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Tech billionaire Elon Musk met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at a festival in Rome on Saturday, where he urged “getting more Italians to save Italy's culture” during a discussion about mass migration in Europe.
“I really want to emphasize that it is important to have children and create the new generation. And as simple as it sounds, if people don't have children, there is no new generation,” Musk said during the annual political festival organized in Atreyu by Meloni's Brothers of Italy political party, after bringing his young son onto the stage had worn. “I am very much in favor of humanity expanding and creating a bright and exciting future for the world. But fundamental to the advancement of human civilization is having people. As simple and basic as that sounds. Every year I look at birth rates, and it's a little depressing because birth rates seem to go down every year.”
Musk encouraged leaders to create incentives to make it easier for women to have children and to support those children, emphasizing: “If there is not at least a birth rate that keeps the population constant, people will disappear. “
Asked by the moderator to respond to the argument that migration from the southern border in the United States or from North Africa and the Middle East in Europe could complement population declines in industrialized, urbanized Western societies, Musk also pointed to population declines in China and Japan, as examples.
“You can't rely on other countries for immigration, and if you look at the global population, for example, it's almost everywhere in the world, and it almost seems to be a function of how – once a country industrializes, once… “As the country becomes urbanized, the population conveniently begins to decline,” Musk said. “We don’t want Japan to disappear, we don’t want the culture of Italy to disappear, we don’t want the culture of France to disappear. I think we need to maintain some kind of reasonable cultural identity of different countries or just “will not be those countries.”
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Elon Musk raises a glass at the Atreyu Congress in Rome on Saturday, December 16, 2023. (Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg via)
“Italy is the Italian people,” he added, drawing applause.
Also present at the festival were British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, who met with Meloni earlier in the day to talk about stemming the flow of mass migration to Europe.
“The leaders agreed on the need to address illegal migration to Europe in an increasingly structured manner and decided to further intensify cooperation between the three countries in combating human traffickers,” said a statement from Meloni’s office . “At the same time, the leaders reiterated the importance of achieving final stabilization of the Western Balkans, also building on the recent progress in the European Union enlargement process in the region.”
In his speech at the festival, Sunak said that if the migration crisis “requires us to update our laws and engage in international dialogue to change the post-war framework around asylum, then we must do that,” according to The Associated Press. The British prime minister also warned that a failure to address irregular migration to Europe would lead to “destroying public trust” in politicians and governments.
Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister of Italy, welcomes Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, at the Atreyu Congress in Rome, Saturday December 16, 2023. (Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“If we don’t address this problem, the numbers will only increase,” he said, according to the AP. “It will overwhelm our countries and our ability to help those who actually need our help the most.”
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Meloni and Sunak agreed on Saturday to co-fund a first-of-its-kind Italian-British project to facilitate assisted, voluntary returns to countries of origin organized by the IOM (International Organization for Migration) for migrants stranded in Tunisia, it said in another statement from Meloni's office.
At their meeting at Palazzo Chigi, Meloni and Sunak also “focused on joint work on migration within the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding signed in London on April 27,” her office said.
Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni poses with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at Palazzo Chigi before their meeting on December 16, 2023 in Rome. (Isabella Bonotto/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The Meloni and Rama governments recently reached a controversial agreement that could potentially result in some migrants rescued at sea by the Italian navy, coast guard or police ships being sent to Albania for processing. However, the agreement has stalled as the Albanian Constitutional Court weighs challenges to the plan. The comments also come against a backdrop of heightened tensions across Europe following the start of the Israel-Hamas war, and France in particular has been under high security alert since October due to a series of deadly attacks on French teachers by suspected Islamic extremists in recent years .
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“I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization,” Meloni said on camera on Saturday, according to a video shared by Radio Genoa. “The Islamic cultural centers in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law applies. There is a process of Islamization in Europe that is very far removed from the values of our civilization.”