Leave it to the irrepressible Mark Steyn to point out a connection between England's National Health Service and the London bombers.
Of the eight persons arrested as of Friday in the terrorist plot, seven are doctors with the National Health Service (the eighth is the wife of one, and a lab technician at the same hospital). The bombs failed to go off because a medical syringe malfunctioned. I don't mean it malfunctioned as a syringe (even in the crumbling NHS, the syringes usually work) but as a triggering mechanism, to which it had been adapted, though evidently not too efficiently.
These facts lead Steyn to reflect on another:
Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.
Some 40 percent of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas – and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place. According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas – the vast majority from non-European countries." Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.
Immigration rates vary according to fairly mechanical laws. For medically trained persons to be attracted into Britain from outside, two things have to be true. First, Britain has to offer them more for their training than they could get at home. That one is easy. Second, Britain's health care system has to offer native born men and women a less attractive career than they can get by pursuing other fields. This is obviously the case in Britain.
So today the NHS is hungry for medical personnel from almost anywhere on the planet, so hungry that the government set up special fast-track immigration programs: Mohammed Asha, Mohammed Haneef and their comrades didn't even require a work permit to come and practice as doctors in state hospitals.
The NHS is the biggest employer in Europe, and it's utterly dependent on imported staff such as Dr. Asha and Dr. Abdulla. In the West, we look on mass immigration as a testament to our generosity, to our multicultural bona fides. But it's not: A dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness and should be understood as such.
I don't agree that this is always a structural weakness. America's dependence on immigrant labor was almost always a result of its economic vitality: even when the domestic population was growing rapidly, we were still creating jobs faster than babies. But when, in the last century, Argentina had to import almost all of its industrial engineers from Europe, that did indicate an underlying problem. And it is clear that the dependence of the English National Health Service on immigrant labor is a sign neither of a robust society or robust institutions.
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