European countries are facing growing public anger over open borders and unchecked immigration, with political tensions running high, but it seems the German minister is blaming Germans for what really are migrant customs.
Schäuble told a newspaper that closing the country’s borders would lead to Germans inbreeding, a highly charged statement. In an interview with weekly Die Zeit, Schäuble denounced closing European borders to immigrants, because, he said: “Isolation is what would ruin us – it would lead us into inbreeding.”
He lashed out at opponents of chancellor Angela Merkel’s open border policies: “Muslims are an enrichment of our openness and our diversity.”
“Look at the third generation of Turks, especially the women. That is an enormous innovation potential,” he added, ostensibly forgetting that it took first and second generations more than half a century to come to terms with German culture.
Another problem is that the latest deluge of migrants into Germany are mostly men. According to the same logic, Afghans and Chadians will be an advantage… in 75 years! And quite a lot could go wrong before that, one of which is real inbreeding.
Sadly, apart from having to wait for the benefits – the outcome of which Schäuble would not have to experience in his lifetime – the last half century shows that Islamic immigration tends to boost cousin marriage and therefore inbreeding rates in Western Europe dramatically.
Consanguineous marriage is common in all Muslim communities, something Schäuble must not be aware of if he is busy denouncing Germans.
Professor AH Bittles, an Australian academic from the Centre for Human Genetics in Perth, has produced research showing how Britain is grappling with serious inbreeding among its Indian and Pakistani immigrants.
Bittles of Edith Cowan University pointed out that “In the resident Pakistani community of some 0.5 million [in Britain] an estimated 50 percent to 60+ percent of marriages are consanguineous, with evidence that their prevalence is increasing.”
While the migrants are happily “inbreeding”, cousin marriage averages not much more than one percent in most European countries and under 10 percent in the rest of the world, not including the geographical area from Morocco to the Southern India corridor.
European “family reunification” laws do not prevent an immigrant from bringing in his nephew by marrying his daughter to him.
In Iraq, almost half of all married couples are first or second cousins. A 1986 study of 4 500 married hospital patients and staff in Baghdad found that 46 percent were wed to a first or second cousin, while a smaller 1989 survey found 53 percent were “consanguineously” married.
Randall Parker, a professor of Economics at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, noted: “Consanguinity [cousin marriage] is the biggest underappreciated factor in Western analyses of Middle Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists seem blind to the importance of pre-ideological kinship-based political bonds in large part because those bonds are not derived from abstract Western ideological models of how societies and political systems should be organized.”
Arranged marriages between first cousins – especially between the children of brothers – are considered the ideal matches throughout the Islamic North Africa, Pakistan and India. High rates of inbreeding are not only found in Muslim countries, but also among Hindus in Southern India.
The Turks, less prone to these marriages, still prefer other Turks. One study of Turkish guest-workers in the Danish city of Ishøj found that 98 percent married a spouse from Turkey who then came and lived in Denmark. That included even third-generation Turks in Denmark, contrary to the German minister’s naive set of beliefs.
The Catholic Church had fought a long war against cousin marriage, even out to fourth cousins or higher. Marriages between two persons anywhere in the direct line or up to and including the 4th degree of consanguinity in the collateral line is invalid, according to CIC 1091. Although this weakened the extended family in Europe, and lessened the advantages of arranged marriages, the upside was the strengthening of the nation-state.
German daily paper Der Tagesspiegel described his statement as “bizarre”, and wanted to know why a country of over 80 million people, would become “inbred” if they stopped immigration. Schäuble used the German word “inzucht” which also translates to “incest”.
Schäuble also pleaded for greater German economic engagement in the Middle East and Africa: “North African countries are already demanding [economic investment] from us as a condition for taking refugees back. And they are right to do so,” he said.
