After expelling a large number of illegal aliens approximately 20 to 25 years ago, the Japanese government made a firm statement I’ll never forget. “Japan is for Japanese,” Tokyo unabashedly explained. “Others are welcome to come and visit, but they’re expected to go home.” And just like that, Japan exhibited the historical norm: defending your homeland and preserving national cohesion — without hesitation or apology.

The West — the modern West — has been a different story. Shortly before his death at age 100, famed diplomat Henry Kissinger warned of immigration’s effects after having witnessed the support for Hamas inside Germany. It was “a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts,” he announced, “because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that.” Of course, he was just stating the obvious. In fact, we’re so far down the balkanization rabbit hole that there’s only one thing to figure out: What should have been one’s first clue?

How about when French intellectual Christian de Moliner suggested in 2017 that his nation be divided to avoid civil war with its Muslims? How about in 2021, when 20 retired French generals and more than 1,000 other military members signed an open letter warning that this looming conflict was drawing nigh?

How about in 2014, when it emerged that more than 1,400 mostly native British girls were raped and tortured by Muslim gangs and that authorities turned a blind eye to the crimes for more than 16 years, hamstrung by political correctness?

How about in 2001, when Swedish anti-Western social engineer Mona Sahlin, commenting on the Islamization of her land, actually said that “the Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back”?

How about in 2018, when mass-migration author and then-German chancellor Angela Merkel — after years of leftist claims that stories about Muslim dominated “no-go zones” were right-wing propaganda — admitted that, yes, they do exist?

How about in 2000, when then-president Bill Clinton signed a Tower of Babel executive order, dictating that if an entity receives any federal funding at all it must provide its services in any language under the sun? (So if someone walks through your doors speaking Chamicuro, you’ve got to be on top of that.)

How about in 2015, when polls showed a majority of Muslims in America preferred Sharia law to American law, and 60 percent of Muslim Americans under age 30 said they were more loyal to Islam than to our nation?

How about during the last decade, when stories broke about Salvadoran gang MS-13 terrorizing American towns and suburbs? How about when...oh, you get the picture.

This picture, like that of Dorian Gray, becomes uglier all the time, too. Just recently there were anti-immigration riots in Dublin after a Muslim man stabbed a lady and three children, while Irish women protested the seeding of their community with Asylum Seekers™. Meanwhile, perhaps proving that every Western nation wants its own Ilhan Omar, a “Scottish” minister named Humza Yousaf inveighed against Scotland’s government — for being too white. (Hmm, how many officials in his parents’ native land, Pakistan, are non-native Pakistani?)

Now, if I asked what these particular people were even doing in Western nations, many might say, “Yeah, the vetting should be improved.” That’s not what I mean. Rather, vetting should be unnecessary for a simple reason:

Immigration should be essentially nonexistent.

Radical? Okay, here’s a question: Can you name one Western land that, on balance, has been improved via our modern immigration regimes? Just one.

I’ll wait.

Yes, it’s a “radical” idea that immigration should only occur if it benefits the host country and isn’t a detriment to it.

Only, Japan doesn’t feel this way.

Neither does China, India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or a multitude of other lands. In fact, the rich and sparsely populated Arab countries even balk at accepting their coreligionists, such as Muslim Palestinians and Syrians. Where do they go instead?

As in 2015, they get shipped into the heart of what was once Christendom!

(Thank you, Frau Merkel, the Childless.)

But why not? As Jordanian academic Mudar Zahran revealed in 2015, Arab newspapers witnessed this migration and triumphantly wrote, “Now we’re going to conquer Europe!” They have help, too. Just consider what Andrew Neather, former advisor to ex-British prime minister Tony Blair, confessed in 2009. The massive Third World immigration into the U.K. over the previous 15 years, he informed, was designed to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Yeah, anything for power, right?

Of course, now there are even more headlines. Just last week,

• French cabinet spokesman Olivier Véran warned that as far as that possible civil war goes, France could be at a “tipping point” after a local teen boy was stabbed to death;

• knife-wielding Muslim migrants shouting “Allahu akbar” brawled in a German asylum center;

• we learned of a U.K.-based doctor discovered to be a leading member of group aiming to establish a global caliphate — and who’s still practicing medicine in Britain;

• German police called a migrant crime wave “frightening”;

• a jihadist plot to massacre an entire French village was exposed; and

• it’s reported that the U.S. now has a record 49.5 million immigrants.

Of course, after all this, finally, these nations are curtailing immigration….

Actually, not a chance. No, the flow continues, as a German minister promises to take in 25 Afghan Sharia judges; the Irish pseudo-elite offers platitudes about immigration while stigmatizing dissenters; the Biden administration opens an immigration back door; and anti-balkanization commentary, such as my writing here, is called “hate speech.”

For this, it’s easy to blame the open-border pseudo-elites, with demagogues such as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) pointing out that the changing “demographics” help his Democrats and Biden stating that America’s declining “white European stock” is “a source of our strength.” But maybe, just perhaps, these nation-breakers couldn’t hold sway were it not for their strength: immigrationism.

Immigrationism is the belief that immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned in principle, and must be the one constant in an otherwise ever-changing universe of policy.

It’s pervasive in our time, too. It’s reflected when conservatives reflexively say, “I believe in immigration — I just want it done legally.” But this is like saying that we don’t mind pythons in the Everglades; we just want them introduced legally. (Note, I like pythons, but not in U.S. swamps.) A law can’t make a bad idea good. And immigration is, now, a really, really bad idea.

The historical norm has been to keep balkanization-breeding, often unassimilable foreign elements out of your lands, not invite them in. This attitude, still the norm in Japan and elsewhere, must be resurrected in the West. Immigrationism must be discredited and stigmatized, become viscerally distasteful and be completely and unsparingly eradicated as a political force.

The alternative is perpetuating the double standard with regard to foreign inundation. That is, were it visited on a primitive tribe, anthropologists would warn, “This is demographic and cultural genocide!” But when it happens to the West? That’s “diversity.”

For the West to live, immigrationism must die.