Climate migrants
(… but Putemm wins the new war?… )
Ulysses left a new comment on your post " Is there a human right to immigrate? ":
Dear Professor,
I listened to yesterday's live broadcasts on a delay.
It is always a privilege to listen to and read her.
He even managed to quote Marco Papa from 300 ½. Wonderful quote in Pescara dialect. I was moved.
That said.
My father, who at the ripe old age of 86 still goes to work at 6 a.m. (He truly deserves the honor of Knight of Labor), told me, when I was a child, about his 11 years in Bern, Switzerland. They had three months to look for work, and if they didn't find one, they were unceremoniously put back on the train. Italian labor was highly sought after and paid decently (plus, the Deutschmark/Lira exchange rate allowed people to build the foundations for a more than dignified life in Italy, specifically in Abruzzo. My country was built on immigrants' remittances). But there was no question of an immigrant committing a crime or of someone being without a residence permit.
Those stories give me a sense of how stupid our local champions of welcome are. They don't know what they're talking about when they talk about immigration and emigration.
Our country has a sanctions system that, in reality, is very lax. Foreigners, especially those who commit crimes, know this and take advantage of it. And the country finds itself in an increasingly worsening situation. Where chaos reigns.
The right to immigrate? The stupid champions of welcome don't understand the concept of cultural cohesion among a people, and therefore don't understand the concept of invasion and socio-cultural disintegration. This is what we're headed for.
But above all, when they assert the right to immigrate, they implicitly say that foreigners cannot have a dignified life in their countries. And they fail to understand that this is a very subtle form of racism.
I, who befriend foreigners, can assure you that there are many who are very deserving. But the deserving ones, often, even when there's no war or dictatorship in their country (Afghans of Azari ethnicity are very careful not to return to Afghanistan), can't wait to return home. Like my father.
Is it possible that we can't find a way to select deserving immigrants?
Posted by Ulisse on Goofynomics on September 30, 2025, 11:22 PM
(… after running down countless times from my mountains – Porrara, Secine, Pizzalto, etc. – after even surviving the Rava del Ferro – where, however, I ran very little! – last Tuesday, shortly before this live broadcast , I took an inglorious thud while running in Villa Glori. Attila Gualtieri, aka the incompetent, who is bringing down trees worse than Hurricane Vaia (even in Villa Glori), left a treacherous root along the villa's driveway on which my slippery foot got stuck, condemning me to a disastrous fall. I softened the impact by sketching a somersault, but while turning sideways to distribute the weight, I must have bruised my chest. At that moment I didn't feel anything, I got up with a certain elasticity, continued running, then I shared a few thoughts with you, but later, once I got to the office, I began to feel a certain pain in my side. After a difficult night, on Wednesday I made myself Look: despite the gossip, I'm beautiful inside! My ribs are all there, white and intact, but the bruise hurts like hell, and so today, instead of attending two conferences I was particularly happy to attend, and then climbing up to tread the first snow on the Majella—but it's the weather, friends, not the climate!—I'm staying in bed, resolving a series of arrears in immobility and with immobility. You can imagine how much I'm champing at the bit, hyperkinetic as I am. I've decided to vent my frustration at this forced inertia by getting a few buckets of pebbles out of my shoes, and let's start with one of the most colossal bullshit and slight inaccuracies that iBuoni(TM) feeds us: that of "climate" migrants …)
I find Ulysses's observation particularly accurate and poignant: one of the two arguments used to present immigration as a natural fact, an inevitable and pre-political phenomenon, upon closer inspection reveals itself to be a subtle manifestation of racism and an unconscious admission of one's own inability to understand, or unwillingness to solve, the problem. Why, in fact, would the inhabitants of one of the world's most resource-rich regions somehow be forced to abandon it due to their inability to sustain themselves, especially now that our reckless policies, those that condemn us to starve today so as not to die of heat tomorrow, have caused the price of raw materials whose strategic importance would once have been difficult to foresee to rise beyond our wildest imaginations?
(… the price of oil is Crude Oil (petroleum), a simple average of three spot prices; Dated Brent, West Texas Intermediate, and Dubai Fateh, US$ per barrel; that of copper is Copper, grade A cathode, LME spot price, CIF European ports, US$ per metric tonne, both expressed as 100-based indices in 1980, taken from the usual database. The Democratic Republic of the Congo—not surprisingly a quiet place!—is the world's second largest copper producer …)
To assume that, amidst such abundance, the natives are incapable of providing for their own decent livelihood is to implicitly affirm some intellectual or cultural deficit. But are we sure this is a sound and acceptable line of argument?
