Excessive Immigration

by Winston C Banks

  A traditional solution to escalating population levels, war, becomes ever more unpopular and possibly more unlikely in any extensive form. Technological successes mean that disease is progressively conquered, the lifespan increases, and everyone demands individual and minority group rights and resources that simply cannot be granted indefinitely. Poverty no longer has quite the impact on high population levels that it once had. The paradox of material and technological progress is that more and more of us worldwide now survive the tribulations of childbirth, accidents, disease, and live into old age, all of which in turn ratchets up population density. Some claim that even in Africa fertility is falling slightly, and emigration is based less on desperate flight from poverty than calculated aspirations (Flahaux & De Haas, 2016). It is predicted that Britain’s population will exceed that of other European countries by 2050 (Kirk, 2017). Climate change is especially likely to exacerbate living conditions for up to 50 million Africans and other southern hemisphere inhabitants, many of whom will then migrate northwards (Wennersten & Robbins, 2017).

  Although we have not engaged in significant wars on our doorstep and in our cities since 1939–45, when approximately 450,000 lives were lost against German and other military forces, we are now experiencing a chronic propaganda war at home. SJWs constantly ridicule the supposed nostalgia for Empire among white Britons. I suggest the reverse is the case. SJWs are fixated on a programme of Cultural Marxism going back to the 1920s; on the shame of the transatlantic slave trade going back to 1562; and on the prescriptions for living laid down by a Middle East prophet who lived in 570–632. They want us ‘never to forget’, they demand historical apologies and reparations, and some appear to want to allow for the possibility of medieval sharia law. Muslim jihadis, including ‘home-grown’ ones, launch random mass killings against the citizens of Britain and many other countries. The PC ideals of the SJWs undermine democracy by tolerating terrorism, balkanisation of the UK, and a costly focus on minority causes. All this enfeebles the country when it needs to build a strong identity around ‘pulling together’ and a reinvigorated post-Brexit economy to prosper in the 21st century.

  There are of course potential solutions that would be perceived as so harsh as to be almost unmentionable. Katie Hopkins, outspoken Daily Mail journalist and hate object of the PC crowd, suggested in exasperation on her LBC radio show following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 that a ‘final solution’ should be found to Islamic extremism. She was promptly fired, as well as previously having been condemned by a United Nations spokesman for likening refugees to (indestructible) cockroaches. Potential solutions to overpopulation would include an increase in contraceptive education and abortions, limiting family size by decree, rewarding people to be sterilised, desisting from supporting seriously disabled people, offering euthanasia to the elderly ill, returning to regimes of capital punishment, and so on. Deterrents against large families and/or rewards for keeping families small or even for antinatalism, might be considered, but would be fiercely resisted by religious groups. A central irony here is that leftists — who urge on us community-minded responsibilities for protecting the environment and scarce resources — must find themselves guilty of divided loyalties. One further, longer-term solution includes space exploration and colonisation, something that leftists also tend to resist since it demands high levels of investment that compete with bids to finance poorer citizens. One logical, or partial solution of sorts would be for some nations or groups to secede from the rest of the (overburdened, overpopulated) world and vigorously protect their own interests. Needless to say, most of these ‘solutions’ look like far-right ideas that the far-left would condemn out of hand (Stocker, 2017).

  Questions of moral philosophy are too rarely applied to our situation. Human rights feature prominently but we do not much discuss territorial rights. In other words, do those who have inhabited a certain space for a long time not have the right to decide on who else comes to inhabit it? This is by no means a straightforward question. The aristocracy and monarchy manage to retain their vast lands by sheer transgenerational presumption, legal tradition, inertia and propaganda. On the other hand, few of us would seriously argue that anyone should be free to walk into our own houses, occupy, overcrowd them and displace us. The scene from the film Doctor Zhivago captures this: communist leaders take over Zhivago’s house, confining him to one room, and declaring the house big enough for 13 families. Many of us would agree with the principle of temporary refuge for the distressed and homeless but most of us also recognise the problems of overload, deception and freeloading. ‘I have the right to come and live in (what you call) your country because your ancestors occupied mine’ is another problematic aspect of such arguments, involving the reasonableness of compensatory timeframes. But we seldom frame immigration debates in terms of moral philosophy, more often resorting to heated emotional, indeed hysterical tantrums.

