mass economic migration. It had originally built its wealth to a significant degree through the use of black slaves and did not abolish this loathsome institution until 1863, two years after Russia had abandoned slavery. But unlike serfdom in Russia, in America slaves had generally been confined to agricultural labor. America became a superpower thanks to its immigrants who gathered in the great Eastern seaboard cities before heading to the West to dispossess native Americans of vast tracts of land which they then mined and worked to create the foundations of the present vibrant US economy. A similar surge in free-wheeling capitalist economic growth occurred in the last 20 years of Russia’s tzars. However after the 1917 Communist takeover, this expansion was stultified with the introduction of central planning in a society overseen by brutal secret policemen. Russia has yet the recover that can-do spirit which transformed America.

Europe has a complacent, wealthy, socially featherbedded population while the birthrate is plummeting. More importantly Europeans are aging and also living longer. In Spain for instance, two people died for every new baby born. This means that the working population, those who generate wealth and pay taxes is becoming ever smaller. The continent needs migrants. It desperately needs fresh blood. Therefore European politicians who wrap themselves in the nationalist flag and frighten voters into supporting them for fear of being “swamped” by migrants are plain wrong. Far from clamping down on new arrivals, governments ought to be actually encouraging because the continent really needs them.

But then of course the majority of politicians riding to power on an anti-migrant ticket are not really concerned about their countries’ economic futures. They are racists with ludicrous concepts of the assumed purity of white skins. Their worldview is taken straight out of the Aryan playbook of Hitler’s despicable and murderous Nazi regime. If the migrants were white and better still, nominally Christian, they would be welcomed with open arms. But of course, those trying to find a safer and better life in Europe are not white. They are blacks, Asians and Arabs and many of them are also Muslims. In their attempt to stem this beneficial tide of humanity, racist parties are not trying to protect jobs. These xenophobes are nothing but odious racists and Islamophobes, motivated purely by hatred.