The folly of mass migration

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.”