Excessive Immigration
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Let me summarise some problems with the blunt and misunderstood concept of racism. According to Banks and Valentino (2012) we may have entered a phase of ‘symbolic racism’ characterised by anger and resentment at affirmative action, for example, in place of former ‘old fashioned’ disgust racism. Kaufmann, E. P. (2017) argues that ‘racial self-interest’ (watching out for our own kind) is not racism. Let me proceed with an observation: I notice there are more foreigners living here than there used to be. Some may follow this up with ‘Isn’t that great? I love diversity’. (Little discussed but apparent in some is the phenomenon of fascination with visibly different individuals. In a sense, this is a form of racism, albeit positive discrimination, and is known variously as racial fetishism, or allophilia.) But for others it may become concern: aren’t there perhaps too many of them? Is this ‘racism’, or a simple valid question? It may then become opposition: I’m against this level of immigration, I think it transforms the country too quickly and negatively, and I question the wisdom of any policy that encourages this. Is this racism, or a valid viewpoint? This sequential analysis hopefully teases out differences in perception as to nuances. One can be justifiably opposed to immigration at high levels without this entailing any unpleasantness or hatred. Then we may run into race hatred from some people: these foreigners are selfish, disgusting, taking over, exploitative, etc. Even this however is still an important step away from direct racist actions, which may include personal insults, employment discrimination, and so on. Finally, violent racism may run from assault through murder, to mass murder. There is no necessary progression from observation and concern to later steps. There is a vast difference between thoughts or voiced preference for low immigration and principled opposition to excessive immigration, and racially motivated violence. In the SJW lexicon, unfortunately, every modicum of non-xenophilic sentiment seem to constitute total and hateful racism.
6
Problems of European Union Free Movement
While freedom of movement (or the right to travel) can be traced back to the Magna Carta, its contemporary connotation of mass movement and the right to permanent residence is another matter. The Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 established freedom of movement and residence of persons within the EU by the ‘gradual phasing out of internal borders’. This worthy aim embraces trade, work, peace-keeping and ‘ever closer union’ and can be seen as highly positive, or rather as naïvely idealistic. In the light of the 2016 UK referendum decision to leave the EU, one can see just how naïve the original vision was, given the unequal economies of member states, population sizes, languages and other differences. Shifting to a common currency was difficult enough and still problematic, but questions of population management in an artificially created entity of 500 million people were not addressed. Problems of accommodating people who moved freely, who would clearly have health and financial needs, and whose cultures might differ considerably, were barely addressed in spite of expansive EU bureaucracy. In retrospect we should not be surprised at unworldly idealism trumping practicality, since many academics took leading parts in Brussels-funded research to help establish EU institutions, and their participation was driven by self-interested politics (Sked, 2017). About 90% of academics voted in 2016 to remain in the EU while one poll counted 76.2% of the British public as ‘not very or not close at all’ to Europe (Goodhart, 2017).
We should not forget one strong, moral anti-capitalist argument here. As the Marxist writer and artist John Berger pointed out, one in seven manual workers or Gastarbeiter in Britain and Germany in 1975 was an immigrant (Berger, 1975). These workers were in post-war times (and still are) needed to maintain production, particularly at times of high demand or seasonally. They were and are mainly men from poorer countries like Turkey and Spain, living in temporary accommodation, and they send a proportion of their earnings home to their families. This arrangement suited the host employers, who could pay lower wages, and it suited countries like Spain who thereby exported their unemployment problem and reduced the risk of social unrest. It also made the indigenous working class feel superior by comparison instead of adopting a position of communist solidarity. Gradually, some migrant workers joined unions, and in time many who could do so stayed and brought their families. EU developments have meant that many more can now migrate on a permanent basis quite legitimately. For Berger, however, they are cynically used by capitalism as mere human labour resources. Berger, with Jewish family roots, a middle-class upbringing, and most of his life living in rural France, fits Goodhart’s (2017) description of an Anywhere individual.
