In 793 the first Viking raid of any note took place at the monastery at Lindisfarne. It was quite a shock to the Christian people of Britain, but it was just a taste of what was coming. This was the dawn of the Viking age and warriors would be pouring out of Scandinavia for 250 years.  In a short time, a piracy problem would turn into a threat to civilization, forcing the people of Europe to organize themselves in defense of their lands and people against the Norse raiders.

The problem over the horizon today is the population explosion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We get hints of it in the news from time to time, but policy makers in the West try hard to pretend it is not a problem. On slow news days, the state media has someone write a “think piece” on the topic, but otherwise, Africa may as well be Mars as far as public policy. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, the math says this must change.

Sailer has a post up on this and he offers some ways to address what will be the defining issues of the next half century or more.

The solutions for the African threat to world peace and prosperity appear to me to require a threefold approach:

– Perimeter and in-depth defense of the West to shut off the magnet justifying guys with three wives and 17 children feeling optimistic and unworried about their selfishness.

– Strong campaigns promoting family planning in Africa.

– Outside investment in sustainable economic development in Africa, such as better agricultural practices that don’t contribute to desertification.

These will be expensive, but the cost is minimal compared to the alternative of turning Europe into a banlieue of Africa. The main problem is ideological: we need to break the taboo against talking about the need for Steps #1 and #2.

His first proposal could work and would certainly limit the flow of economic migrants into the West. The fantasy version of migration is that these people come to work. In reality, they come to go on welfare. Politically, this would be an easy sell to populations facing financial pressure due to bloated welfare systems and excessive government. But, politicians appear to be allergic to this notion. They would rather see the whole thing collapse than be thought rude to the invaders.

Math is not a social construct and the math says the West cannot afford to feed and clothe a billion Africans, plus the millions of others who wish to have the material benefits of the West without the work. You can choose to accept reality or be forced to accept reality. There is no third option so the West will eventually have to halt the flow of migrants into Europe..

The second proposal strikes me as odd, given Sailer’s views on human biology. The West has been flooding the Dark Continent with condoms to fight HIV for a couple of decades now. George Bush made a big deal of fighting AIDS in Africa. The thrust of the effort was the distribution of condoms. Even so, the population explosion has gone on, suggesting that the locals are not all that interested in birth control. Biological reality is not amenable to wishful thinking.

The last proposal has a similar problem. The West has been investing in Africa for as long as anyone has been alive. Ethiopia, for example, gets 90% of its government budget from foreign aid. Hundreds of billions have flowed into Africa through government, charity and combinations of the two. In many parts of the continent, the result has been worse than doing nothing. The book Dead Aid details how aid to Africa has mostly made things worse.

That leaves us with option one as the starting place. A million or so Muslim migrants into Europe has radically altered politics. Ten million more and instead of “right wing parties” the news is full of violent revolts and coups. Whether the current political class snaps out of their delusions or they are replaced with more practical men, Europe will put and end to the great migration.

There’s something else. The West is broke. That reality is going to become more apparent as we head to the denouement of the credit money age. That means economic development programs in Africa come to an end. They may not end dramatically, more like a slow winding down as economic reality makes aid to Africa less fashionable. Decades of delaying the inevitable means decades of facing the inevitable.

Africa is a fragile place. It does not take much to plunge it into anarchy. Think of Yemen but continent scale without rich neighbors willing to provide food aid. The inevitable result is famine and then plagues as the population starts to shift around looking for food. Throw in civil war and a massive spike in violence to the mix. That’s horrible, but it would fix the population problem in a decade or two.

That assumes the West has the willingness and ability to hold the line against mass migration. It’s not hard to see the math. The current migrant crisis leads to political instability in Europe. That retards food and medicine shipments to Africa, which puts pressure on the population to seek relief across the Mediterranean. Suddenly, the Viking age is looking pretty good.