Excessive Immigration

by Winston C Banks

  A British woman, Josephine Iyamu, was charged in 2017 with being a ringleader for criminal offences of human trafficking and slavery of vulnerable people from Nigeria to Europe for the purposes of sexual exploitation. A National Crime Agency spokesperson reported that similar crimes were probably now occurring in the tens of thousands in the UK (The Guardian, 6 September, 2017).

  Consider that Hirsch (2017) has made many provocative, anti-white comments, including suggesting that Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square should be pulled down to atone for slavery. Add to this the report that Taha Hussain, an ISIS sympathiser, called for a statue of Queen Victoria to be destroyed outside Windsor Castle in preparation for occupation by ISIS (Daily Mail, 11 September, 2017). Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, a taxi driver from Luton, was charged with preparing to commit a terrorist offence in driving towards Buckingham Palace, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and reaching for a four-foot sword (The Independent, 31 August, 2017). However unlikely to materialise, inevitably such threats against iconic British landmarks conjure up images of hostile invasion and occupation, by emboldened black anti-colonialists and Islamic terrorists in our midst. The illegal pulling down of Confederate statues is already underway in the USA, and we might link these with the 9/11 attack on American phallic power as part of a campaign to dismantle symbols of Western dominance, as well as ISIS’s destruction of ancient monuments in the Middle East which are regarded as idolatrous.

  There was a furore at the British Museum in 2017 when a spokesperson explained that they sometimes had to omit long Asian names because they try to keep exhibits’ descriptions simple and have limited space (Daily Mail, 14 September, 2017). Complaints were received to the effect that the Museum was being imperialist and racist. But it is true that for many, some Indian names are very long and unpronounceable. By one estimate, about 50,000 surnames are now in use in the UK. While some immigrants complain that their names on job application forms cause discrimination against them, many indigenous Britons have given up trying to remember the names of their doctors, newsreaders and others, simply because they are too unfamiliar and hard to pronounce. Some Jewish immigrants have changed their names in order to assimilate, to flourish, and to avoid prejudice. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu changed from his Jewish name Israel Ehrenberg, for example. By contrast, some people of African heritage are changing their names back, for example the British theatre director Kwame Kwei-Armah from his birth name of Ian Roberts. (See Myska, 2012, on the complications of names.) The name Mohammed (along with various spelling variants) tops the list of boys’ names. Meanwhile, many countries have laws prescribing which chosen first names are permissible.

  Alongside this example of the difficult new pluralism of names, poor grasp of language, use of improper English and heavy accents cause stressful misunderstandings and add to subtle stress levels generally. Most seriously, the case of Dr Daniel Ubani was lethal. A Nigerian-born German citizen, Ubani was acting as a locum in Britain in 2008 when he administered a fatal dose of diamorphine (ten times the maximum dose) to a patient on his first shift, having poor English and misreading the instructions (The Guardian, 4 February, 2010). EU freedom of movement, and suboptimal rules on registration of doctors, were also implicated in this case, but in spite of his conviction for gross negligence and a past history of complaints against him, Dr Ubani was able to continue working as a doctor in Germany (Gammell, 2010). Add to this a report in 2017 that an NHS shortage of 40,000 nurses was driving continuing recruitment from overseas, but that a high failure rate on English language tests was proving an obstacle. The touted solution was that the tests are too hard, or unsuitable, and should be made easier (Tapper, 2017).

  Police were called to a mosque in High Wycombe containing hundreds of worshippers, to deal with a noisy altercation (Metro, 19 September, 2017). They were then confronted by rude and aggressive shouting because they had apparently not realised that mosques are regarded as sacred places requiring removal of outdoor shoes before entry. A woman police officer could be heard on video being insulted by a Muslim worshipper. This case raises several questions. Are mosques, like foreign embassies, to be considered in effect another country, beyond British laws? Should the police in such circumstances have to suspend their urgent business and remove their shoes? While it is normal in some countries for visitors to remove outdoor shoes when entering any house, it is not a standard expectation in Britain. No doubt modern police training always includes cultural awareness elements but police officers cannot be expected to act like anthropologists. But should there not be some expectation that sincere religious adherents act in a civilised and law-abiding manner towards the police, indeed towards everyone?

