Excessive Immigration

by Winston C Banks

  Women like Ann Coulter, Lauren Southern, Faith Goldy, Rebecca Hargraves, Lana Lokteff, Marie Le Pen, Iben Thranholm, Anne Marie Waters, Jayden Fransen and others are quite a rarity in openly calling for a kind of white Western resistance to mass immigration. Candace Owens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali too are rare in their stand against the standard black grievance model and Islam respectively. The predominantly male identity of pro-white movements may be explained by a female dislike of anything that smacks of racism, and (as suggested earlier) even by a certain attraction to the exotic and the perceived underdog. In any case, it appears that openly pro-white men may find themselves isolated by their views, or they may have to hide them. Lamoureux (2016) writes dismissively of male ‘white nationalists’ who have difficulty meeting white women. The Danish journalist Iben Thranholm (2016) suggests that white European men now ‘act like women’, having adopted the nice but emasculated persona thrust on them by feminists; they have become in her terms ‘pussies’. Notice that male black and Islamic activists remain firmly patriarchal in their views and display none of the signs of such cultural pussy-whipping.

  11

  Some Academic Battles

  There is good reason to think that academia has been dominated for decades now by the politically correct left-wing. In 2015, only 12% of UK academics voted for right-wing parties, while 50% of the public did (Carl, 2017). Additionally, about 28% of academics currently employed in British universities are from abroad and 38% of postgraduates (Goodhart, 2017), proportions which are sure to have an international, nationalism-undermining influence. The expansion of British universities from 1992 and their hunger for international students’ money inevitably increased the foreign student population, the subsequent permanent residence and overstay factor, relaxation of academic standards, and the promotion of diversity rhetoric and policy; and added to the general cultural camouflage.

  We tend to rely on experts for information about the ‘true state of affairs’ and academics do present their research as if it is objective. But academics in the social sciences, arts and humanities in particular are notoriously defensive of egalitarian, indeed neo-Marxist ideas, and hostile towards right-wing positions; and in some cases (famously, that of Chomsky), are relentlessly anti-American. An understandably horrified Jewish intelligentsia has since the 1930s heavily influenced the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Curious about the extent of current Jewish influence in academia, I googled that phrase on my laptop and was confronted with a Sky Broadband Shield preventing my enquiry on the grounds of hate. See however MacDonald (2002).

  People with right-wing sympathies find it difficult to start careers in universities, and ideas that challenge politically correct ideology tend not to find their way into funded research. Many academics, particularly anthropologists, love to pour scorn on Western civilisation, for example by referring to WEIRD identity (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) to argue that we are not the objective centre of things we take ourselves to be (Heinrich et al., 2010). ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’ is a movement among radical black academics aiming to highlight the ‘psychosis’ of whites (Andrews, 2016). Academics over the past few decades have promoted postmodernism, women’s studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, decoloniality, and in various ways have reinforced cultural relativism, and undermined certain knowledge claims. Most anthropologists push the idea that all human societies are different and equal, none is better or worse. None should be called primitive (Mullings, 2005). Another relevant academic meme here is anti-essentialism, a concept explained in tortuous terms only academics can master (Modood, 1998); and see Nayar (2014), for an excellent example of academic gobbledegook on coloniality and ‘decolonial philosophy’.

  Very few academics can concede that lowly and right-wing people have views that might be taken seriously, they themselves having cornered the market in intellectual analysis and rigour, and possessing the last word on every social phenomenon. Whether we are discussing anti-immigration views (Card et al., 2004; Bello, 2017) or stereotyping and prejudice (Dovidio, et al., 2013), the bias is almost always towards an SJW view, with ‘non-PC’ views struggling to find any legitimacy in academia, or indeed being howled down. Adamson (2017) is one of relatively few academics now openly critiquing the defence of multiculturalism, and doing so from a traditionally leftist position. Were we discussing racial profiles here, a loud demand for quotas would be heard, to ensure that a much higher percentage of right-wing academics is hired to balance the unjustified and talent-wasting left-wing dominance of academia.

