Following his column on the current deluge of migrants now inundating Europe, Srdja Trifkovic received the following note from a contact who has worked many years as an asylum processing officer with the Dutch Ministry of Immigration:

Dr. Trifkovic points out that none of the countries affected by the current deluge (save perhaps Hungary) exercise what has been a key element of state sovereignty for centuries: control over national borders. Their frontiers have been swamped by people who are for the most part culturally hostile to Europe. European countries are de facto giving up their basic authority to the lawlessness of the invading crowds. Their weakness only stimulates unknown new multitudes to try the same. The invaders present not only a real current threat but a substantial long-term risk, deeply destabilizing or even destructive for the targeted countries.

Having spent many years as asylum processor for the government of The Netherlands, I detect something new and deeply disturbing with the current, overwhelmingly Muslim wave. We see iron determination to force their way in, and brazen disregard for law and order—which is not the behavior typical of genuine refugees. Even though many come from troubled or war inflicted regions, war refugees are mostly traumatized, unsteady groups of deviating composition, with specific movement and communication patterns. They would in the first place be accepted by the culturally congenial neighboring countries, and would not be systematically directed to Europe.

The current crowds are rather uniform: young men are by far the largest group. There is a homogeneous air about them, contrasted by their differing ethnic origins. The behavior of the young people with whom I have dealt, their choice of words and body language are overtly self-assured and dominant. Almost commanding. This has nothing to do with the ways of the economically motivated foreign workers and their families, or shattered social and psychological patterns common to the true war refugees.

A status of a recognized refugee is highly wanted, cherished goal of an asylum seeker. It has been defined by international treaties and long-term conventions and has to be documented and made highly believable, individually substantiated, detailed and to the point. Only in certain temporary cases does an EU government take responsibility to admit some categories on the group basis, leaving the individual assessment aside. The individual identity check represents an important first step of the application processing, and the system has now broken down under the sheer weight of numbers.

Current groups are determined and vigorous, not desperate to save individual lives, which is the driving force of authentic war refugees. They are driven by higher goals. Their mass movement is of a collective nature and unabashedly so. They are desperately determined to make the land (or sea) crossover, not the civilizational crossover, to join the fellow “minorities” already there. The binding between them is not ethnic but religious. They do not make up anything resembling a spontaneous movement, or “migration” as the phenomenon has been known. Turkish and Moroccan workers in the 1970’s might have been true (labor) migrants, but members of this deluge are not. The term “migration” as we know it implies complex interwoven factors resulting in continuous human streams dispersed over a considerable timeline. All of these qualities are absent in the present pattern. That the combat arms are missing on the boats or in the hands of the invaders, makes their future conquest no less plausible and no less inevitable.

Also new in this flow is the absence of even the slightest effort—or indeed need—to mask the nature of the process by those making the passage. The ignorant European “elites” offer no resistance and act submissively. The possible master button this time might lie just south-east from where the deluge comes from.