Testa CEO Elon Musk recently stirred controversy when he highlighted an interview of the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader of Tibet, which was done in 2019. The interviewer was Indian-origin BBC journalist Rajini Vaidyanathan.
She asked him questions related to migration. One was whether people from Third World countries should be allowed to settle in Europe. He replied that it was OK “in limited numbers,” but not it it meant Europe losing its cultural identity. He asked, “The whole Europe becoming . . . Muslim? Impossible. Or African . . . —also impossible.”
Vaidyanathan then asked if it was a problem that her Indian parents moved to England. The Dalai Lama answered, “If England, a small island, [is filled with] 90 percent Indians, then I don’t know.” In a statement prior to the interview he maintained that “Europe belongs to the Europeans.”
Musk’s posting of the religious leader’s comments on X elicited many comments. One of the many in favor stated that “Mass migration is fundamentally colonialism. Each country can only absorb so many people into it before you radically change it and even create a destabilizing power vacuum. That’s why immigration needs to be very well regulated.”
Some of the Dalai Lama’s critics called him a “hypocrite” because he is a refugee from his native Tibet. That is not a fair claim because he does not oppose all migration. He’s just for reasonable limits. He understands that painfully well because he has witnessed the mass migration of Chinese into his Tibetan homeland. This migration is driving Tibetans and their culture to extinction.