One of the tactics employed by SJWs in their pro-EU discourse is to claim that freedom of movement works both ways, that many British people live and work in the EU. It is true that some do so (currently about 890,000), particularly in Spain and France, and about 189,000 of these appear to be retired and living on pensions. By contrast, the 3.4 million EU citizens living in Britain include over 916,000 Poles (Travis, 2017). The idea of an equivalence of movement is thus shown to be nonsense. It is of course true that 17th century British emigrants to America and later colonialists set a major precedent. Of those early 400,000 emigrants who sailed to the Americas, many were fleeing religious persecution, or seeking work in the tobacco industry for example, and some were criminals. But the risks were high and many died of disease or hunger en route or on arrival, but the good prospects outweighed the alternatives (Evans, 2017). This was similar in some ways to today’s refugees and other immigrants to Europe, except that America in the 17th century had massive open spaces and was not (and still is not) nearly as densely populated as the UK.
The Brexit vote produced an unexpected result that was perhaps avoidable had the unique characteristics and needs of the UK been recognised and necessary changes agreed. David Cameron was unsuccessful in his bid for changes to free movement into the UK (Graham, 2014). Angela Merkel bluntly rejected special pleading from the UK: ‘I would never agree to it. You can’t have numerical limits’. Often portrayed as stemming from ignorant populism, Brexit is to a large extent an instinctive rejection of the unwise pace and proportions of immigration and its impact, and of a Brussels-based bureaucracy that could not be trusted to understand or influence key British affairs. The population density of the UK is not mirrored in most its neighbours, and the sources of immigration and the UK’s popularity as a destination should have been taken seriously before Brexit became necessary, but the EU has been inflexible. But even apart from Britain’s unique characteristics, much more careful thought should have gone into addressing the demographic and cultural realities of each nation. Although as yet no other country has followed the UK’s example, France, Austria and the Netherlands have come close, and enthusiasm for the future of the EU is far from overwhelming. Brexiters have been called fanatics but it may be the pro-EU anti-borders progressives who are the fanatics, unwilling to honour the organic realities of geographical nativism that cannot simply be overturned by political fiat (Marshall, 2016), and resistant to commonsense limits to available resources. In 2017 the European Court of Justice overruled objections from Slovakia (population 5,430,000) and Hungary (population 9,800,000) to having a quota of refugees imposed on them. As Furedi (2018) has argued, Hungary has been tarnished as a populist nation on the brink of fascism simply for having a sense of national identity that differs from that of the Eurocrats. Bello (2017) also stokes this fire of white guilt by portraying disquiet about immigration as a xenophobic, international security threat. Meanwhile, in spite of sophisticated attempts to measure migrational flows into EU countries, the obstacles and complexities may prove insurmountable (Takle, 2017).
Increasing public discontentment with immigration has revealed flaws in government policies and management of migrational flows. Successive governments have vowed to bring immigration down but have failed, and the points-based regulation of non-EU immigration has had mixed success. The UK still resists the requirement for all adults to obtain and carry ID cards, and in this we are in a minority. EU citizens are not required to have a registration certificate in order to reside or work in the United Kingdom, while this is a requirement elsewhere. It means that people entering the UK can easily ‘disappear’ until they need formal employment or housing. Poor systems for establishing, and often unwillingness to verify, the right to access free health care means that the NHS attracts some abuse and loses money. Poor tracking of incomers means that serious fugitive foreign criminals sometimes enter the UK and commit further offences. One Romanian man was imprisoned in 2017 for 16 years following a brutal assault, attempted rape and theft. He had previous convictions in Romania for sex offences and yet travelled freely, and worked in a car wash in north east England (ITV News, 1 September, 2017). We are told there are now 413,000 EU2 (Romanian and Bulgarian) citizens estimated as officially living in the UK (ONS, 2017). Insufficient funding of the UK Border Agency has sometimes frustrated investigation of false passports, sham marriages and illegal entry via small ports. Employment abuses in sensitive areas such as airports have led to some specific smuggling cases. Little of this can be laid directly at the door of the EU. As Palmer and Wood (2017) show, successive British governments have altogether failed to tackle immigration and the prospects for effective post-Brexit reductions in illegal and excessive legal immigration appear bleak (Moxon, 2006).
On the other hand, French politicians and police have allowed undocumented migrants to cross France from many other European countries to camp in their thousands at Calais and elsewhere, who then agitate for asylum in the UK with the support of British liberal activists, and in many cases attempt illegal entry. Since many of these claim to be unaccompanied children (some are but many are probably not), the French and other national authorities are failing in their child protection duties. The European Court of Human Rights is resorted to both by immigrants who have legitimate grievances and by many who do not, and the spectacle of abuse of these mechanisms, backed up by an industry of human rights lawyers, frustrates the non-PC observing public and some politicians (Barkham, 2008). Immigration removal and detention centres hold unprocessed asylum seekers and people awaiting deportation and regularly attract protests from SJWs who argue that migrants who have committed no crime should not be detained. Of the 13 such centres in the UK, Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, housing mainly female and family residents, has attracted criticisms for inhumane conditions, abuse by staff, and some deaths and incidents of self-harm and suicide. Protesters have called it a ‘racist, sexist hellhole’ and tried to shut it down (Lousley, 2015). Farcical government blunders aside, immigrants continue to enter by one route or another, to claim asylum, and to fight deportation. Meanwhile, xenophilic anti-Brexiters, Cultural Marxists, no-borders anarchists and liberal celebrities are willing the UK’s post-EU economy to tank so they can gleefully say, ‘We told you so’.