Once upon a time, the left, I wouldn't say it set out to solve the problem, but at least it "theorized" (as they say), that is, it talked about (as ordinary people say) the problem of colonialism, the exploitation of African peoples, their right to self-determination, and what to do to guide them along a virtuous path. Today, the most elaboration we get from such intellectuals is a sort of re-edition for dummies of the principle of communicating vessels, according to which it's obvious that they must come here, because there are many there and there are few of us here.
But why has the Italian left regressed to such infantile and controversial arguments?
(… just as an example: it is certainly true that there are many of them in Africa, but they have much more space at their disposal than we do, so much so that their population density per square kilometer is half that of ours …)
For those who have been following the work we've been doing here for years, the answer is clear: the Italian left stopped reflecting on the self-determination of African peoples when it decided to psychoanalytically remove that of European peoples—that is, when it sold itself to the European project, to that disguise of a policy of deflation and anti-worker recession , in order to gain support from the European Social Democracies (TM) to govern at home against the will of the electorate (the latest telling episode: Sarkozy's smirks; relevant literature: the works of Kevin Featherstone ). Someone, in the 2010s, might have asked why they should feel sorry for the fate of the Bantus and not that of the Greeks, and so, to avoid giving the Democratic Party electorate strange ideas, they preferred to forget the Bantus! In short, the crucial issue of what can be done to accelerate the people's progress toward true independence was elegantly dropped, to prevent that discourse from also being applied to the people the Italian left most despises: the Italian people.
The fact is that in Africa, this independence would obviously depend on something no one wants, least of all the climate ideologues and all the willing executioners of the climate movement: the reappropriation of African resources by the African peoples. Because there are those who eat their fill of climate change, and a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for continuing to do so is to continue along the path of colonial exploitation of Africa, which today sees China as the undisputed protagonist (but with much greater intelligence than the Europeans demonstrated in the 19th century). The Mattei plan, which I have culpably never studied and whose contents I wouldn't really be able to explain to you (but I can study if you're interested), has at least the merit of communicating something that was once a left-wing idea: let's help the African peoples progress at home!
Because, you see, here various levels of sinister contradictions intersect, which are worth listing.
1) Resources or minus habens ?
One is the one highlighted by Ulysses: to assume that a population living in such a rich territory is inevitably condemned to abandon it, handing over so much wealth to others, is to presume that this population is made up of the handicapped : it is therefore objectively a form of racism, not even that implicit. But if the inability of African peoples to live with dignity at home were truly due to some form of intellectual or cultural deficit (as those who claim immigration is an inevitable pre-political fact claim), then the rhetoric of immigrants paying for their own pensions would collapse, given that the contributions of low-skill, low-value-added, and consequently low-wage workers could hardly sustain the pension burden of a relatively more advanced population. Or not? In other words, if they can't be "resources" at home, why should they be so at home, where some hold them up to us as the panacea for all our ills (always neglecting the arithmetic)? But also, conversely: assuming they can be resources in our country, why shouldn't they be resources in their country, too, where, until proven otherwise, there's a greater need? Is this what we want to talk about? Will anyone inform us about this?
2) Every immigration to our home is an emigration to someone else's home
I would add that it's obviously contradictory to tear our hair out over our alleged inability or opposition to ensuring a hypothetical right to immigration for others, while simultaneously tearing our undergarments over the actual problem caused by the emigration of our young people. What is a problem for us—our export of human capital, investing huge sums in training young people who we deny employment opportunities (and therefore the ability to contribute to collective prosperity) at home—is evidently also a problem for African countries, and to a greater extent the more backward they are. Aren't those who pay the immigrants their pensions also concerned with who will pay the Africans' pensions? So, do we want to pose the issue in the right terms, which are not about ensuring the right to immigration, but about ensuring the right to stay at home, as only Benedict XVI has done in Western public debate (unless I've missed something)? It goes without saying that in certain circumstances, related to humanitarian protection, reception will remain a non-negotiable (and who denies that?). At the same time, reception cannot be seen or even imposed as the sole outlet for evident structural imbalances that we must address first and foremost at home, for the two excellent reasons that we have a greater ability to influence our own problems than in other countries, and that if we don't resolve our own problems, condemning ourselves to a slow decline, we won't even be able to ensure humanitarian protection (which is expensive).
Remaining in the background is the cloying, guilt-inducing rhetoric, a cornerstone of all magical, shamanic, or religious thinking: we must welcome them because it's our fault they're suffering (but we shouldn't think about how to make them feel better)! They're not suffering because of me, nor do I believe it's the fault of any of you, and by abolishing true, rational, non-Deamicisian-sentimental reflection on the problems of these peoples, we won't be able to quiet our consciences. Good God, the Democratic Party member is actually easy to please: he just needs to feel good, and for him, the problem is solved. To feel good, he simply needs to ask others to indiscriminately welcome anyone into their neighborhoods, as we know. But precisely those who, for the sake of self-flagellation, acknowledge the historical legacy of colonialism should be more diligent in identifying the forms exploitation takes in contemporary times (and environmentalism is one of them), and in proposing alternative paths.