Germany has emerged as the lead player in the EU, with undue influence (Sked, 2016). We have seen how Angela Merkel’s well-meaning but disastrous decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of migrants with few checks or plans for their reception and housing was both ill-judged and starkly dictatorial. She has asserted that she ‘would not stop pushing for the fair distribution of refugees across the European Union’ because ‘that contradicts the spirit of Europe’ (The Guardian, 27 August, 2017). Merkel’s stubborn agenda was based on her own fantasy of a quasi-consensual spirit of an artificial cultural entity with shared liberal values. The foolishness of Merkel’s decision was revealed by the Cologne attacks of New Year’ Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted by 2,000 asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. The media did not report these attacks for several days and much rationalising by PC journalists went into denial and false explanations. It was found that the majority of these men were between 15 and 35 and spoke little if any German, and the attacks were co-ordinated, and included thefts. Observers have said the kind of attacks — ‘group sexual harassment’ — are common in some Arab countries. Žižek (2017) refers to this behaviour as a ‘carnivalesque rebellion of the underdogs’. Similar attacks happened in other German cities and indeed in Sweden (Arpi, 2016; Neuding, 2017; Taylor, 2017). Critics pointed out in retrospect the dangers of naïvely letting in multiple thousands of single young men from largely Islamic cultures that do not recognise the same rights of women. Merkel had to concede she had made some mistakes, especially after it emerged that some refugees were subsequently returning to their (allegedly unsafe) countries for short social or business breaks. But even without these events, the German policy regarding its earlier Turkish Gastarbeiter had already been acknowledged to be mistaken, with low-skilled immigrants not returning home, failing to learn German and to integrate, and subsequent problems continuing into the third generation (Elliott & Kollewe, 2011).
One problem with the EU is that its 27 countries must administer their own business including the security of their borders, which is especially onerous for those that have borders abutting non-EU countries or seaways near them. It is difficult to calculate the length of the entire EU border but it is certainly thousands of miles. Many people enter EU territory illegally, or overstay visas, and gamble too that it is all worth the risk, since many will become clandestini, work without documents, and never be detected either in the EU broadly or in Britain (Southern, 2017). The soft approach to offenders displayed by Merkel has set a precedent. Seven further countries currently hope for accession to the EU, several more including the Eastern Partnership states are possible candidates, and even some distinctly non-European nations may one day join. Popular resistance to this naïve, idealistically orchestrated, one-world agenda is common but found strange by many academics (Taydas & Kentmen-Cin, 2017). It was revealed that some very wealthy Russian, Ukrainian and Syrian individuals (some of whom have corrupt reputations) had taken advantage of Cyprus’s so-called golden visa scheme to invest in Cyprus in return for citizenship and EU passports (Farolfi et al., 2017). Portugal too has been implicated in such visa schemes, with Brazilian, Angolan, Azerbaijani and Chinese individuals involved, some of whom have been associated with criminal corruption and bribery. Country-shopping is a prominent feature among discerning economic migrants but always much easier for the rich. Given the expansion of the EU, driven in part
by idealistic anti-borders politicians, its often porous borders, economic attractiveness, and the largely unidirectional inward movement, interesting times surely lie ahead.
Irish citizenship law means that some babies born in Ireland have automatic rights to Irish citizenship regardless of the nationality of their parents, a restricted jus soli law having been passed in 2005. Unsurprisingly, this has attracted some immigrants to Ireland who are then able to apply for Irish citizenship themselves, and in due course they can as EU citizens move freely to other EU countries. Cases exist of Nigerian women using this facility to avoid deportation following denial of an asylum claim (Cullen, 2001). This is not to suggest there is an epidemic of such scams but it is just one example of how some generous national laws and EU regulations are consciously exploited by those determined to secure a better life outside Africa. It also illustrates the bureaucratic naïvety of certain EU human rights laws and indifference to demographic practicalities. Brexit negotiations also include highly sensitive decisions regarding the future border between southern and Northern Ireland. Due to their history, the Irish are rightfully sensitised to rising and falling population levels but Reville (2017) warns against the facile solution, espoused by Merkel, of propping up declining European fertility by mass immigration.
