Is the immigration-industrial complex crumbling?

Are the powers-that-be about to reap the whirlwind of stubbornly promoting unrelenting mass migration?

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work [quotas]. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Bertolt Brecht

Now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution
C.P. Cavafy

If there is one thing that the Left and the Right are on a unity ticket about, it is that human beings are tribal. Of course, many Leftists regard that as an unfortunate reality, but few of them would deny it is a reality.

Given the tribal nature of humans, it’s not surprising that many nations are either outright ethnostates or close to it. But in the same way that only liberal democracies that treat people well agonise over the possibility they might be committing human rights violations, nations that have spent decades (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway and Sweden) or centuries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US) welcoming immigrants obsess over the possibility they might be treating would-be migrants unreasonably.

If the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free turned up in many Asian, African, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, or South American nations, the local political, business and cultural elites wouldn’t be engaging in a soul-searching national debate about whether they should be granted citizenship or at least asylum. The new arrivals would be dispatched back to where they came from forthwith.

Even nations that supply many of the world’s migrants see it purely as a one-way trade. For centuries, countless Chinese have emigrated to other countries. (There’s a reason many of the world’s cities have a Chinatown.) But does anybody seriously believe the Chinese Communist Party will be importing millions of Africans as Gastarbeiter now the world’s second-largest economy is starting to hurtle off a demographic cliff?

All of which is to say that, by any measure, the citizens of the Anglosphere and, more recently, Western European nations have been remarkably welcoming of migrants. But after long having had their wishes ignored by business elites and their political handmaidens, their patience is now wearing thin.

The standard throat-clearing
I’m the son of a migrant. For a substantial period, I was married to a daughter of a migrant. Many of my best friends are migrants or the children of migrants. None of what follows should be read as an attack on individual migrants, most of whom are admirable people. But it certainly is an attack on those who’ve fanatically promoted unsustainably high levels of migration for their own economic and/or psychological benefit.  

The gathering storm
If they can afford it, I recommend people subscribe to a business newspaper, such as the Australian Financial Review, Financial Times or Wall Street Journal. Even capitalism-despising progressives – especially capitalism-despising progressives – can learn much from such publications.

That’s because entrepreneurs, business owners and C-suiters who need to make risky financial decisions demand hard data and clear-eyed analysis of said data, not comforting fairytales. As I discovered when I took out a subscription to the AFR a few years ago, reading the business press is like being welcomed into an exclusive gentleman’s club where the scales are removed from your eyes and you get to finally discover how the world really works.

Tom Fairless recently said the quiet part out aloud, as our American friends like to say. In a Wall Street Journal article entitled ‘Immigration Backlashes Spread Around the World’, Fairless noted that (a) people in many Western nations are starting to arc up about immigration and (b) while that may result in some temporary cuts to migration, elites are unlikely to be able to wean themselves off their addiction to unsustainably high immigration levels even as governments fall and populist movements rise.  

Let’s take those one at a time. Fairless notes:

The Dutch government collapsed on Friday after parties failed to agree on new measures to restrict immigration that has soared to record levels, triggering new elections in the fall… 

Anti-immigrant parties recently took power in Italy and Finland, and have started backing a minority government in Sweden. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party is leading national polls…

Roughly half of Canadians think the government’s new target of about a half-million immigrants a year is too many in a country of 40 million…  [You’re pissweak, Canadians – Australia is absorbing almost that many in a nation of a mere 25 million!]

In the U.K., which has eased rules to attract more college graduates from abroad to fill skills shortages, nearly half of people think legal migration is too high…

Americans’ satisfaction with the level of immigration into the U.S. declined to 28% in February…

In France, which has been convulsed by violent protests after police shot and killed a teenager of North African origin, recent polls suggest that French far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who favors tighter rules on immigration, could win the country’s next presidential election…

In Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, is polling at around 20%, double its share at the 2021 national election

In Australia and New Zealand, which have long successfully targeted highly skilled immigrants, foreigners are being blamed for rising housing costs… Some 60% of Australians support a cap on migration to reduce housing costs, according to recent polls.

Given that litany, a naïve person might assume that both centre-left and centre-right parties across the Anglosphere and Western Europe would calm the fuck down with the migrant inflows. Fairless says that will probably occur soon, but the reprieve will inevitably be short-lived:

The backlashes repeat a long cycle in immigration policy, experts say. Businesses constantly lobby for more-liberal immigration laws because that reduces their labor costs and boosts profits. They draw support from pro-business politicians on the right and pro-integration leaders on the left, leading to immigration policies that are more liberal than the average voter wants.

That leads to a populist buildup and outburst, Manning said. Populist politicians subsequently stifle immigration, reducing voters’ anxieties, and the cycle begins again.

(See what I mean about getting the cold, hard facts in papers read by plutocrats? Refreshingly, there’s no pretence that immigration doesn’t reduce the bargaining power and hence wages of native-born workers, not to mention recently arrived migrants, in Fairless’s article, contrary to what a gazillion dodgy think tank reports and academic studies assert.)   

