Overpopulation threatens not only humanity but the entire environment (Foreman, 2015; Smail, 2017). Anthropogenic climate change is not slowing down and the recurring recommendation is that reductions in population may be the single most effective strategy for addressing our problems. The idea of a ‘demostat’ has been mooted, which consists of measuring and adjusting population levels. But both religious tradition and third-world reproductive behaviours continue to push overpopulation. The most conscientious of Westerners, and arguably the highest IQ citizens, are now typically limiting themselves to one or two children. If population control continues to be interpreted by SJWs and immigrants as racism and they refuse to countenance it, we are going to see troubled megacities containing superdiverse populations. We should heed the warnings of those calculating that the world’s true optimal population based on carrying capacity criteria is around 4.5 billion, and that of the UK between 17 and 26 million (Population Matters, 2006).
In 2006 Tony Blair admitted two very important things (BBC, 2006). One was that immigrants were driving up the population of Britain, which had then gone over the 60 million mark. The other was that we have no official policy on population control. The latter, he said, would be ‘political dynamite’. Why would something so critical to the UK’s future welfare, intensely related to its available resources, be dynamite and thus to be avoided? We discuss our ageing population, we blithely admit that net migration means that the equivalent of a new city is being added to the overall population annually, but we seem unable to address this problem urgently. The membership charity Population Matters pressed for such a policy at the 2017 general election without success. Presumably it is one of those matters that has to become critically bad before anything is done. The American organisation NumbersUSA is far ahead of anything similar in the UK in spelling out problems of overpopulation caused by mass immigration and suggesting solutions, while steadfastly refusing racist labels (Beck, 1996). Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (2017) in a densely argued, technically informed pamphlet, includes the stark metric of British population increasing so much in the next 25 years that it will equal 3.5 additional Greater Manchesters.
Predictions vary greatly for world population levels, by one account from 15.8 billion to 6.2 billion in the year 2100 (Plataforma SINC, 2013). The low estimate is predicated on falling fertility. Whether or not this global self-regulation transpires, there are reasons to believe that the world Muslim population will continue to increase and overtake Christianity for the first time ever, and some growth in folk religions will occur, while the population of Buddhists, Jews, atheists and religiously non-affiliated will remain static or fall (PEW, 2015). Highest population increases will be seen in Africa, and Europe and North America will have the highest concentration of religiously non-affiliated people, but will be under increasing pressure from immigration. By my reading, this suggests that overall there will be a decline in rational progressivism and intelligence-led worldviews. Research on the relationship between average higher intelligence and smaller family size seems to confirm this (Meisenberg, 2010).
9
Interethnic and Intergroup Problems
It has suited the anti-racist narrative to speak in black and white terms. At one time in the UK the term Black was used to encompass all non-white groups, in order to strengthen the anti-white hand politically. But it was always obvious that some non-white groups were more numerous, aggrieved or troublesome than others. Chinese and Sikhs among others attracted relatively little negative attention and had little of the ‘attitude’ associated with African-Caribbean people. Indeed, the population of Chinese-origin people in Britain significantly exceeds that of Jamaican-origin people but the latter group makes much more ‘noise’ (the violent criminal activities of Chinese Triads and Jamaican Yardies notwithstanding). The presence of Japanese in the UK, predominantly in London, confirms a belief that, while visibly different, they are considered mainly polite, industrious, integrative, and do not cause trouble or demand that the host society bends to their wishes (ethnically distinct Yakuza criminals, again, notwithstanding). (Martin, 2017, and Sakamoto et al., 2009, go some way to explaining these patterns in the American context.) And while Africans and Caribbeans used to predominate in discussions of race, population increases among Asians and non-British Europeans have led to different dynamics. Ongoing debates are found regarding slavery, with sometimes fierce clashes over the extent of Jewish profiting from the slave trade, and in competitions for ‘most persecuted people’.
It is well-known that street gangs often form based on quite superficial territorial grounds, in accord with Tajfel’s (1982) social identity theory (and see Berreby, 2008). The troubles in Northern Ireland were based on longstanding religious (Protestant versus Catholic) and economic factors. Much more widely, we know of tribal conflicts in Kenya and Rwanda, and between Russia and Chechnya, for example. Tensions grow between blacks, Asians and Mexicans in the USA. Longstanding tensions between the English and Scots led to the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. An increasing proportion of nationalist Poles are vociferously objecting to refugees in their midst, despite Polish Jews fleeing in the early 20th century, and many Poles moving to Britain. British Sikhs have protested that they do not wish to be implicated as ‘Asian men’ when grooming gangs come to trial involving Muslim men, especially since some Muslims have sexually assaulted Sikh girls, and no Sikhs have been similarly convicted (People of Shambhala, 2012). Antagonistic Muslim attitudes towards Jews are well known and documented (Jikeli, 2015), Jews being referred to in the Quran and elsewhere as ‘descendants of pigs and apes’.