  In 2017 the Bank of England was criticised for a lack of diversity among its senior staff, who are mainly white men (Monaghan, 2017). This criticism comes about not merely due to suspicions of possible racism (or sexism) but because the Bank is committed to the Public Sector Equality Duty of the Equality Act of 2010, which promotes equality, diversity and inclusion. The Bank, which employs about 3,600 people, seeks to ‘attract and develop the best people’. ‘The Bank’s greatest asset is the people who work for it,’ runs the familiar public relations rhetoric. We are often told by SJWs that talent must not be wasted, but it is wasted when there is not proportional representation of all ethnic and other historically ‘marginalised’ groups. There is some evidence, however, that too much diversity in the workplace may lead to reduced productivity (Chua, 2013). Nevertheless, ‘lack of diversity’ is the shaming, rallying cry here, which is frequently used to embarrass and pressurise public and commercial companies. There is, of course, no logical reason to believe that quotas lead to greater efficiency or profitability. The best employees are presumably those with the best qualifications, experience and aptitude but in reality there is always a large dose of indeterminacy involved. Nevertheless, no-one seriously proposes the use of quotas for basketball teams, rap bands, curry houses and daytime women’s chat shows. Apart from legislative pressures, however, Cultural Marxism has ensured for decades that naming and shaming creates discomfort regarding these matters. With no democratic mandate but with relentless stealthy and hysterical propaganda, SJWs have pushed British society into a programmatic communism of empowerment of minorities.

  An authoritative analysis of ethnic minority employment trends is found in Audickas and Apostolova (2017). Figures that fall anywhere below the 13.6% (or thereabouts) for BAME people are invariably used to imply discrimination by institutional racism. Here is a sample: 51 of Britain’s 650 Members of Parliament (8%) are currently from ethnic minorities. Among police, 6.3%; magistrates 8%; teachers 8%; armed forces 7.2%; doctors 40.8%; Fire and Rescue Service 5.5%; Civil Service 11.6%. Findings tend to confirm that fewer ethnic minority individuals are employed at senior levels (6.7% in the NHS, for example). Yet if there is a 19% BAME representation in the Crown Prosecution Service, and 33% among professional footballers, we may discern a more interesting pattern and set of questions. Are members of some ethnic groups better suited to some employment sectors than others? The dogma of equality suggests no, but observation and commonsense suggests yes. Likewise regarding senior positions: Rao (2014) argues unconvincingly that racial discrimination oppresses BAME staff within the NHS. Why 40.8% doctors but only 5.5% in the Fire and Rescue Service? Are we to assume that all such differences are due to institutional racism? It is calculated that only a figure of 88 MPs would be truly representative of the UK’s BAME population. Will ethnic justice be achieved only when all employment statistics match the overall BAME percentage? If so, reductions in the number of BAME footballers and doctors, among others, would become necessary. And all this has to be calculated alongside correct quotas for gender, sexuality, disability and other identities. The clamour for artificially equal quotas is ridiculous.

  On 27 October 2017, ten male Vietnamese illegal immigrants, including two minors, were discovered hiding in the back of a lorry. The driver, Pedro, originally from Portugal himsel
f but now living in Britain, started this journey in Germany and came through Calais to Folkestone. His lorry was checked twice en route, at one point some stowaways being found and evicted, but the ten remaining illegal immigrants got as far as Beaconsfield (about 106 miles away) without being discovered. There are three points of special interest here. The overland distance of about 6,000–7,000 miles seems to be no object, if they did indeed travel from Vietnam. What attracts Vietnamese economic migrants to the UK, where about 55,000 Vietnamese already live? Can we expect the same level of diligence from a Portugese driver in such circumstances, and from French customs staff, as from a native Briton? (Mail Online, 20 October, 2017.) In March of 2017 ten accompanied Vietnamese children aged 13 to 16 arrived near Shrewsbury in Shropshire in a lorry that had come from France. The local council have to take responsibility for them, to organise foster care and safeguarding, at a cost between £50,000 and £133,000 a year for each child, depending on their mental health needs (Mail Online, 16 November, 2017). On being granted asylum, the council will remain responsible for their accommodation, health and other needs until they are 25. We might ask how they got so far, why their vulnerable state was not picked up much earlier in France, and how this is to be funded.