  Stephen Asma (2013) may be an exception, drawing on moral philosophy to commend the inescapabilty and rightness of biological favouritism, including tribal loyalties. It seems unsafe to openly examine the rights and wrongs of immigration in philosophical terms (Mendoza, 2016), or of life boat ethics and population control (Hardin, 1995), but the Oxford University Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology Nigel Biggar has examined the ethical nuances of immigration policy (Biggar, 2014), defended Cecil Rhodes, and earned the scorn of students and many colleagues for calling for guilt about Empire to be limited (Harding, 2017). Wellman and Cole (2011) look at opposing sides of the open borders debate. The French philosopher Derrida’s writings on ‘unlimited hospitality’ are rare in addressing some of these concerns, and probably quite at odds with the views of majority indigenous populations (O’Gorman, 2006). Nietzsche’s well-known views on ‘slave morality’ also suggest strong opposition to unlimited refugee demands.

  One important topic that I have not discussed much here concerns maleness. A little reflection will alert us to male gender as disproportionately implicated in the problems of immigration and race conflict. A majority of new immigrants are male. Black gang and knife crime, irresponsible fathering, violent rap lyrics; illegal migration, Islamist terrorism; honour killings; sexual abuse; patriarchal religious oppression of women and gays; and white racist violence — these primarily feature men, and often young men. This does not imply that women are never illegal immigrants, never involved in crime, terrorism or violent racism, but their part in these actions is minor in comparison with that of men. Of course, white men are guilty of many of the same behaviours but to a lesser extent, having been more tamed into docility than their black counterparts, and being more godless than their Muslim counterparts. This is a large topic requiring detailed attention elsewhere, and mentioning it too briefly here should not suggest that any facile solution to our problems is necessarily to be found in misandrous feminism. My hunch is that we men (for how can I exclude myself here?) have evolved to be much more territorial, threat-aware, ready to cheat, lacking in empathy and, as mooted above, much more susceptible to testosterone-driven rape, aggression and disproportionate retaliation. One part of a solution here is for SJWs to check their naïvety and gullibility and face up to facts. Their difficulty in doing so, however, is that decades of socialisation in ‘seeing the good in (oppressed) people’ has blinded them to serious threats from deviant outsiders who have not been similarly socialised. Lynn Barber (2017), for example, an elderly left-wing journalist living in an affluent part of north London, took in a Sudanese refugee during 2015, who became abusive, lied, cheated the benefits system, and turned out not to be a genuine asylum seeker at all.

  If we do not seriously discuss and implement some solutions, however, brutal answers may well arise of their own accord. A mechanism of collectively unconscious order might see to it, for example, that wars do arise, and that strong leaders appear offering harsh solutions such as allowing migrants to drown at sea, and building and protecting physical borders manned with soldiers with shoot
-to-kill instructions. When problems are not openly discussed, or when obvious but difficult remedies are dismissed out of hand, these sentiments go underground. Propaganda urging us all to be nice to each other in our overcrowded, tense habitats, can only go so far and work for so long without holes appearing and vicious counter-propaganda being issued.

