As I write this I am sitting on a balcony thirty feet above the Plaza Mayor in the center of Madrid Spain. Madrid is a fantastic city and, in my opinion, one of the last cities in the world where the idea and reality of what a healthy city should be still exists. This is my sixth visit to Spain where my wife lived during her Junior year of college, and brought me shortly after we were married. This trip is even more fascinating than the others. The reason for the difference is due to the dismaying contradictions posed by an exciting, safe, and strongly interactive urban giant such as Madrid and the declining, almost Third World, cities that now characterize much of America.
Madrid is dynamic, energetic, diverse, and full of an amazing range of disparate people, both residents and a horde of extremely varied tourists from seemingly everywhere. That spirit is disappearing in Western European nations that are struggling to cope with a flood of immigrants—legal and otherwise, as well as a generation of migrants from other lands who for a variety of reasons have failed to culturally or politically assimilate into the nations that provide homes, education, and opportunity. For some the issue even goes beyond non-assimilation. A significant number of second-generation individuals whose families migrated to Europe detest or hate the new nation of their birth and maturation.
Examples are easily found. Paris is experiencing serious ethnic strife and conflicted diversity related to a disturbing degree of non-assimilation of new entrants. London, where I lived on three occasions and still love dearly, is barely holding on to the vestiges of its cultural identity as a flood of migrants from cultures extremely different from what has been called “Britishness” have supplanted a significant part of London’s spirit and culture. The more cynical have even referred to London as “Londonistan.”
Stockholm is beset with rising crime, addiction, and “culture shock” as a result of large-scale immigration into what had been a well-intentioned immigration policy by a compassionate Swedish nation. The conflict over immigration doesn’t stop there. Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and Denmark are increasingly “closing the gates” in an effort to protect their traditions, identity, and culture.
In America, cities such as New York, Washington, DC, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and a disturbing number of other significant urban areas are disintegrating, and with crime, homelessness, and educational dereliction.
I am sharing these thoughts because of my concern about the inability of major Western democracies to cope with the massive flow of migrants and refugees from disadvantaged and dangerous countries who seek new lives for themselves and their children because they are trapped in a vicious reality of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, little or no opportunity, corruption, and violence. The World Bank, United Nations, and other institutions have predicted huge movements of refugees taking place between Third or Fourth world nations, those in which conflicts and persecutions exist that create special levels of danger and persecution for identifiable classes of people to the degree they deserve to be termed “refugees” under international law. Along with this are people granted Temporary Visa Status due to natural disasters or war in their countries.
All that sounds great in the abstract as a matter of compassion. But the US and Western Europe appear to be the only nations that are expected to take care of the tens of millions of people who leave their own country for various reasons, including economic advantage, while the rest of the world somehow escapes any responsibility to contribute to the alleviation of what is happening.
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Hellbound and Down 
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