  The government’s inspectorate of schools, Ofsted, found in 2017 that among faith schools, 33% of Christian, 54% of Jewish, and 58% of Muslim schools inspected were in need of improvement or inadequate. Many of these independent faith schools do not promote ‘fundamental British values’. There is a high risk that such schools — some of them unregulated or even illegal — focus too strongly on religious texts and cultural values that are at odds with, or actively undermine normal British secular expectations (Mail Online, 3 December, 2017). The Ofsted head who wrote the report, Amanda Spielman, was subsequently threatened by Islamic extremists. St Stephens School in Newham, East London, drew attention for getting its ban on eight-year-old girls wearing hijabs overturned (Naidoo, 2018). Neena Mall, the headteacher, had stressed the importance of integration into British life, but an organised campaign reversed her decision. Naidoo calls the original decision ‘institutional Islamophobia’ and part of a dehumanising ‘toxic narrative’ about Muslims.

  A Manchester hospital in 2017 received the dubious distinction of racking up the highest single ‘health tourism’ debt from one foreign, non-EU patent (unidentified) whose treatment cost amounted to £532,498. Before that, in 2016 a Nigerian woman named Priscilla had incurred costs of just over £500,00 when she arrived pregnant at Heathrow after being turned away at Chicago, and had quadruplets in a London hospital. These large sums are almost always unrecoverable, often result from calculated abuse of the NHS, and in many cases could be prevented by insisting on medical insurance as part of any visa process (Mail Online, 8 January 2018).

  A Muslim couple, Munir Mohammed and Raiwada al-Hassan, were found guilty of plotting terrorist acts in 2015 and 2016 using ricin and explosives from Derbyshire and London bases, and having with links to ISIS. Al-Hassan was a graduate of UCL and a pharmacist. Mohammed, originally from Eritrea, was a refugee from Sudan who used false documents and worked illegally in a food factory (BBC News, 8 January, 2018).

  It is important to dig into detailed cases like these because there is a danger that we can become desensitised to incrementally large-scale cultural changes, as is horribly evident in the grooming gangs scandals. One can attack these accounts simply for appearing (mainly) in certain right-wing newspapers. Indeed, online campaigns like Stop Funding Hate specifically target the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and The Sun by persuading large advertisers not to do business with them because they are allegedly anti-immigrant peddlers of hate. One can argue that reports like those above are isolated incidents, not characteristic of most migrant or non-white behaviour, or that they are deliberately and mischievously chosen to whip up racist sentiments. On one particular day (16 December, 2017) the Mail Online carried at least three stories that could be interpreted as anti-immigrant and hate-fuelling. (1) A 72-year-old Somalian asylum seeker who came to Britain 15 years ago and became a citizen was found to have defrauded the Department for Work and Pensions of £39,000; during this time he had spent 2.5 years back in Somalia; he had forged an immigration stamp; and he had incurred large medical and legal costs. He received a prison sentence of 15 months. (2) A report claims that 6,000 criminals (some convicted of very serious offences) cannot be deported; and 200 of these are receiving large sums in compensation for being detained too long by police, while their victims receive nothing. (3) A 16-year-old male of Bengali origin was abducted and beaten by several Pakistani-origin men for having a relationship with a female member of their family, in an act described as an ‘honour beating’; they were convicted of false imprisonment, grievous bodily harm, and affray.

  Anyone citing such examples may be accused of stereotyping and race hatred, yet the reports are either true or untrue, legally permissible or not, and presumably in the public interest. The Guyanese-heritage ex-Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Philips, admitted in his sceptical, post-multiculturalism work that many such stereotypes are true (Phillips, 2016, Ridley, 2016). In the case of the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham schools in 2014, where some evidence existed of an Islamist infiltration, staff nepotism, and low standards, events were interpreted quite differently by media with contrasting perspectives (Shackle 2017). For SJWs, all such examples are anomalies or minor matters, exploited for racist purposes, and the picture they prefer to paint is of immigrants’ human rights being abused, their contributions to British life being exemplary, and everything ticking over smoothly and progressively beneath the disgustingly fascist distortions of the right-wing press. Consider, however, the case where Muslim pressure to radically change a school’s ethos resulted in false claims of Islamophobia against the headteacher, Erica Connor, who had to take early retirement due to the stress involved, and was eventually awarded over £400,000 damages in court (Beckford, 2009).