Tensions were heightened in the Golders Green area of London when the Centre for Islamic Enlightening bought the historic Hippodrome building, with plans to develop it as a mosque and cultural centre. Golders Green has for many decades been densely populated by Jews, and its famous crematorium is a memorial to countless Jewish notables. Tensions between blacks and Jews in the USA are well noted (Adams & Bracey, 1999). Tanzanian albinos are persecuted by black Tanzanians. Mahatma Gandhi peacefully campaigned for Indian independence from Britain in 1947, and worked strenuously and fasted for inter-faith unity, only to be assassinated by a fellow Hindu in 1948, leaving a torn India and Pakistan in his wake; not to mention his racist past (Biswas, 2015). The agonies of the partition are still reverberating. Conflict in Myanmar between Buddhists in Rakhine and Rohingya Muslims has driven hundreds of thousands of the latter to flee to Bangladesh, demonstrating that ethnic conflicts are so often the cause of migration.
The topic of British-Irish relations is complex and I will only touch on it here. The Irish have suffered from British interference, religious conflict and colonisation over many centuries; from the great potato famine of 1845–1852 (in which a million died while food was still shipped to England) and many further, bitter struggles and wars with the British to the present. Anti-Irish sentiment or Hibernophobia perhaps reached its height in the 1960s when signs for rooms to rent sometimes specified ‘no Irish, no coloureds’, some interpreting this as an aversion to ‘rough Irish navvies’ who might be troublesome heavy drinkers. Ireland’s fortunes continue to fluctuate economically, and its immigration has exceeded its former levels of emigration. But some degree of stereotyping remains, the Irish often depicted as variously stupid, mad, drunk, genial, good fun, backwardly religious, violent, or highly creative. Quite recently I heard an Irish SJW academic speak of the ‘British Othering’ of the Irish. But I think it is broadly true to say that little real ‘racism’ exists among the British towards the Irish and by one calculation it may be that six million people now living in the UK have Irish ancestry or recent Irish origins. This does not mean, however, that some residue of the former ‘Troubles’ is not festering beneath the surface. The absence of rubbish containers in British train stations (or their existence only in the form of transparent bags) attests to IRA terrorists’ bombing activity in Britain in the 1970s to the 1990s (but this had roots from 1939).<
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The more one thinks about it, the plainer it is how common such conflicts are. Even Gordon Allport (1954), in his study of prejudice, conceded that ‘rivalries and hatreds between groups are nothing new. What is new is the fact that technology has brought these groups too close together for comfort’. Yet propaganda for the advancement of a rosy multicultural society has persisted and we have tried to ignore the problems inherent in having so many ethnic groups immigrate into the UK, or indeed into any one small geographical space. These groups tend to follow the same preference for one’s own kind as experienced by any other groups. Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and indeed factions within these do not necessarily get on. In 2016 Asad Shah was stabbed to death by another Muslim, Tanveer Ahmed, who had travelled to Glasgow to kill him because he was a liberal Ahmadi Muslim. In 2006 three Asian men killed a black man in Birmingham’s Lozell area during a riot which was associated with the displacement of African-Caribbeans by incoming Ugandans and Kenyans. In Sheffield in 2013, an imminent riot among whites, Pakistanis and Slovakian Roma residents of the Page Hall area was feared (Shute, 2013). An academic analysis of social cohesion and its breakdown focuses on the place of inter-group trust, which is often missing in societies where immigration has been too rapid and integration has failed (Larsen, 2013). More prosaically, Judah (2016) captures the sometimes banal, sometimes comedic, everyday racist banter among groups of Afghanis, Nigerians, Romanians, Pakistanis and others living in London. One Romanian, for example, says how much he hates Britain, its weather and its ‘ugly women’, the work is too hard, and ‘there are niggers everywhere’.
It is reported anecdotally that in certain job sectors ethnic nepotism holds sway. In other words, you may struggle to get a job in some places (on the buses, driving taxis, in parts of the NHS) if it is already dominated by one ethnic group or another. Officially this is not the case, since equal opportunities legislation strives to ensure it cannot happen. But it does, and it causes problems. But interethnic and intercultural strife is evident in other ways. Groups separate themselves residentially, religiously and so on. And to be fair, an ‘old boys’ network’ also ensures that the British establishment of aristocracy and Oxbridge graduates looks after its own. We should not be at all surprised that clans, subcultures, ethnic groups, races and nations show loyalty to each other and this in turn produces conflicts (Vanhanen, 1999).
One of the reinforcement factors for exponential immigration is family reunification policy which (with some safeguards of sufficient income and passage of time) brings in several more family members; and the associated chain migration phenomenon, with subsequent immigrants moving into the same areas (see Vaughan, 2017, for US examples). The £11 billion of remittances migrants in Britain send to their families back home annually is roughly equal to the UK’s foreign aid budget, and much of the remittances sum derives from child credits and benefits. The sum of £69 billion annually goes from Western Europe to families of origin in other parts of the world (Giannangeli, 2015). It has been claimed that some eventually manage to save enough of this to migrate to Britain and other EU countries.