  Apart from (possible but unlikely) spontaneous and drastic adjustments occurring (such as significant worldwide falling birth rates), arguably the only hopeful way forward is through open dialogue, in which we are finally able and willing to debate in such a way that we actually listen and learn from each other. This meta-tribal or post-political hope for a solution seems unlikely, given our human nature and behavioural tendency towards violently polarised views. There is scant evidence of many of us being prepared or able to put aside our prized religious or political beliefs in the interests of survival. There might be some hope in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s (2015) call for deep but unlikely Islamic reformation; or in the assertion that Islam is already undergoing its own radical modernising process (de Bellaigue, 2017); and in the prospect of Africa overcoming its own chronic problems (Perry, 2015). We can also be hopeful about the extension of basic human rights worldwide. In such scenarios, migration would be far less necessary.

  In the long run, people like me hope and expect that all religions will inevitably perish as they come to be seen for the pre-scientific, unnecessary and troublesome phenomena they are. But this may take some centuries, and it’s even possible that lslamic revival movements may take humanity backwards. Even now, Muslim missionaries with sharia agendas are joining the Christians and Scientologists on busy London streets trying to hook in undiscriminating passersby (Gordon, 2017). However, just as SJWs love to scorn Brexiters as stupid nostalgic patriots, we can make a case for all religion being fundamentally nostalgic. All major religions are stuck in past cosmologies and moral systems, all being based on ancient scriptures, transgenerational cultures and dogmas that resist the pressures of rationality, science and individual liberties. So-called new religions and spiritualities also show a romantic longing for recovering lost oneness-with-all. All religious movements are stuck in a bygone age of tribal solidarities and refusal to engage fully with emerging new identities and technologies. Or, to be more brutally honest about it, all of us as individuals flounder amid the complexity of modern life, and eclectically grab on to the bits and pieces of tradition, novelty and hope that make temporary sense to us, or that suit our unique circumstances.

  Physical human differences will always exist, and my expectation is that natural inequalities in intelligence, attractiveness and so on, will always persist, whatever impact social engineering has. What we cannot yet know is the extent to which intermarriage and miscegenation will radically alter the population genetics of our descendants, but latest reports indicate that Britain now has 2.3 million people in interracial relationships, the increase being due to internet dating (Hurst, 2017). Obviously, some hope and believe that black and white differences will dissolve into harmonious mixed-race norms. (Yes, perhaps we are all ultimately mixed race, as SJWs love to declare on DNA evidence, and we are all nth generation Africans.) There may be 1.2 million people in Britain who identify as mixed race, although it proves very difficult to define and measure this group (Aspinall, 2017). In the USA, Velasquez-Manoff (2017) proclaims the superiority of being a ‘multi-ethnic person’ and of a biracial social future, arguing that diversity proves more creative, better for problem-solving and productive of mental flexibility. While some mixed-race people demur, experiencing racism from every quarter, the Indian-origin geneticist Aarathi Prasad (2009), who has a dual-heritage child, argues that ‘there is now good evidence that the more genetically diverse among us are indeed more likely to be more attractive, have better physical health, and more robust mental health too’. It is also possible that currently divided ethnic and religious groups will to some extent develop, mellow and blend quite naturally in time. Indeed, if it were not for the propagandistic, separatist hate disseminated by Islamist jihadis and liberal SJWs, it could be that many more pragmatic and peaceful generations of immigrants would protest less and assimilate more.

  But we cannot know what man-made or natural disasters may intervene in human affairs. Anything from nuclear war through climate change disaster, to mass famine, deadly virus, asteroid collision, or AI takeover, might wipe us all out, or kill enough of us to force us to restart our species. By some accounts (e.g. Cochran & Harpending, 2011), significant genetic change is already well underway and accelerating rapidly. Human evolution, supercharged by technology, may take wholly unpredictable turns. In the meantime, the spread of Islam; escalating world population, especially in Africa, with resulting migration northwards and westwards; associated dysgenic effects of low IQ and unskilled migration; the declining strength and influence of the West; the cultural appeasement, ethnomasochism, and open- or relaxed-borders policies pushed relentlessly by the so-called progressive left, and denial of the serious downsides of Cultural Marxism; and the cynical economic globalism of some myopic capitalism — all these make up the ingredients of a deadly future. We must sense too that our intellectual hubris masks the true state of affairs. Or we can hope that we are merely living through an exceptional moment of demographic mega-churn after which things will settle down.

