Bruce Bawer Throws Cold Water on Unfettered Roma Immigration

While victimists (my coinage for those who for reasons of profit and/or altruism ply the victimhood trade) like Backwoods Bernie and his ilk wring their hands over the plight of Roma refugees and call for Canada to open its borders to them, non-victimist Bruce Bawer cautions against it. Bawer observes that, although Roma and Muslims are cultural polar opposites, both may pose a threat to societal stability:

Although this massive new wave of gypsies – like the Muslims who have been immigrating into Western Europe for several decades now – represents a serious threat to the region’s social order, there are significant differences between the two cultures. One of them stands for the severest authoritarianism on the face of the earth today; the other stands for the closest thing around to pure chaos. Education, in Islam, means memorizing a single book that its adherents believe to contain all the answers; in gypsy culture, it means teaching kids to beg and burgle – and shunning any members of the community who might actually want to send their children to school. Islam despises freedom; gypsy culture exploits freedom to the hilt. While jihadists seek ultimately to supplant the democratic rule of law with sharia law, gypsies are content just to be lawbreakers. 

Yes, Islam is the greater threat. Yet a subculture that defines itself by sheer anarchy, too, can help bring down a civilization. Islam is responsible for innumerable acts of terror; but there is also something terrifying about a people who are compelled by generations of cultural conditioning to trash the homes given them by generous governments – ripping up carpets, tearing down wallpaper, filling the backyard with garbage even if there are rubbish bins available, and defecating on the floor of the very room in which they sleep even if there’s a bathroom right down the hall. (And who, if they aren’t handed the keys to their own place, may well move into yours while you’re away for the weekend and trash that.) No, a Western Europe struggling against both Islam and gypsies is without question an even more frightening and fragile entity than a Western Europe threatened by Islam alone.

Oh, Bruce, you're such a "Romaphobe."