A landmark case against the UK government Home Office came in late 2017, with a judgement by the high court that it had no right to deport rough sleepers. This came about as two Polish men and a Latvian protested against the decision to deport them (Taylor, 2017). They were assisted in this by several parties, including AIRE (Advice on Individual Rights in Europe). EU law on free movement means that homeless people who are citizens of any EU state, employed or not, cannot be deported, and presumably this also means that there can be no legal limit to the number of homeless people on Britain’s streets. The judgement also means that anyone who has been so deported can apply for readmission to Britain and financial compensation. This ruling offends commonsense, almost certainly offends those who voted for Brexit, and yet has to be suffered until Britain actually exits the EU. Meanwhile, rough sleepers have to be accounted for in terms of associated begging, crime, housing, benefits payments, and moral pressure via SJWs on government to build more houses. It is also being argued that many rough sleepers are actually employed on low wages and have ‘fallen on hard times’ (all due, of course, to right-wing policies). North East London Migrant Action’s website carries the slogan ‘Homes not borders: resist racist removals’, which clearly shows this SJW trend.
The Council of Europe is not part of the EU but its functions and spirit partly overlap. Commencing in 1948 with a post-war urgency and a mission from Winston Churchill to form a United States of Europe of some sort, the COE’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) now pursues an agenda of tracking key social and legal trends in its 47 member states representing a total of 820 million people, and issues regular human rights directives. In one of these, it states ‘European states must first come to
terms with their own past. To this end, those that have not done so should publicly acknowledge that slavery, the slave trade and colonialism are among the major sources of current discrimination against Black people. This is a sine qua non for overcoming Afrophobia’ (COE, 2017). It is doubtful if most ordinary people read such documents or are even aware of the COE’s work, but critical-thinking Eurosceptics, anti-immigrationists and critics of linguistic bullying might be shocked to learn of the authoritarian tone of such documents and their lack of nuance. The ECRI has even directly criticised parts of Britain’s media, particularly its right-wing tabloid press.
The EU can be seen as a grand experiment in multiculturalism for which there was never a true, popular mandate and which does nothing to enhance democracy (Mair, 2013). French President Emmanuel Macron admitted in 2018 that if the French held a referendum on leaving the EU, it might go the same way as Brexit. Nothing of the sort should be entertained, since such decisions are too complex for ordinary citizens to vote on. The EU and its member states can be seen as the sites of accidents in demographic upheaval. Charitably, it can be regarded as resulting in changing cultures that will have an overall, long-term neutral effect. EU leaders can be viewed as well-meaning bunglers whose project has got monstrously out of hand. But most worryingly the EU may be interpreted as merely the groundwork for a one-world ideology, a Cultural Marxism orchestrated by a quasi-confederacy of states whose only concerns are distributive and social justice, maintenance of peace, and prosperity: but in reality it is a naïvely idealistic vision of borderless international socialism whose future is unknowable but at risk of dystopian outcomes. One of these risks is the surrender to incremental Muslim occupation and excessive reproduction, leading to Islamic colonisation (Faye, 2016) and highly undesirable consequences (Ye’or, 2013), any discussion of which SJWs decry as Islamophobia. Academics like Virdee and McGeever (2017), for example, interpret Brexit as racism composed of nostalgia for Empire and a ‘Powellite island retreat’.
The New European, a newspaper founded in 2016 to affirm EU values after the Brexit vote, promotes an uncritically rosy view of Europe and the EU past and present, and a correspondingly negative view of all things perceived as Brexit-associated xenophobia. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for example, originally an Asian Ugandan who came as a refugee to Britain in her twenties, is an affluent, outspoken journalist, SJW and Muslim who writes for this newspaper. Beginning one column with an acerbic put-down of UKIP’s leader, Henry Bolton, she called him an old fool (he is 54 and she is 68) for his affair with a young woman declared racist (Alibhai-Brown, 2018). Lashing out at ‘white supremacists’ and the ‘vainglorious British Empire’ in the same column, she goes on to state: ‘Listen bigots, I will not be a grateful, little brown migrant. I am a citizen and a taxpayer, so will express my views freely as a columnist’. Perhaps she has forgotten that the UK remains the tolerant country that allows for her free speech (including her name-calling); while many of her fellow Muslims seek to vigorously suppress views they dislike, many EU-supporters too want to turn a blind eye to growing Islamic intolerance and illiberalism, and in some countries she would be at great risk for her vociferous views.
