YOU DON’T EMIGRATE TO EXPORT UNDERDEVELOPMENT

People do not normally leave their country because they are perfectly happy with it.

They leave because they want to work. To earn more. To give their children a better future. To live in a safer, more prosperous society. They leave because they believe that somewhere else they will find opportunities that were unavailable to them at home.

That is the whole point of emigration.

You leave in search of something better.

You do not leave in order to recreate the conditions you were trying to escape.

Yet this rather obvious point has become strangely controversial.

Immigration is not simply the movement of human beings from one geographical location to another. People do not arrive as blank slates. They bring languages, customs, social habits, moral assumptions, ideas about family, authority, religion, work, property, individual responsibility and the law.

Culture travels with people.

To deny this is not tolerance. It is intellectual laziness.

If a country remains poor, unstable or chronically underdeveloped, we should be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: why?

Geography matters. History matters. Colonialism can matter. International politics matters. But none of these explanations is sufficient on its own.

A society also has what might be called an operating system.

It consists of its institutions, its habits, its unwritten rules and, above all, the assumptions people make about how society is supposed to work.

What does an individual owe to the community?

What does the community owe to the individual?

Is the law something to be obeyed—or something to be negotiated?

Does personal loyalty matter more than an impersonal institution?

Is advancement earned through competence and hard work, or through family connections and patronage?

Is individual responsibility a virtue, or is every failure someone else's fault?

These are not trivial cultural details.

They shape institutions.

And institutions shape societies.

This is where the intellectual tradition associated with becomes relevant. Behind institutions there is culture. Behind culture there is a particular view of the human person and of society.

Before you can understand the political structure of a society, you have to understand the mentality that produced it.

And mentality does not emerge from nowhere.

Religion has historically been one of its most powerful sources.

That does not mean that a particular religion mechanically produces either prosperity or poverty. Human societies are far too complicated for such childish formulas.

It means something much simpler—and much harder to deny.

Ideas matter.

Religious traditions have helped shape attitudes towards authority, family, gender, law, community, individual responsibility and the relationship between the individual and the collective. They have helped define what people consider sacred, legitimate, obligatory or forbidden.

A worldview is not decorative folklore.

It is part of the machinery of society.

Which brings us to integration.

Integration cannot mean that the host society provides everything while demanding nothing in return.

It cannot mean housing, welfare, education, healthcare and legal protection on one side, with no corresponding expectation of learning the language, obeying the law, respecting institutions and accepting the basic social norms of the country one has chosen to enter.

Integration works both ways.

And there is nothing remotely radical about saying so.

In fact, there is something deeply absurd about the alternative.

Imagine leaving a country because it offers little freedom, little security, little prosperity and few opportunities—then arriving in a country that has built precisely those things and demanding the right to reproduce the cultural and social patterns from which you were trying to escape.

That is not integration.

It is cultural importation.

And no successful society has an obligation to commit cultural suicide in the name of tolerance.

If you come to Europe because you recognize that Europe offers greater opportunities, then ask the obvious question:

Why does it offer those opportunities?

They did not fall from the sky.

They are the product of centuries of institutional development, legal evolution, economic growth and cultural change.

You cannot simply demand the fruits of a civilization while dismissing the historical, cultural and institutional foundations that produced them.

The immigrant who comes to work, obey the law, educate their children, build a future and become part of the society around them is not the problem.

The problem begins when immigration is treated as a one-way transaction: the host society is expected to provide, accommodate and apologise, while the newcomer is told that adaptation is somehow oppressive.

That is not integration.

That is surrender.

A confident society can welcome outsiders without apologising for its own identity.

It can be generous without being naive.

It can be tolerant without declaring every imported practice beyond criticism.

And it can say, without embarrassment, that some things are not negotiable: equality before the law, individual freedom, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, the rights of women, the protection of children and the authority of democratic institutions.

An open society can welcome people who are different.

But an open society still needs a centre.

If it becomes so terrified of asserting its own values that it refuses to distinguish between what it wants to preserve and what it does not wish to import, then it has ceased to be tolerant.

It has simply become confused.

And a civilization that has forgotten why it became prosperous should not be surprised when prosperity—and eventually cohesion—begin to disappear.

You don’t emigrate to export underdevelopment.

