We need to clear away a lot of nonsense ideas which have crowded the issue of immigration.
The use of immigrants to fill temporary shortages of labour is as much of a cheap short term fix as taking cocaine or amphetamines to help you stay awake a bit longer. Undoubtedly it is very effective in the short term but sooner or later you will face repercussions.
The problem with migration in Europe in the latter half of the twentieth century and the twenty first century is the use of a wholly inappropriate model. The United States absorbed millions of migrants and did an admirable job of assimilating them into a coherent and thriving society. The heroic image of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free lead many politicians to regard migration as a quick and easy fix with no downsides. These European politicians had a belief in the superiority of their own culture and society which was arrogant and dangerous. They assumed that migrants from poor countries would be as eager to become British, French, Dutch or Swedish as all those Irish, Germans, East European Jews and Italians were keen to become Americans eighty or a hundred years before. Not so, not even close.
There are big difference between mass migration to America and post war third world migration to Europe. As late as the nineteenth century if you got on a ship to cross the Atlantic your family back home mourned you as if you had died, because unless you were very wealthy they knew they would never see you again. Virginia really was a new world, it might as well have been Alpha Centuri.
Today migrants can wire money home, visit every year and talk every night on the telephone. Links are not severed, roots are not pulled up, bridges are not burned.
I had a great uncle who told his mother he was popping out to buy 5 Woodines, he got a train to Liverpool and caught a ship to Canada and never set foot in England again. His brother, my grandfather, who was born three years before the first powered flight, visited his son who had emigrated to Canada several times and stayed in touch by regular letters and telephone calls. Today airfares are even cheaper in real terms, if you live frugally even somebody on minimum wage could afford to go home once per year from halfway across the world. Many children of immigrants now spend most of their longer holidays from school back in their parents' home village. The extended family links are kept up, because people want contacts to enable further migration. Bradford, Blackburn and Oldham will never be free of recent migrants as a significant proportion of marriages are arranged for the purpose of further migration out of the third world.
As time goes on it is likely that the disruption of migration will become less and less. Why would a migrant need to sever roots when they can Skype? If their roots still work why do they need to adopt a new identity? And if they already believe that they come from a morally and spiritually superior culture why would they want to integrate with a nation of filthy decadent kuffar?
Traditional migrants to America, in the main, wanted to become Americans. These days migrants to Europe merely want to live in Malmo or Bradford among their extended family, they have no intention at all of changing who they are, the clothes they wear, the food they eat or the aspirations they have, the very idea!
This makes a huge difference. People who come to live in your country and want to join your society and culture are immigrants. What is the correct name for people who come to live in your country while living as if they were still living in, and loyal to, the country and society they left behind? Not immigrants. Colonist perhaps. Or alien invaders.
The idea of multiculturalism is a total failure. Nowhere and at no time in history do we have a working model of a healthy multicultural society. It exists only in myth, aspiration and the fantasy world of architects' models where everybody is tall and slim and there is no litter, grime or crime. Hope and good intentions are not enough.
Nineteenth and twentieth century America was an exceptional case because the cultural gap that had to be crossed by Italian peasants and Hungarian artisans was relatively modest compared to the chasm that exists between Pakistanis, Somalis and Moroccans and modern Europe. What is the common culture we share? Facial expressions, the expectation of communication using the voice and an agreed arithmetic. And not a lot more. It's a start, but it is really nowhere near enough to base a nation on.
The other difference between the American melting pot and Europe is of course Islam. The successful migrants to America were either Christian or Jews used to living for many centuries in countries dominated by Christians. Muslims are taught that their culture is morally superior to those of everybody else in a way which was not the case with Poles and Irish migrating to America or Greeks to Australia. The act of immigrating should bring with it a large dose of humility, or at least realism. If your country and culture is so fucking terrific why are you choosing to leave it? But when immigration is done with a belief that you are morally superior to those you have come to live among friction is inevitable unless those you have come to live among acknowledge your superiority, which only happens when you come bearing a wonderful new technology and/or military dominance. The British were prepared to accept that the Romans were a cut above them in the technology and civilization stakes, but they did not extend that understanding to the Vikings, still less to penniless Estonian Jews or illiterate Bengali peasants.
People will always resent anybody else claiming or even silently assuming moral superiority over them but that resentment is amplified when there is no evidence of any superiority in technology, wealth or military power to accompany it. In working class communities across Europe today Muslims are facing the indigenous community and staring at each other dumbfounded that the other has the nerve to claim superiority. The Muslims see promiscuity, sexual debauchery and drunkenness, the indigenous community see oppression of women, violence, sexual hypocrisy and systematic abuse of the welfare state and they both think the other group are ignorant, untrustworthy and smell.
Muslims in Europe are in a very poor position to get away with claiming superiority as they show no evidence of it. Muslim ghettoes are often run down, dirty, scruffy, show no signs of vitality and in some cases are hotbeds of criminality.
The nations of Europe are being destroyed by the irrational and failed doctrine of multiculturalism. It is a farce, countries require community and identity and solidarity, not a patchwork quilt of different and mutually incompatible loyalties. If people want to come to Europe to work and earn more money than they can in some third world shit-hole, and that is all they want, then that is what they should get. We should have short term work visas and put up single people in dormitories and let them send their money home to their families. If they have children here they should be deported. Guest workers deserve decent working and living conditions and the full protection of the law, but they should not be immigrants and they should not earn the right to stay.
To be an immigrant should require a commitment to the nation and culture you wish to join. Immigrants should post a bond, a deposit on their citizenship. If they do anything to cast doubt upon their intention to integrate as a law-abiding citizen they should forfeit all or part of that deposit. Living in a country should be a bigger commitment than hiring shoes to go bowling, don't you think? If you think it is outrageous to charge admission to a country how do you think people- traffickers work? They charge illegal immigrants for the opportunity to come to work illegally. I am suggesting that governments charge for people to come legally. If an immigrant fails to learn the language and does not demonstrate a commitment to the norms and values of the country they wish to join they should be expelled, if they get involved in crime they should have their assets seized to literally pay their debts to society – something that is not done by keeping people in prisons at more than the cost of a good business grade hotel suite. New immigrants should be monitored by people whose job is to see that they do integrate and avoid getting into criminal, anti-social or treasonous behaviour. Social workers or probation officers would do the job well. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. At the moment the only people who look after immigrants are shady shifty people whose motives are very unclear and certainly do not feature the national interest very highly.
For those people who do want to become immigrants for sound reasons such a system would be quite attractive, you pay up front a deposit which if things don't work out for you you can get back to pay for the costs of going back where you came from, and if everything goes right it's money in the bank for you in your new home. Having somebody to help you settle in would be priceless, almost certainly allowing you to make contacts with people who actually have settled in and are doing well, not just hollow boasters and shysters. The only people who wouldn't like it are those who do not want to become upstanding and prosperous citizens in their newly chosen home, and they can fuck off.
Illegal immigrants should never be given full amnesties which reward their illegal adventures and asylum seekers should not simply be granted full citizenship on request. Surely we can manage something humane which neither sends people back home to be tortured nor rewards them by putting them up as honoured guests at our taxpayer's expense. It is madness to be paying to give asylum seekers refuge and forbidding them from earning a living while we have illegal immigrants paying for the privilege of being allowed to pick lettuces. Surely we could come up with a better system which gets lettuces picked without filling our nations up with people who don't want to live here as one of us.
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