It is probably not a good idea to bring Nietzsche into the picture here, associated as he often is with Nazism. But his views on master-slave morality are very apt. He strongly disliked the Judeo-Christian tradition which celebrates meekness and feeds off long-held resentments. He argued — in contrast with Jewish insistence on Holocaust remembrance beginning forty-five years after his death — for the benefits of forgetfulness. He said, ‘Our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism’ (Nietzsche, 1887/2013). This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves, when the underdog morality of SJWs is not only a form of minority political activism and bullying-from-below but the basis of the United Nations and Council of Europe’s strictures, and when the coalition of those aggrieved by historical slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and countless phantom persecutions, thrives on the narrative of perpetual resentment and demands for a borderless world.
7
The Problem of Islam
The most stunning impact of Islam for Westerners is that a majority of us in the West, and certainly in Britain, merely decades ago had hardly heard of it (Mohammedanism was a more common term), and either accepted the dominance of liberal Christianity, or assumed that secularism was fixed and atheism would continue to grow. A UK text such as Stalker (2001) could uncritically celebrate the alleged economic benefits of immigration and extol the virtues of migrants as heroes, with barely a mention of Muslims; but this was of course just before 9/11. The presence of Islam in the UK was negligible but today, as if out of nowhere, well over three million Muslims live in the UK. This figure roughly equals the entire population of Wales, and also the total number of Muslims in the USA, which means that the UK has a Muslim population about five times the proportion of the American one. Hitherto unknown mosques are mushrooming, by some estimates up to 2,000, many funded by oil states, and about 45% of them run by conservative Deobandi Muslims whose origins lie in an anti-colonialist resistance movement in India.
Islam began approximately 1400 years ago with Muhammad’s reported revelation from Allah, the gathering of followers, and the creation of the Quran. It is the most recent of the major Abrahamic religions and, in one view, has so much energy behind it precisely because it is relatively young, fervent, and has been through no reformation. Faithful Muslims do not question the literal truth of the Quran, which rests on principles of monotheism, creationism, divine revelation, patriarchal culture, obedience to authority, the prospect of paradise, and prescriptions for how to live. Today there are approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide and Islam is set to overtake Christianity as the largest religion in the next 50 or so years. Ali (2015) tellingly refers to Islam as a super-tribe, and the ummah is understood as a supranational community of all Muslims. This might not be such a problem if Islam resembled modern Christianity more in its tenets of pacifism and liberality.
We have come to speak of Islam in terms of its ‘moderate’ and ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims and radical Islamists. Islam is a problem in the West, certainly in the UK, and a curiosity. Why would so many religious adherents move to a country like the UK where liberal values have been predominating? Why do so many Muslims who live here not want to integrate but instead continue to dress as if living in alien cultures? Some of these questions are addressed by Talal Asad, a Muslim academic who lives and works in New York, but his responses derive from a contorted Foucaultian view that amounts to evasive casuistry (Hamdan, 2015). Muslims seem divided on the rights and wrongs of ‘living among disbelievers’ but one interpretation of hijrah or hegira is ‘conquest by occupation’. Why do we now hear so many stories of honour killings, sharia courts and corporal punishment, female genital mutilation, polygamy, halal food rituals, radicalisation of pupils at some Muslim faith schools, ultra-sensitivity to blasphemy against the Prophet, high fertility and large families, cousin marriages, arranged marriages, and homophobia, not to mention the sexual grooming and abuse of white girls (McLaughlin, 2016)?
The position regarding sharia law and polygamous marriages is not completely clear in the UK context. But in principle such marriages that have taken place legally in the country concerned (of which there are up to 58) have been recognised since 2008 (Wheeler, 2016). This gets complicated when UK income support payments are involved, as each wife can make a claim. Polygamous households may in fact eventually receive a higher amount in universal credits. It is thought there may be about 20,000 polygamous marriages among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the UK but if unrecognised or ‘secret polygamy’ is taken into account the figure may reach 100,000. Some Muslim men appear to have up to 20 children each. Baroness Shreela Flather (2016) has written that via many evasions and exploitation of loopholes polygamous arrangements are being imported into the UK with potentially serious consequences for state benefits and family cohesi
on. It has also been suggested that due to difficulties in getting accurate information and in order to avoid accusations of racism, some of the officials concerned turn a blind eye to these matters. See also Fairbairn et al. (2017).
Does this all amount to exaggerated stereotypes, and merely the minority, ritualised or dark side of an otherwise noble religion? That is what we are urged to believe. It does appear that some Muslims live normal liberal lives in the UK, paying only lip service to Islam in the same way many Christians are only nominal believers. But it’s also clear that a substantial proportion of Muslims hold highly illiberal views and despise the sinful behaviour of Britain’s native infidels (Kern, 2016; Lipka, 2017). Or should we believe that the ‘far-right Salafi-Islamists’ have hijacked normative liberal Islam (Khan, 2016)? Disturbingly, Goodhart (2014) cites figures showing that 81% of Muslims living in Britain regard themselves as Muslim first, British second (compared with a figure of 46% in France and 47% in the USA). Klausen (2008) found that 70% of a sample of the British Muslim elite were ‘neo-orthodox’. Kassam (2017) insists as an investigative ex-Muslim that no-go areas in several Western countries are real and spreading.
Excessive Immigration Page 10
