The folly of mass migration
Small
ethnic communities enrich a culture, but large ones will ruin it. Pro-migration do not understand the implications of creating an indistinguishable global
melting pot.
Europe has a
problem of illegal mass migration, much of it in the guise of unfounded asylum
claims. This, of course, is an open door policy implying mass migration without
limits – a process that would enormously increase mass migration to Europe from
the poor countries of the world, and
transform Europe beyond recognition.
A failure
of vision
The desire
to make mass migration okay is founded on four failed assumptions.
·
First, that mass migration is a normal part of
human life;
·
Second, that it cannot be controlled;
·
Third, that almost all migration is beneficial
to the host society; and
·
Fourth, that migration is a right not a
privilege and that the host society has no right to choose who can live amongst
it.
Together,
these assumptions take the politically fashionable and emotionally comfortable
route of focusing almost exclusively on the needs and desires of actual and
potential immigrants, and almost completely ignoring the needs and
desires of both Europeans and sending countries. Thus, they fall into
the trap of so much of the current migration debate – failing to imagine and project
a vision of the sort of world that it might be desirable to create in
the long term.
The active
promotion of mass migration does nothing to stem its causes. It
intensifies a world of flux, divided families, splintered communities, cultural
alienation and ethnic resentments. A different, humane vision is needed, one of
a world of “sustainable societies”. This involves stabilizing the world so that
most people are able to live in their society rather than feeling they have to
leave it.
The
illusions of mass migration
The approach
to mass migration embodied and rests on four assumptions, each of which is open
to serious challenge:
Mass migration
is normal
This
assumption tells us that the instinct “to migrate between different
environments is part of our inheritance”. This approach may be described as ‘migration-apologetics’,
which regards present trends as historically unexceptional and thus not to be
resisted. Of course, there has always been migration, especially of an
‘invasive’ sort which was resisted by wars as people sacrificed their lives to
defend their way of life. Arabs conquered their way across North Africa; Moguls
invaded India; Romans, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain, killing or driving
away those who stood in the way of their migration.
People from
China and Korea moved to Japan, taking land from the indigenous Ainu. Over a
200-year period, 55 million Europeans migrated to North America and Australasia,
committing genocide against those who already lived there and obliterating the
societies of the Native Americans, the Maoris and the aborigines.
Aided by war
and genocide, what is currently happening is indeed far from normal. A hundred
years ago, most people in the west rarely moved even to the next village; now
whole villages from Syria are relocating to Europe. People once, at most, moved to a neighboring
country, one often culturally and ethnically similar, whereas now they move
around the world to radically different cultures whose populations have a
completely separate history and character.
Migration
is historically rare. The fact that there was virtually no border controls
until the 20th century illustrates this: there was no need to control borders
because so few people ever wanted to cross them. Virtually no society
anywhere in the world throughout history has ever wanted to attract migration
for its own sake – the white settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are
virtually empty lands built on migration; as such, they are extraordinary
historical anomalies.
The
historical rarity of migration allowed humanity to evolve different languages,
cultures, customs and family names unique to each society. Human immobility is
such that intensely localized regional accents emerge, with, for example,
villages in Ireland just a few miles apart having distinguishable speech
patterns. None of this would have happened in a world of mass migration.
Mass
migration on the current scale is unprecedented. There is more migration from the non-west to the US now than there was
from Europe at its peak of emigration a century ago. Britain gave shelter
to 200,000 Huguenots and 100,000 Jews, but never in modern history has Britain’s
population growth been almost exclusively driven by migration; in the
past, population growth was almost exclusively self-generated. Since
the Second World War, migration from the ‘third world’ has increased the British population
by 5 million more than it would otherwise have been, and current levels of migration
are predicted to push the current figure of 59 million up to 68 million by
2030.
Mass migration
cannot be stopped
The second
assumption is that mass illegal migration cannot be stopped. This
is demonstrably false. In 1924, the US government passed legislation
that effectively closed the door on European migration, opening the door to migration
from poor countries with new legislation only in 1965. Australia has shown in
recent years that tough policies can reduce illegal migration to virtually
zero.
Pro-migration
campaigners who tell the people of Europe that “mass migration cannot be
stopped, so it must be welcomed” are adopting the policies of despots through
history of quelling opposition by telling opponents that resistance is futile.
The evidence is otherwise. All that is needed is political will.
Mass migration
is mostly beneficial to the host society
The third
assumption is that mass migration is beneficial to the host society. This is at
best contentious. In a relatively empty land in the past, such as Australia,
Canada or the US, the desire to boost the population via mass migration can
make sense. But today, mass migration only makes crowded countries even more
crowded and unpleasant to live in. It can also create severe problems of
coexistence between communities of people forced into unwilling proximity.
What happens
when countries like Syria are empty of its civilized roots? The World Bank said that Africa had lost a
third of its professionals in recent decades as western nations reduced migration
controls for skilled workers, and that the brain drain was delaying economic growth in
the continent, increasing the wealth divide between the west and the rest.