Folie à deux
The interests of big business heavy hitters and small business owners don’t always align. But both are keen on access to an ever-larger pool of potential workers and customers. So, there’s nothing strange about centre-right parties – parties set up to serve the interests of Capital – being willing to endure significant political pain, including risking antagonising their nativist, lower-income supporters, to keep the cheap and compliant labour flowing freely.

The pertinent question is why centre-left parties are now so keen on high immigration levels. Historically, these parties were very much against anything other than, at most, moderate levels of strictly controlled immigration. I imagine that working and lower-middle class supporters of the Labor, Labour and Democrat parties are just as opposed to high levels of migration as their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were and for much the same reasons.

Yes, tribalism – of the kind the Danish, Japanese, Saudis, Swiss and Koreans (Northern and Southern) unabashedly engage in – is undoubtedly part of it. But it’s mainly because they understand more migrants inevitably means more crowded roads and hospitals, flatter wages, and even less possibility of placing a foot on the property ladder. Fairless quotes Marine Le Pen, who notes, “If we can offshore the factory we do so. And if we can’t, because it isn’t easy to send a restaurant or the construction of a building overseas, then we bring in more immigrants.”  

Some confounding facts
University-educated progressives like to think of themselves as being exceptionally well-informed and intelligent, so they are presumably aware of some or all of the following facts:

*As many left-leaning sociologists (is there any other kind?) have noted, high migration levels erode social capital. Diversity isn’t actually our strength. Like everything else, it has its upsides and downsides. One of the downsides is that people are far less likely to strike up warm relationships with their neighbours and co-workers if they seem alien to them.

*It’s challenging to unionise a multiethnic workplace. And it’s nigh on impossible to unionise a workplace where a significant number of the employees are either illegal immigrants or ‘students’ who either aren’t meant to be working at all or only working part-time hours.

*While many immigrants vote for centre-left parties (which they perceive as typically being more pro-migrant and pro-multiculturalism than centre-right parties), they tend to be economic and social conservatives. Let’s just say it’s rather unlikely an immigrant from Albania, China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Mexico or Syria is going to share the same views on child-rearing practices, gender, gender roles, sexuality, the welfare state or even multiculturalism as a university-educated, native-born progressive.

This often leads to a great deal of awkwardness when migrants fail to behave ‘correctly’ towards another group the Left lionises. If you’ve got a couple of minutes free and want to see how a Guardian journalist desperately tries to process how a “Muslim-majority city council” (Yay!) could ban the flying of Pride flags (Sacrilege!), I can recommend this article.

*Speaking of the intersectional status hierarchy, it’s not only poor whites (who much of the Left now quietly or openly despises) who are negatively impacted by immigration. For instance, it’s likely that the biggest losers from the US throwing open the migration floodgates in 1965 have been African-Americans.  

*You can have a generous welfare state or open borders, but you can’t have both. The Nordic nations progressives so admire were, until recently, almost Japanese in their ethnic homogeneity. In contrast, the US, which has welcomed more migrants than any other country in the history of the world, has a famously miserly welfare state and is the only developed nation without universal health insurance coverage.

Given all of the above, you might wonder why the “pro-integration leaders on the left” are so fanatically committed to bringing in ever more migrants against the repeatedly stated wishes of many of their voters.

I’ve concluded that there is no rational reason for this behaviour, but there is a religious one.

It’s often observed that contemporary leftists, who are typically agnostics or atheists, have embraced wokery as a religion and are using it to fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts. Religions, especially Christianity, typically encourage their adherents to ruminate on their inadequacies and to take action to improve themselves. Woke dogma holds that white people are uniquely evil and that countries that were, until recently, primarily occupied by Brits and Europeans, or the descendants of Brits and Europeans, are also uniquely evil.

It doesn’t particularly matter what the Original Sin of any Anglosphere nation is – sometimes it’s slavery, sometimes it’s imperialism, sometimes it’s the dispossession of First Nations people – the important thing is that Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US are appallingly bad countries and white Australians, Canadians, Kiwis, Brits and Americans appallingly bad people. (And if you’re tempted to ask why hundreds of millions of non-British and non-European people are desperate to relocate to wicked countries filled with terrible people, you’ve fallen into the trap of thinking logically rather than theologically.)  

As any guilt-ridden Catholic or Calvinist well knows, there’s no escaping Original Sin. But that certainly doesn’t mean a worthless sinner can get out of attempting to atone for their wrongdoings. And how do you expiate your sins? There are no hard and fast rules apart from the fact that you should suffer somehow. The more you suffer, the more likely it is that at least some of your sins will be washed away. To use the modern parlance, the suffering is a feature, not a bug.

Once you identify this religious mindset, the rabidly pro-migration views of many university-educated progressives finally start to make sense. If members of the traditional ethnic majority are particularly sinful, and migrants are somehow without sin, then you’d obviously want to ramp up the proportion of migrants in the population.

Likewise, if you are pro-migration because you believe your shameful nation will somehow become marginally less disgraceful if it welcomes “the wretched refuse of [developing nation’s] teeming shores”, then it doesn’t matter if receiving vast numbers of immigrants causes all sorts of economic, political, logistical and social problems. You want migration to cause problems because the more your nation suffers, the more likely its indefensible historical sins will be forgiven.

That’s my theory, at least. If you’ve got a better one, leave it in the comments.