A brief detour into speculative ideas about the origins of ethnic conflict may be instructive. In one theory, from about 100,000 years ago humans dispersed around the world not merely out of adventurousness, escaping adverse climate, or seeking resources, but in order to lessen potentially deadly intergroup disputes (Spikins, 2015). Disliked and opposed by SJWs, evolutionary theories and observations include the notion that early humans could not relate well to a group of over about 150 people. In the worldview of many academics, especially anthropologists, early humans were ‘noble savages’ who were co-operative, egalitarian and non-violent. But Kelly (2005) argues for early territorial habits in which groups had understood borders between them and rarely got too close to the border for fear of attack. Projectile weapons had been created 400,000 years ago, but highly suggestive evidence of actual lethal inter-human battles dating to 13,000 years ago has been found in Jebel Sahaba in northern Sudan. Most now agree that violence has been steadily declining in human societies but it still periodically breaks out in homicide and genocide, and is arguably always just beneath the surface when territory, sacred beliefs, or valued relationships are threatened.
In another theory, early one-to-one altruism, balanced by awareness of potential cheating, led to group level ‘mutualistic collaboration’ (Tomasello et al., 2011). These are hardly novel ideas but they may cause us to wonder if such evolved mechanisms of trust in small groups could ever equip us for life today, in the groups of millions in which we live. Even with the complementary faculties of altruism and self-protection it seems that some people who are forced to co-exist in densely populated places are strong on pathological altruism and weak on the evaluation of cheating and parasitic behaviour (Oakley et al., 2012). Now when we have almost no avenues for escaping from each other except by moving to other densely populated areas, conflicts inexorably increase. An example of ongoing leftist pathological altruism is cultural appeasement, whereby pacifying immigrants has become more important than protecting one’s own group’s interests (Richards, 2009). That is one, submissive strategy for addressing ethnic conflict. In a rather pessimistic analysis by Ruane and Todd (2004), ethnic conflict may be a kind of path dependent phenomenon that becomes self-perpetuating.
It is reported that preferences exist for lighter skin not only in the West but also, for example, in India, the Philippines and parts of Africa (Abraham, 2017). In Nigeria, 77% of women use skin-lightening agents. Many women try to lighten their skin with a range of cosmetics, intravenous substances or laser treatments in India, where fairer skin has become more valued. The blame for this trend is often attributed to the Western advertising industry but it goes back perhaps thousands of years and is traceable to the Hindu caste system, which has darker-skinned people at the bottom. Bollywood too demonstrates this bias towards fairer skin. Some critics blame colonialism for the spread of this preference, and regard it as a form of racism. It can also be very damaging to health, and is often part of the marriage market. So we have here a form of in-group, own-ethnicity prejudice which is however interpreted by Cultural Marxists as a form of culpable colonial action.
Intra-ethnic problems are not only about cultural and political schisms. Pressure is often asserted from militant blacker-than-thou blacks, for example against blacks deemed to be Uncle Toms, too ready to suck up to whites. The terms house nigger, coconut and oreo are often used to insult black people who are successful, or who assimilate into white culture too readily. The term ‘going native’ has also been used similarly, like nigger-lover, of whites in other countries who adopt alien ways or get too close to the indigenous people of those countries. In 2009 Sadiq Khan used the Uncle Tom epithet of moderate Muslims who were too ready to be critical of their own religion and culture (Nsubuga, 2016), and radical Islamists warn their co-religionists not to succumb to Western decadence and risk becoming apostates. Braun (1990) claims that many ordinary Africans readily agree that most whites are cleverer than they are but this is furiously denied by Western anti-racists. In-group diversity of opinion is thereby suppressed in the interests of the more militant activists who wish to perpetuate division in relation to whites by creating an illusion of ethnic solidarity. Of course, not all ‘ethnic English’ worship the Union Jack and despise foreigners but the perceived sharp division between Brexiteers and Bremainers captures this sense of in-group tension, as also in Goodhart’s (2017) Somewheres and Anywheres.
Religion exhibits intergroup conflict not only between major faiths, and between church and state, but also within same-faith groups, famously between Catholics and Protestants but also Sunnis and Shias. Well over half the world’s population has a religious affiliation, Christianity being the largest (2.2 billion), then Islam (1.8 billion), secular/non-religious/agnostic/atheist (1 billion), and Hinduism at 1 billion. Interestingly, the non-religious proportion is growing alongside the growth of Islam. But while re
ligions have traditionally emerged in distinct geographical areas before global proselytization, they are now spread across dense regions such as the UK. This changing pattern leads to increasing inter-faith tensions but also to tension and conflict between faith and secularism (Theodorou, 2014). One of the most heated of recent conflicts has been between the more fundamentalist religions and the liberal values of Western nations that, for example, embrace gay marriage and abortion. The 2016 Orlando gay nightclub shooting of 49 people by ISIS-inspired Omar Mateen, is a tragically vivid example of this mismatch. Divisions have also emerged between African American and white Christians (Mathews, 2017).
Excessive Immigration Page 13