Promoting mass migration just creates a world where everyone with education and
energy seeks to move to the west. This retards development where it is most
needed and leaves countries in a state of disarray. What becomes of Syria when
the mass migration ends? No one speaks about that.
Most migration
to Europe is not from full countries to empty ones, for the simple reason that
most of Europe is still more densely populated than most of the developing
world. Most of the people migrating each year are in fact moving from a less to a more densely populated land.
Problems stemming from this are complex and overwhelming.
Mass migration
is a right not a privilege
The fourth
(and most philosophical) assumption is that migration is a right of
individuals, but that societies as a whole have no significant rights to decide
who lives among them, except on grounds of “security”. This is the founding
principle of the People Flow report, and it is thoroughly wrong. Migration
has always been a privilege, not a right; throughout history, societies have
always had the fundamental right to determine who should belong to them.
It is hypocritical to profess belief in democracy and then deny people
any democratic control over migration policy, one of the crucial influences on
a society’s development.
The
intolerances of western liberalism
The People
Flow authors make a mistake common among pro-migration advocates:
seeing a nation as nothing more than a geographical entity with a functioning
economy and a legal system. But a nation is first and foremost its
people. It is the French people that define what France is, not lines
on a map.
The
pro-migration are effectively trying to abolish nationhood, denying a country
the right to sustain its own culture.
British-born white people, the progeny of
the generation who survived the Nazi attempt to obliterate Britain as an
independent nation state, now account for only 60% of the population
of London. England has for more than 1500 years been a Christian
country – its flag is a cross, its head of state is head of the national church
– but in its second city Birmingham, Islam is now more worshipped than
Christianity. In two boroughs of London, whites are already in the
minority, and they are expected to become a minority in several cities in the
coming decade.
If
current trends continue, the historically indigenous population of Britain will
become a minority by around 2100. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and
much migration to Britain comes from Muslims fleeing Muslim lands – around 75%
of intercontinental asylum seekers are Muslim. But where are the limits? In an
extreme example, would British Christians have a right not to live in an
Islamic majority state?
For an
answer to this, consider what that most liberal of American writers:
“A
characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They
are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition
requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even
the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move,
even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough
to take in 40 to 50 million homeless. If the Norwegians say that, all in all,
they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think
not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”
But
at what point are people of the west allowed to say that enough is enough, it
is time for us to be allowed to preserve our culture? This is an issue
of almost total, mind-numbing hypocrisy among western governments and political
elites. They defend the inalienable right of other peoples – the Palestinians,
Tibetans, and Native Americans – to defend their culture, but not the right of
their own peoples.
It is vital
to emphasize that mass migration and the remarkably intolerant ideology of
multiculturalism are exclusively western phenomena.
Indeed, the
striking thing about the mass migration debate in the west is its determined
parochialism. If people in Japan, China, or Africa were asked whether they have
a right to oppose mass migration on such a scale that it would transform their
culture, the answer would be clear. Yet uniquely among the 6 billion
people on the planet, westerners – the approximately 800 million in western
Europe, North America and Australasia – are expected by the proponents of mass migration
and multiculturalism to abandon any right to define or shape their own society.
This liberal
hypocrisy was perfectly illustrated when the British government gave full UK
passports to 200,000 people living in British overseas territories, such as St.
Helena, Montserrat and the Turk & Caicos Islands. The inhabitants were allowed to
live in Britain, but there was no reciprocal right for British people to live
there. The justification for this one-sidedness was given in the House
of Lords by the foreign office minister Valerie Amos:
“The
right of abode is non-reciprocal. The territories which fall within the scope
of the Bill are for the most part small islands. In consultations on the
content of the Bill the governments of the territories concerned made clear
that granting British and European citizens the right of abode in their territories
would risk fundamentally altering the social, cultural and economic fabric of
the territories.”
Britain
too is a small island, yet other British government ministers tell the British
people that they must embrace mass migration, and that it is simply racist for
British people to oppose the altering of their country’s social, cultural and
economic fabric. It is largely about being a minority, and being
outnumbered. But western people are a global minority.
There are more citizens of either India or China than all the people of Europe,
North America and Australasia put together. There are as many people in
Bangladesh and Pakistan together as in the US.
The
wellspring of diversity
Pro-migrationists tell
everyone else they should “celebrate diversity” within our nations, while they work to destroy the
diversity between nations.
Small ethnic communities enrich a culture, but the question of scale is crucial.
If it continues, unfettered mass migration would simply stir all the different nations
into one indistinguishable global melting pot.
For
myself, I like Ireland because it is Irish, I like Sweden because it is
Swedish, I like Vietnam because of the Vietnamese, and I like Japan
because it is Japanese. Yet I like diversity. I leave the last word to a
universally respected author, who struggled against another ideology that tried
to transform the culture of a nation against the will of the people, and tried
to make all nations under its control the same. In accepting the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked at length about
the struggles of people around the world to retain their culture and identity,
and then alluded to mass migration, the multicultural ideology and the global
melting pot:
“In
recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of nations, of the
disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization.
I do not agree with this opinion...the disappearance of nations would have
impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality
and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities;
the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a
special facet of divine intention.”