Instead, the only reflection and the only proposal is the Thatcherite one: there is no alternative , immigration is not an object of political evaluation nor can it be an object of political management, except "downstream", because it is an indisputable fact of nature.
What could possibly go wrong when faced with such depth of reasoning and proposal?
The economic and demographic arguments used to argue the inevitability of incoming flows to us are therefore all racist in nature, because I don't know how else to define (Ulysses is right) such a radical distrust in the ability of African peoples to regain control of their own destiny. But I think it's overlooked, or at least I've never heard anyone point it out, that environmental arguments are equally racist.
Let me explain: you've probably heard of climate migrants, right? The topic is a different take on the immigrationist TINA ( there is no alternative ): above, we discussed "they have to come here because there are more of them than us," now I'd like to say a few words about "they have to come here because it's warmer there than here." In short, the idea that human inundation, like water inundation, depends on the climate and therefore cannot be managed except through "transition," that is, through the colonial exploitation of African resources (which, as I'm trying to make clear, is more part of the problem than the solution…).
Well.
This "climate" immigration thing is complete bullshit, nonsense that can only be said by people who are completely ignorant of geography, as ignorant as they are racist. The premise (and it's a shame to have to mention it) is that the equatorial climate is characterized by the absence of seasons and stable temperatures ranging between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius, which are, admittedly, relatively warm compared to our non-summer temperatures. For example, right now in Kinshasa it's 32 degrees Celsius with 51% humidity, so not particularly high (not enough to qualify this as a humid day), while in Rome we're having a decidedly cooler and drier day, with 19 degrees Celsius and 34% humidity. You'll notice that since it's cool here, no one is telling us today that "they have to immigrate to us because it's hot there." Since the Democratic Party member is able to empathize with others' problems only when they are his own, in countries with temperate climates this type of analysis has its own seasonality: it usually occurs in the summer! The fact is, it is precisely in those circumstances that climate immigrationism demonstrates its full fallacy. In fact, in a hot summer, the situation at midday usually looks like this:
(I randomly took one of my many screenshots : this one is from July 19, 2023). I don't know if you notice the elegant paradox: when the Democratic Party member, battered by our blazing heat, comes to tell us that "we must welcome them because they are seeking refuge from the climate crisis (?)aah!11!", it's cooler in Kinshasa than in Pizzoferrato's Valley of the Sun! This doesn't happen by chance (and in fact my phone is full of similar screenshots ), but because of two very specific elements that only someone as ignorant as a hoe can ignore (as a hoe would ignore them)!
The first is that the African continent is indeed more exposed to the sun (having a wide tropical belt), but it so happens that our Lord, in his inscrutable wisdom, raised it higher than Europe above sea level . The second is that Africans are not stupid, and obviously, given the choice, they choose to settle in higher places, where it's cooler. If we take the top ten European capitals and the top ten African capitals, the situation is this (I'll give you the calculations I did on the ham map, so you can check them):
The average elevation of major settlements in Africa is ten times that of their European counterparts (Pretoria is higher than Gamberale, Addis Ababa is as high as the Maiella Pass…), and since the vertical temperature gradient is 0.65 degrees Celsius every hundred meters, you can clearly see that here there is a 6.5 degree Celsius difference to the advantage of those very countries from which, in the Democratic Party epic, people would flee "because of the heat."
It goes without saying that I don't attach any particular weight to this statistic, but I remain astonished by the ignorance of those who, while they love to pose as profound intellectuals, on the one hand ignore the most basic features of that much-maligned science of geography (it should be well known that sub-Saharan Africa is a gigantic plateau, with all that entails ) and on the other—somewhat predictably!—see the African as a "noble savage" incapable of rationally choosing a place to settle. Yet, if the Sahara is a desert, that means, by definition, that there's no one there! And there must be a damn reason why, on a continent of over a billion and a half people, the hottest place is deserted, right? It must be because Africans, not being stupid, prefer to settle elsewhere whenever possible, right? So the idea that "poor things, we have to take them in because it's 50 degrees at their homes" (the summer maximum in the Sahara Desert) should be reconsidered a bit, perhaps by occasionally checking the weather app on your phone (which, being also made of coltan, should remind the good souls of the existence of equatorial Africa).
Well, sorry, I've been meaning to tell you this for a while, and I don't know why I felt like doing it today. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2025/10/i-migranti-climatici.html on Fri, 03 Oct 2025 13:27:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.