The EU and its 27 member states are made up of mainly white people with a Christian heritage. Proposals to admit Muslim-dominated Turkey into the EU have been extremely controversial and remain on hold. Tensions have always existed between nationals from the different EU countries, with slang terms abounding for all such foreigners. European history like history everywhere is strewn with wars and long-term hatreds and resentments. But ongoing immigration into Europe from northern Africa and the Middle East has changed the profile of the European population. Racial, ethnic and cultural conflicts are rife in parts of France and Belgium, and increasing in Germany and Sweden. Under-recognised in debates about the EU and immigration are the corridor and Trojan horse phenomena. Hundreds of thousands of Africans, and migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere have forced their way into Italy, Greece and neighbouring countries, aiming to move on to Germany, Holland, Sweden and the UK in particular. I have heard first hand Syrian refugees and others declaring their intention to use their right to freedom of movement, as soon as they get the necessary EU documents, to move on to the UK, for example. These are the law-abiding ones, of course, there being many who are prepared to lie and cheat their way into the UK and other preferred destinations. While Angela Merkel was responsible (or irresponsible) for encouraging millions more migrants to enter the EU, many had already set their sights on the UK because they knew people who lived here, they spoke some English, understood the UK to be soft with welfare benefits, and unable to control its borders effectively, or to even know how many immigrants were living there. Almost nobody is heading to Poland or Bulgaria. Indeed, much migration is from former Communist states to the capitalist West. Relatively few want to live in boring Denmark or chilly Finland (although still too many for their indigenous citizens). Who wants to learn a difficult minority language that facilitates no further work opportunities in other countries?
It was reported in 2004 that around 20,000 Dutch passport-holding Somalis had moved from the cities of Tilburg and Rotterdam to Leicester and Birmingham in the UK. They had not found Holland as hospitable as its hyped multicultural tolerance suggested, and Britain was much more to their liking. Instead of bowing to Holland’s assimilation model requiring them to live in dispersed housing, they could all move into the same small area in Leicester. Similar stories appeared about Denmark, from where about 4,000 Somalis moved to the UK (Evans-Pritchard, 2004). The Dutch Somalis’ flight had also been triggered by the killings of Pim Fortuyn in 2002, and Theo van Gogh in 2004. It has also been speculated that the Dutch authorities prevented Somalis’ trips back home for female genital mutilation procedures. The problems of minority preferences for housing were also illustrated in 2016, when some families of the 20,000 promised Syrian refugees were placed in Bute, a beautiful but remote Scottish island with a population of 7,000. Although they found the local residents welcoming, the weather, lack of employment opportunities, elderly profile of locals, and absence of other Arabic people depressed them, and they wanted to go instead to Glasgow or Manchester (Cramb, 2016). This is quite understandable from their point of view, but highly problematic when most refugees prefer certain urban locations. London stands out as having the world’s second largest immigrant population, a trend set to continue indefinitely.
The EU problem became quite grave with the economic meltdown of Greece, as it was also sinking in that citizens of the poorer countries within the EU disproportionately exercised their freedom of movement to work in the richer countries. The Tories in principle should have seen this coming and applauded it, after Norman Tebbit famously admonished British workers in the 1980s to get on their bikes to look for work anywhere it was available, as his father had done. Little movement of British workers into Poland, Bulgaria or Romania was happening, any more than Muslim refugees from around the world were converging on Saudi Arabia (a Muslim country much nearer to them, and far better suited to their cultural needs but strangely showing negligible hospitality to them). Brits are constantly told that immigrants are needed to make good the shortfall in workers for seasonal jobs, or work that native Brits do not want to do, or vacancies for nurses and doctors that the UK have far too few of. Given the falling birth rates of white Britons, more and more immigrants are needed to take care of long-living Brits, and to support the economy. So, added to waves of immigrants from Africa, Asia and elsewhere over the decades, over three million EU citizens moved into the UK. But add to this the ongoing flow of refugees from Syria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other places, plus numerous undocumented migrants intent on entering Britain by any means, and it is easy to see why the authorities could neither control nor count who was coming in. Those who are or claim to be refugees have sometimes walked two thousand miles from Greece to get to Calais, when they are supposed to register for asylum in the first country they come to. A 2010 estimate had it that 1.2 million illegal immigrants already lived in the UK, entering via the Channel Tunnel, arriving at night in small ports, wangling and overstaying academic and tourist visas, or using false papers (Palmer & Wood, 2017). According to Judah (2016), 70% of illegal immigrants are hiding in London, equivalent to a city the size of Glasgow. Many are begging, or working in the cash economy, or employed illegally in very low paid jobs, or involved in minor drug dealing, and so on.