  One expects to find a cadre of Marxists among academics, even after a heyday many decades ago. But these are not always, necessarily or immediately easy to identify. Accounting, for example, is not the obvious home of socialists, but Sikka (2017) has promoted a socialist critique of banking, whose alleged complicity in global tax evasion and money laundering also props up human trafficking and slavery. More obviously, Žižek, the Lacanian-Marxist Slovenian philosopher, calls for a vague readiness to live more nomadically, and a warm-sounding ‘politics of solidarity’ in relation to the worldwide migration crisis, but only after a display of ostensible sympathy with those of us not wishing to have our traditional way of life radically disturbed. His exploration inevitably returns to Marxism, or communism, however so styled, as the solution to all ills. Badiou (2016) like most other Marxist thinkers interprets Islamist terrorism, like that shown sickeningly at the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015, as evidence of an aggressive nihilism arising from global capitalism and the huge wealth gap associated with it. In response, a ‘nomadic proletariat’ has grown which sometimes expresses itself through Islamist terrorists’ actions; and there are no ‘immigrants’ — only workers.

  Like our religious and political systems, academia is a centuries-old institution characterised by hierarchies, rituals, jargon, and redundant elements. They may still be somewhat valuable sites of knowledge creation and transmission but they are also enclaves of unexamined faith. Rituals of lectures, assignments, grades, and awards for students are only one side of the institution, which exists too to provide sanctuary for some intellectuals, to engage in spurious disciplinary battles, and the creation of swathes of knowledge often of dubious benefit to society. Academics compete for research money, attend international conferences of doubtful value, and carefully cultivate their careers and political missions. A piece of low-value research like that of Stevenson et al. (2017) on Muslims’ beliefs about prejudice against them costs the public purse a mere £19,905. A research project titled ‘Aesthetics of protest: visual culture and communication in Turkey’ costs £250,000 (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), has a decidedly left-wing character, and has no obvious value to the British public. And many of course cost a lot more than these. While some academics and departments are politically neutral, many are not, and where bias exists it is almost always in a left-wing direction. Academics play the game of calling for evidence, defining what they deem legitimate evidence, producing questionable statistics, and often writing in an impenetrable jargon understood only by their immediate peers. But at the same time, a liberal and Cultural Marxist ethos, partly fuelled by higher student fees, Labour Party policies for high (‘non-elitist’) university enrolment and the expansion of universities, and multiculturalism, has been converting academia into so-called safe spaces, from which challenging views are being banished.

  The politically correct view about race is that there is no such thing. One anthropologist, Eriksen (2010) puts this starkly: ‘no serious scholar today believes that hereditary characteristics explain cultural variations’. The leftist position on IQ is that it is an unreliable measure and absolutely cannot be applied to different national or ethnic groups. Garth (1930) found ample evidence of whites believing blacks to be mentally inferior, but such views soon became taboo with the rise of resistance to anti-Semitism and anti-racism generally, research turning much more often to measuring racial prejudi
ce. Allport’s (1954) seminal psychological analysis The Nature of Prejudice was an understandable product of its time and place, heavily influenced by concerns about anti-Semitism, lynching, and racial segregation. The logic used here is that if no single group of people can possibly be identified as inferior in any way (unless due to temporary environmental or socioeconomic causes), there must be something wrong with any group or subgroup espousing such propositions. Discussions are even had now on whether research on race and IQ should be banned (Horgan, 2013). Research on crime patterns among non-whites is screamed down as racist. Depending on how far left academics are, they will produce research demonstrating colonialist aggression, institutional racism, empathy deficit disorder, the infinite capacity of a country to accommodate immigrants, poverty as the cause of all social problems and anti-capitalism as the solution, the idea that nationalism is merely a social construct and borders have no reality. All these ideas can certainly be aired and discussed but unfortunately their counterparts are usually suppressed or shouted down. Research on IQ in different countries gets routinely shouted down as ‘scientific racism’, based on poor methodology, motivated by hatred, ignorance, a eugenics agenda, and so on (Saini, 2018). Politicised students reinforce the idea that certain arguments cannot be discussed at all and that those advancing them are self-evidently evil racists.

