Demographic Dangers & Declining Birth Rates, Part Two: Refugees & Immigration.

Immigration is the potential solution to many demographic problems. So why are people so fearful & are they right to be so, or are we all falling victim to hard-right, disinformation narratives?

Peter Winn-Brown
11 min readApr 12, 2023
A dinghy with 54 Afghan refugees arrives on the beach in Lesbos, Greece.
A dinghy with 54 Afghan refugees arrives in Lesbos, Greece. Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse, From the NYT.

“If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, (even though) I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as…

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Peter Winn-Brown

The past can illuminate the present if we shine the light of inquiry openly, truthfully, with attention to detail & care for the salient facts.