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About half of the Vietnamese “€œboat people”€ who managed to reach Hong Kong during the 1980s were repatriated by the British to the Communist regime”€”somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000. Many went to the United States. Many others were kept cooped up in squalid conditions for the best part of a decade. But times have changed, and Europe will take many of the tidal wave of asylum seekers and economic migrants. As more are taken, more will come.

Some think the population of Africa alone may grow by one billion over the next 30 years. As populations grow and developing countries grow richer, the numbers of migrants, legal and illegal, will increase by leaps and bounds. The only alternative to indigenous inhabitants becoming a minority in each Western European country is to do what former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder recently said we must not do”€”create a Fortress Europe.

Adm. Christopher Parry, one of the Royal Navy’s cleverest strategists, warned in a paper in 2006 that Britain and Europe faced being overrun by mass migration from the Third World within 30 years because of population growth and environmental destruction. The Internet, cheap flights, and free international phone calls would hinder assimilation. (Is there anything left to assimilate to nowadays?)

He compared the plight of the West with that of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The Blair government liked to encourage senior public servants to indulge in blue-sky thinking, but Admiral Parry had taken it too far. He was silenced and accused of racism.

Nine years have gone past since then, and he seems prescient.

What is clear now is that while Vladimir Putin is bad news, and ISIS much worse news, the real threat to Europe is not from Russia but from asylum seekers.