You emigrate to escape it.

Remigration: When a Word Should Alarm Europe

History's greatest tragedies do not begin with massacres.

They begin with words.

Words change the way a society sees part of itself. They redefine who belongs and who is viewed as an outsider. That is why the growing use of the term "remigration" in European political discourse should concern everyone, regardless of political affiliation.

Before asking whether such a policy is feasible, we should first ask what it actually means.

Remigration—for whom?

Listening to much of Europe's emerging right-wing rhetoric, the answer appears increasingly clear. The issue is not immigration as such. Immigrants from China, India, or Latin America are rarely presented as the central problem. Instead, the focus overwhelmingly falls on people from Muslim-majority countries. The debate, therefore, is no longer simply about immigration; it is about an alleged incompatibility between Islam and Western civilization.

Europe undeniably faces serious integration challenges. Pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. Across the continent there are neighborhoods marked by social exclusion, crime, religious radicalization, unemployment, and the failure of integration policies. Ignoring these realities only strengthens political extremism.

But acknowledging these problems is fundamentally different from treating millions of people as a single, inherently suspect group.

This is where history deserves our attention.

In 1940, Nazi Germany developed the so-called Madagascar Plan, a proposal to deport Europe's Jewish population to the island of Madagascar, effectively treating an entire people as a geographical problem to be removed. The plan proved unworkable for military and logistical reasons. It was later abandoned, and the regime ultimately implemented the "Final Solution," leading to the systematic murder of six million Jews.

Mentioning this episode is not to suggest that contemporary advocates of remigration pursue the same objectives as the Nazi regime. Such a comparison would be historically inaccurate. Rather, it serves as a reminder of a broader lesson: whenever societies begin discussing entire groups of people primarily in terms of removal rather than as individuals with rights, responsibilities, and human dignity, they enter dangerous territory.

History offers other warnings.

In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish population. More than a century later, it expelled the Moriscos—Muslims who had converted to Christianity. The goal was to create a religiously homogeneous kingdom. The result was immense human suffering and the loss of valuable economic, scientific, and cultural contributions.

In 1923, Greece and Turkey carried out a compulsory population exchange based almost entirely on religion. More than one and a half million people were forced from their homes. It was presented as a permanent solution to ethnic conflict, yet it left deep scars that endured for generations.

In 1947, the Partition of India triggered one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed newly drawn borders in opposite directions. The promise was peace through separation. The outcome was mass violence, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees.

More recently, during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Europe witnessed how rapidly multiethnic societies could collapse into brutality. Nationalist rhetoric transformed neighbors into enemies. Ethnic and religious identities became markers of exclusion, persecution, and murder. The Srebrenica genocide remains one of the darkest reminders of how quickly coexistence can unravel.

None of these historical episodes proves that today's Europe is destined to repeat the past. History never repeats itself in exactly the same way.

But it does teach one enduring lesson: societies rarely descend into violence overnight. They get there gradually—through polarization, fear, simplistic narratives, and the progressive dehumanization of those perceived as "the other."

That is what should concern us.

The real danger lies not in a single word but in the simultaneous failure of two opposing approaches.

On one side, immigration that is too often poorly managed, with inadequate border control and unsuccessful integration policies.

On the other, the temptation to answer these failures with slogans that promise the removal of entire communities as though complex social problems could be solved through mass exclusion.

Both approaches feed extremism.

Both deepen fear.

Both weaken the foundations of democratic coexistence.

Europe deserves better.

It needs effective border management, orderly migration policies, clear distinctions between those who have the legal right to remain and those who do not, meaningful integration for those willing to embrace democratic values, and lawful, case-by-case deportation of individuals who have no legal right to stay or who commit serious crimes.

That is the essence of the rule of law: judging people by what they do, not by who they are.

The real question, then, is not whether "remigration" is an effective political slogan.

The real question is whether Europe intends to confront migration with serious, rational, and lawful policies—or whether it will allow the debate to degenerate into a clash of collective identities.

European history does not tell us that the worst is inevitable.

It does remind us, however, that the worst becomes possible when politics stops solving problems and starts dividing humanity into categories deemed incapable of living together.

And that is why a single word can sometimes become the beginning of something far more dangerous.