  Difficult to disentangle is the relationship between individual encounters and mass phenomena. I have no close relationships with any immigrants and only one with a second generation immigrant. But from time to time I meet a refugee from Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or wherever. Language problems aside, there is no friction or animosity. Their stories seem genuine, the individuals are likeable, and I sympathise with their struggles. But I do not always know if they are completely honest with me, or if they unintentionally exaggerate how badly off they are. I can enjoy Muslim taxi drivers’ tales of travel, resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism but I cannot know the real details behind them. I can read the Daily Mail or The Guardian, each selecting and tweaking certain anti-immigrant or pro-immigrant stories. Indeed, I read widely, watch many YouTube presentations, and digest opposing accounts of immigration, race, and multiculturalism, and various historical and sociological spins thereon. One can be moved by a single story, for example the Greek mother genuinely upset about her left-behind family in Greece as she struggles to earn money in Britain to have her family join her (Kemp, 2017). Gulwali Passarlay (2017) tells the story of his own journey from Afghanistan, arriving frightened at Calais in the back of a lorry, aged 13, and not initially being believed by interviewers at the Dover Immigration Removals Centre. He found excellent support in foster care, experienced helpfulness from some professionals, took a degree at Manchester University, wrote a book, and was selected to be a carrier of the Olympic torch in 2012. One can be welcoming to individual immigrants while also being opposed to mass immigration and its consequences, seeing large-scale ‘change as loss’ (Goodhart, 2017).

  Hollywood and other left-wing media recognise the value of individual perspective. As an example, the makers of Wallace and Gromit have made an animated film about a family of Syrian refugees who cross the Mediterranean, called We Wait. ‘The refugees interact with you through eye contact’, says Ben Curtis, producer at Aardman Studios (Dee, 2017/18). This overco
mes the problems of detachment characteristic of news reports (although it echoes the Alan Kurdi story and its single powerful photographic image). Emotional manipulation is what visual-dramatic media do well, yet how often are we placed in eye contact and made sympathetic with characters who are not victims but ‘victors’? Curtis says he wanted ‘an accurate and sensitive portrayal’ of refugees, but when do we see accurate and sensitive portrayals of Ray Honeyford, Enoch Powell, or just ordinary, bemused and bewildered white citizens struggling to understand the transformation of their country?

  We all see large numbers of Muslims, Africans and other highly visible immigrants in the town centres in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Bradford, Leicester and elsewhere. In some areas like Stratford in east London my ethnicity is definitely in the white British minority (of 21% — see http://www.integrationhub.net/map/residential-patterns-map/). Foreign languages abound, and I often struggle to know which are being spoken. I regularly see foreign beggars who are apparently homeless and poor, sitting and occasionally playing an accordion on the streets of many European countries, or on tube trains. When I go to hotels or cafés the receptionists and baristas are invariably from other EU countries. This is not the majority white Anglophone country in which I grew up. I don’t think I am longing for an imperialist past. I am sad in an unbigoted way and bewildered by these cultural changes and associated population growth, which feels much more negative than positive.

  14

  Threats to Free Speech

  We already realise that our own home-grown, so-called hate speech laws are curtailing our taken-for-granted freedoms. It has been painfully clear for decades that we all have to take great care not to offend those groups of people protected by PC strictures — non-whites, women (or rather, feminists), gays and others referred to as LGBTQ, the disabled, and others (Banks, 2017). So, there are legal limits to free speech and there are informal limits imposed by the ‘Cultural Marxism police’. In this latter case, the punishments involve being outed, embarrassed and vilified, and risks to your reputation and career. But the third, most dramatic and terrifying of sanctions against free speech is the death threat, otherwise known as the fatwa. Sanctions against offensive or slanderous speech directed at individuals in person, in writing or on social media is something most of us would defend to some extent as necessary evils. But many of us would draw a line at sanctions against expressing our reasoned views on impersonal matters. Charles Murray being prevented by American students from speaking at Middlebury College in March 2017 because they deemed his views on race and IQ a form of hate speech falls into this category. But Murray’s life was not threatened.