  Race denialists have argued that the battle has been won, and that to believe in the category of race is akin to believing (stupidly) in a flat Earth. Academics show barely concealed contempt for the very concept of race and its manifestations (Garner, 2017). While race is sometimes used of three physically recognisable human groups and ethnicity contains hundreds of social groups, most sociologists are impatient with all such categories, as are anthropologists, Sarich being one of few exceptions (Sarich & Miele, 2005). Biologists like Coyne (2016) agree that the question is far from clear but also assert that we can speak of subspecies or ecotypes among humans as among animals. Perhaps we cannot say confidently that genetic and physical differences extend to hardened differences in aptitudes and behaviours but neither can we pretend these group differences do not exist. Although genetic differences may not be profound, they are there (Rosenberg et al., 2002) and show up in medical pathologies (Rotman, 2005) and sports (Dutton & Lynn, 2015; Entine, 2000; Epstein, 2014). Precise mechanisms may not yet be known, but there is some evidence for epigenetic transmission of traumatic stress across generations of Jewish populations subsequent to the Holocaust (Yehuda et al., 2015). Denial of such factors is not merely of political or sociological significance, however, but could impede effective medical research and treatment.

  Interesting confusions appear in Kenny (2013) in a book about historical and worldwide diasporas. Kenny sensibly agrees that some diasporas have been involuntary and some at least partly voluntary. But when discussing the emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, he asserts that ‘humans have not physically evolved since, apart from some minor and inherently meaningless variations in skin color, hair, and body shape’. This is an incredibly superficial and inaccurate (but PC) claim. Kenny also says the following of 19th century Asian migrant workers: ‘the uncomfortable proximity of migrants from different backgrounds, both on the ships and on plantation barracks, intensified fears about loss of caste through social pollution, especially the sharing of food and water’. In the mindset of too many academics, it is fine for non-Westerners to display hierarchical beliefs about each other, but racist for Westerners; and it is fine for Hindus to experience ‘uncomfortable proximity’ but racist and unacceptable for today’s whites.

  One theory associated with evolutionary psychology, life history theory, includes the hypothesis that some human beings and groups (like some animals) live fast, are very fecund, and die younger, while others stagger their pregnancies and have fewer of them. This roughly fits the tendency of white Westerners to have small families and to delay some gratifications in favour of longer-term financial security. In Rushton’s (1997) research, it is proposed that the three broad racial categories of orientals, whites and blacks exhibit average consistent differences. In his r-K theory, Rushton compares reproductive (r) with childcare (K) strategies. Africans (including African-diaspora people) in this view tend on average to mature sexually at an earlier age, have more twins, higher rates of infant mortality, more single parents, higher testosterone, smaller brains, lower IQ, and shorter life expectancy. Orientals are at the opposite end of this scale, and whites in the middle. Condemned as racist by leftist academics, such theories can however be evaluated objectively by various metrics, transracial adoption and twin studies, and so on, and if necessary rejected.

  Another theory rests on ‘disgust sensitivity’ and argues that some of us suffer from parasite stress. People who have been exposed to infectious diseases may carry unconscious anxieties against other humans whom they associate with disease and whom they therefore avoid, harbour prejudices against, and sometimes persecute (Thornhill & Fincher, 2014). A strong preference for social order over ‘pattern deviancy’ is revealed too in the research of Gollwitzer et al. (2017). Hitler believed in ‘the state as a racial organism’ and saw Jews, Roma and other rootless groups as parasites upon it. Parasite stress theory might partially explain some white-on-black xenophobia and ethnocentrism but could also explain a lot of other interethnic mistrust, dietary and ritual behaviours. It can certainly be applied to many examples in Hindu, Jewish and Muslim cultures where ‘the other’ is regarded as unclean in certain habits. However, explained in this way, it appears to let racists off the hook — perhaps they cannot help their entrenched feelings: they know not what they do, nor why they do it.

