The French are paralyzed as a nation and essentially have been since WWI. Verdun was the tipping point. Your description of their current government actions to a large degree mirrors their response to Nazi Germany.

Funny you all call them migrants but here we call them undocumented aliens.

Actually, I call them refugees. So does the country of your birth. What do you call them?

Refugees since many are fleeing terror and death in Central America.

My mother is calling them refugees. She knows what she is talking about. She was a refugee in 1945, a young girl threatened by rape and death.

The use of the term "migrants" is a deliberate attempt to minimize the plight of these people. It's designed to characterize them as people who are not fleeing from economic ruin and the very real threat of death but as people who at best merely want to be social parasites in their new country of residence and at worst enter those countries as terrorist "sleepers".

Very good article from The Economist - the old left vs. right days are waning; people no longer attach themselves to a particular class - the industrial/manufacturing political identity is all but gone.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefi...-thou-art-sick

Well written.

The article ends with advice to center leftists: "They must make their own currents".

But Cats how is this tied to the migrant issue?

From the article:

Where are all the votes going? Many have been hoovered up by populists, typically of the anti-market left in southern Europe and the anti-migrant right in the north

And:

The fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the subsequent integration of eastern Europe into the EU hastened some of that change by providing new pools of cheap labour. It also had a deeper effect. The politics of the EU countries had until then been constrained by history: hemmed in by the threat of the Soviet Union on one side and by memories of fascism on the other, social democrats and Christian democrats huddled in the centre ground. A generation later parties can set out their pitch far away from the old mainstream.

On the news last night most of the 'migrants' returned to Turkey were Pakistanis, so what terror were they fleeing?