  Many have predicted the inevitable demise of the nation state, under the banners of unstoppable capitalist globalisation and management of persistent tribalism (Horsman & Marshall 1995). It’s possible we may see a turn from attachments to homeland and blood ties to increasingly pragmatic movements and international social networks. Already, as a lesson from Brexit, we are seeing concerns about workforce provision becoming pragmatic calculations: x number of Portugese nurses will be needed in the next ten years, say; quantity y of African carers; and so on. Although this would seriously clash with SJWs’ beliefs about equal opportunities and abilities, and would offend most liberal sensibilities, this accountancy model of immigrant labour may override them. In tandem with this, if predictions regarding robotic replacement of many workers materialises, governments assisted by big data on population will radically convert organic demographics into mere logistics. Currently experimental or rudimentary techniques of electronic communications, genetic engineering and prosthetic augmentation will probably also have a major impact on future global and regional populations, as will space exploration and colonisation. Immigration and emigration will gradually cease to have any real importance, as management and balancing of population needs supersedes other considerations. Human rights may retain some symbolic significance but technologically mediated worldwide governance will replace all such sentimental concerns. However, politics is about the short term, and few worry about such distant scenarios.

  In the near years ahead, we do not really know what to expect, but increasing population containing ongoing immigration and multiculturalism with all its problems is highly likely. These are not simply teething troubles we are living through, temporary setbacks that will resolve themselves. I do not know to what extent the observations, assumptions and expectations here are fair, but I know I am not alone in my fears and warnings. I fully realise that those whom I refer to under the umbrella terms of CM, PC and SJWs have an altogether different vision, and like to say to immigration-obsessed people like me, for example, ‘What are you so afraid of?’ I hope I have shown what I regard as cultural and social phenomena that it is reasonable to be worried about and to seek to mitigate. It is not normal to burden people with too much superdiversity: human beings have evolved in small homogeneous groups to accommodate only gradual changes. Unmanaged migration has led to ongoing conflict and looks set to become far worse. Nyborg (2015) sees a choice between ‘Western submission or civil resistance’. Enoch Powell foresaw this in the 1960s but was vilified for simply pointing it out. The American writer Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (1922) argued in highly articulate and prescient terms almost a hundred years ago that:

/>   Usually highly prolific, often endowed with extraordinary physical vigour, and able to migrate easily, owing to modern facilities of transportation, the more backward peoples of the earth tend increasingly to seek the centres of civilization, attracted thither by the high wages and easier living conditions which there prevail. The influx of such lower elements into civilized societies is an unmitigated disaster.

  Stoddard’s views have long been dismissed as expressions of merely disgusting white supremacy (he was among other things associated with the KKK), yet they readily feed into our present discussion. More hopeful contemporary writers like Pearce (2011) remind us of the horrors of Nazis’ attempted eugenics and of the tendency of the vast majority of people to remain near where they were born, and overall sees world population falling and stabilising. I am inclined to pessimism, seeing more cultural and dysgenic decline than reasons for hope in the West, alongside Koch and Smith (2006), Murray (2017), Woodley of Menie et al. (2017b), and others. But some see a similar long-term decline in the Arab world (Anderson, S., 2017) and pessimism about the prospects of third-world progress persists. One reading of our moment in history is highly nihilistic: we are seeing through the illusions of religion (there is no God); no political system works perfectly or satisfies everyone; borders and nations are crumbling illusory constructs; there is perhaps no such thing as race or deep national identity; no amount of academic research and soulsearching can ever get to the bottom of our social traumas or avert tragedies; there is no end in sight to human conflicts. This perfect storm of contradictory nihilistic insights creates a sense of dread, a vacuum of meaning, in which we all cling to and furiously defend our traditional illusions.