  D’Angelo et al. (2017) researched the reception of African, Asian and Middle Eastern refugees by boat across the Mediterranean in 2015. They report that 84% of migrants surveyed were genuine refugees (from war, famine and personal insecurity) to Greece, Italy and Malta. 25% are reported as children. Of those 1,008,616 migrants, they used a questionnaire with 750 and interviewed 45 people. Their conclusions entirely concerned issues of quality of accommodation, human rights and responsibilities of receiving nations. What this report is not wholly clear about is how (or whether) the veracity of migrants’ claims were clarified by documentation. Obviously, the authors of the report have been hugely sympathetic to these migrants and we can justifiably ask where the line is between credulous and gullible.

  Even if we assume that every migrant’s claim to be a refugee from war or other terrible circumstances is genuine, and put ourselves in their shoes and agree that we would have no choice but to do the same, where does that leave us? A rigorous long-term study would be required to discover the trajectory of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of migrants. And apart from the immediate pressure on resources, consider that some of these will probably be lying; some will be criminals; some will be or later become terrorists, or include criminals and terrorists in their families; many will struggle to learn new languages and get work; some will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and require mental health services; many will go on to have large families; and all who stay in Europe (a likely majority) will become old and need pensions and public services. Many will move from one country to another, usually heading for dense urban places where a concentration of their own people already live, and often this means the UK, Germany and Sweden. And all this happens year on year. Now, generous academics measuring the reception received by migrants are not usually concerned with such secondary issues. But we know from news stories that lying, deceiving authorities, exploiting human rights laws disingenuously, are common practices, and that a minority of migrants with evil intent hide inside the Trojan horse of the presumably desperate, grateful majority of legitimate asylum seekers. It is for these reasons that Bloom (2018) casts doubt on immediate, emotional empathy and commends deliberative, rational compassion.

  Anderson (2015) argues against believing in real distinctions between citizens and immigrants. The anarchist-sympathisin
g work of King (2016) outlines the practical campaigns and theoretical objections of the European network of those altogether opposed to borders. By contrast, you must search hard to find academic support for the need and justification of border controls, and identification and removal of illegal immigrants. Studies of animal and human territoriality are no longer as fashionable as they once were, yet the geography and psychology of personal and group space is highly pertinent to understanding the conflicts of immigration. Today we are likely to hear far less of Robert Ardrey’s territorial imperative thesis, opposition to it having come from emphatic leftists like Ashley Montagu, and we hear much more about Proudhon’s ‘property is theft’ ideas. Taylor (2010) and others have pushed notions about the human importance of local territory in contrast to relative lack of significance of nation states. This is an area where contemporary academia is at odds with a majority of British and other publics who see personal territory and property as analogous to historically occupied and defended territory, and national borders.

  Academia should be intellectually challenging. There is much to be said for questioning and expanding our understanding, for example of the nation state. Some say it was virtually created by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which placed much more emphasis on territoriality, sovereignty, borders and war. McGarry (2017) is right to remind us that the Roma originally came from India and arrived in Europe in the 14th century, therefore predating the nation state. It is interesting to realise that this group of people has a non-territorial identity and a largely nomadic character (some being sedentary). This does challenge the norm of firmly settled peoples who belong somewhere, identify with a place, work and pay taxes in return for security, rights and services. There are claims that powerfully challenge national identity. Roma culture challenges the very idea of immigration — of movements in and out of territories — and can be considered proudly stateless. But what such academics should be doing is presenting both sides of this argument. Many valid complaints are made against gypsies, they do present social problems to local councils, and territory and borders do matter to a majority of people. Although both ethnicities have been persecuted, Jewish nomadism is quite different from that of the Roma. Anderson’s (1991) classic work on the highly nuanced elements that constitute a nation ultimately points towards a mockery of nationalist feeling. The reflexive defence of minority causes expressed by so any academics is one thing, but acknowledgement of the majority’s negative take on immigration is also important, and arguably more so.