The following article is a readapted version of the speech that Daniele Scalea, President of the Machiavelli Center, gave in Budapest on October 17, presenting the Hungarian edition of his book "Immigrazione: le ragioni dei populisti“.

Often, immigrationists and globalists have a habit of accusing us of not showing enough hospitality toward migrants arriving (illegally) in Europe. In response to this accusation I will be forced to go back a bit in time, to the classical era.

The ancient Romans placed great value on hospitality. It was considered a sacred duty to provide food, shelter, and gifts to guests, even if they were strangers. Very similar was the situation among the ancient Greeks, who had their own hospitality ritual called xenia. The Trojan war resulted from a violation of xenia, when the Trojan Paris, who was a guest of Menelaus, king of Sparta, abducted his host's wife, Helen.

The sense of hospitality was so strong among the Greeks that Ulysses even expected it from a monster like Polyphemus. As Homer tells us, the hero decided to wait for the Cyclops in his cave because he wanted to "receive the gifts of hospitality." When the giant appeared before him, he openly asked for them.

Julius Caesar was certainly imbued with such values, principles and customs related to hospitality. However, as he recounts at the very beginning of De Bello Gallico, when the Helvetians, who had left their land, appeared en masse at the gates of the Roman Province, Caesar denied them the right of passage and the possibility of settling in Gaul. Why, with regard to the Helvetians, did he not apply the customs of hospitality? Why did he not welcome them as guests or refugees? Why did he defend the border in arms?

Caesar does not deem it necessary to explain this in his book, because it was evident to his readers of the time. Hospitality was due to the individual, the family, or the small group, but when large masses moved and migrated together, that was no longer a visit by guests, but an invasion of enemies.

I wrote this book primarily because I believe that many in the West have lost a sense of proportion when it comes to immigration. So many simply ignore the real numbers. Others believe that hospitality is an absolute value that should have no limits. I wished to clarify that there is a big and essential difference between small and legal immigration, and illegal and mass flows. Only a heartless person would deny help to a family fleeing its persecutors. Only a person devoid of patriotism and self-love would open the doors to tens, hundreds of thousands of people who come to his country every year, without knocking, without asking for permission, without the will or the chance to integrate. On the one hand we have refugees, on the other settlers. On one side hospitality, on the other submission.

For this reason, the book opens with a quantitative analysis. The first step in understanding a phenomenon is to measure it. By measuring today's immigration in Europe we can understand it in its reality of ethnic replacement. The native peoples, in Italy, Germany, France and many other countries, are set to lose their absolute majority in this century or the next, overtaken by the sum of the immigrants in these decades, their descendants and those who will arrive in the coming decades. Never in history has such a large and sudden ethnic replacement taken place without a single sword being drawn, or a single shot fired.

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Let me be clear: I certainly do not intend to incite violence against immigrants. Many of them are good people who have come here in search of a better life. Just as many Europeans do not realize that they are being replaced, so many immigrants do not realize that they are the replacements. Often great historical processes occurred without the understanding of the very people who were carrying them out.

Changing migration policies would also benefit good immigrants. If they have come to Europe to build a better life, it is precisely because they have recognized how Europe is better than their countries of origin. Therefore, they have no interest in making it the same as the lands they come from. The rational choice, for the well-meaning immigrant, is to integrate - indeed, assimilate - into the nation that has welcomed them. But this is impossible as long as the flows are so massive. It is like pouring salt into a glass of water: at first it dissolves in it, but beyond a certain limit it stops dissolving, remains salt, fills the glass making the water overflow, and ultimately replaces it altogether.

So this book is not an incitement to violence, hatred or war, but an exhortation to love one's homeland, civilization and nation; to want to preserve it as part of human variety and richness. We must preserve for our descendants what our ancestors built for us, namely, one of the richest and most advanced continents in the world. This preservation does not preclude the welcoming of refugees or the arrival of immigrants, but it is incompatible with the mass arrival of people who will eventually replace the natives. In the book I have tried to explain the reasons for this, and also the reasons why others on the neo-Marxist Left are so eager to achieve ethnic replacement, which they euphemistically call "multiculturalism."

I hope it will also be an interesting read for the Hungarian audience; the audience of a small nation that too often is finding itself, like Leonidas' Three Hundred, alone guarding the border of Europe.

Founder and President of Centro Studi Machiavelli. A graduate in History (University of Milan) and Ph.D. in Political Studies (Sapienza University), he teaches “History and Doctrine of Jihadism” at Marconi University and “Geopolitics of the Middle East” at Cusano University, where he has also taught on Islamic extremism in the past.

From 2018 to 2019, he served as Special Advisor on Immigration and Terrorism to Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Guglielmo Picchi; he later served as head of the technical secretariat of the President of the Parliamentary Delegation to the Central European Initiative (CEI).

Author of several books, including Immigration: the reasons of populists, which has also been translated into Hungarian.