As we now know, or begin to finally accept, a significant number of ISIS terrorists have been faux-refugees, children of refugees, or have used EU legal or illegal documents to travel freely across borders, also returning to Muslim countries for terrorist training. Those determined to create havoc fully and cynically exploit the naïve human rights ethos of the West, and especially exploit the naïvety of PC facilitators. SJWs insist these are a tiny minority of extremist Muslims. Jihadi John (or Mohammed Emwazi) was born in Kuwait, grew up in London with Iraqi immigrant parents, and left in his twenties to fight with ISIS in Syria, where he beheaded at least eight people. One of the best-known Islamist terrorists, he was killed in a drone strike in 2015. It is estimated that anywhere between 3,000 to 35,000 terrorists-in-training or associated activists, mostly British citizens, live in the UK, a mere 500 of whom are under intensive surveillance (The Telegraph, 31 August, 2017).
Nigel Farage, ex-UKIP leader, argued that Brexit would return to the British the ability to manage any necessary moderate immigration, and that ex-commonwealth migrants might have as much right to move here for genuine work purposes as Europeans. Brexit, in this reasoning, was not skin-colour racist. But if we care to be really honest and politically incorrect about this it is probably true that for many white Britons some immigrants are more welcome than others. Indigenous Britons are wary of allowing too many East Europeans in, but concede that most Poles are hardwork
ing. Some white Brits believe that East Europeans are often a little uncivilised, or their culture is too dissimilar, and their potential numbers are worrying. This runs alongside traditional wariness of dark-skinned immigrants, or again a wariness about numbers. But there is I believe an admiration for Germans and their work ethic and efficiency, the French and Italians for their aesthetic style, the Dutch and Scandinavians for their civility and work ethic. Broadly speaking, immigrants who ‘add value’, are attractive and hardworking and preferably look, dress and behave like us, are welcome, but others not so much, and refugees from further afield, preferably professionals and in small numbers, are grudgingly tolerated. British governments seem to welcome rich Russians and Arabs but ordinary Brits are less enamoured. But these sentiments cannot easily be openly declared.
Immigration of Poles stretches back decades and British sentiments about Poles vary from appreciation of their wartime contributions, their tremendous suffering at the hands of Nazis, movement to the UK in larger numbers following the fall of Communism in 1989, and facilitated by accession to the EU in 2004, and perceptions of Poles as often unacceptably right-wing in their homeland. There are probably over a million Poles living in Britain, plus the descendants of earlier waves of immigrants, and they constitute the largest single non-indigenous national group here. Polish is the second most commonly spoken language in Britain, and the birthrate is higher than the UK average. Poles live in most major cities but have a particular concentration in Peterborough and Boston in the east of England. They provide substantial labour in agriculture, light industry and the building trades. Crime figures for EU migrants in 2010 showed Poland as the highest offending with 6,777 convictions, followed by Romanians and Lithuanians (Whitehead, 2011). Some of this may be explained by the sheer number of Polish immigrants, many of whom are working class; the correlation with a drop in the crime rate in Poland suggests that many unemployed young men may have been taking their chances in Britain. Stereotyping and racist attitudes towards Poles and crimes against them have been significant — and are characterised as Polonophobia or anti-Polish sentiment — but probably due to their European origins, largely Roman Catholic religious traditions, work ethic and assimilation, they do not attract the same levels of victim identity and publicity as other groups. Proximity to Poland and the possibility that some will return home may also distinguish them from other immigrant groups (Pidd, 2016).