The Folly of Mass Immigration (Part II of V)

The illusions of immigrationism

The approach to mass immigration embodied in the Demos/openDemocracy pamphlet rests on four assumptions, each of which is open to serious challenge.

Mass immigration is normal

The Demos/openDemocracy vision tells us that the instinct “to migrate between different environments is part of our inheritance”. This approach may be described as ‘immigration-apologetics’, which regards present trends as historically unexceptional and thus not to be resisted – although it does graciously admit that revolutions in transport and telecommunications do mean that the scale of current immigration is without precedent.

Of course, there has always been immigration, 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.

But even unaided 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 Bangladesh are relocating to northern England. People once, at most, moved to their neighbouring 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.

Immigration is historically rare. The fact that there were 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 immigration for its own sake – the white settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are virtually empty lands built on immigration; as such, they are extraordinary historical anomalies.

The historical rarity of immigration allowed humanity to evolve different languages, cultures, customs and family names unique to each society. Human immobility is such that intensely localised 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 immigration.

In the last quarter century, immigration has doubled, so that over 3% of people on the planet now live outside the land of their birth. Contrary to People Flow‘s claims, most of this migration increase is in the developed world; the numbers have actually decreased in the developing world in this period. People flow in all directions, but there is now just one dominant flow: south to north. The UN says that 2.3 million people are moving from the developing world to the west every year.

This scale is unprecedented. There is more immigration 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 immigration; in the past, population growth was almost exclusively self-generated. Since the second world war, immigration from the ‘third world’ has increased the British population by 5 million more than it would otherwise have been, and current levels of immigration are predicted to push the current figure of 59 million up to 68 million by 2030.