UK immigration: a terminal addiction

Gerard Baker goes to great lengths to detail that immigration is toxic now in most of the developed world. But yet, like an alcoholic, concludes that we cannot stop.

Let them in. But it's still a mess
November 16, 2007, Times Online:

Italy, Denmark, Switzerland . . . all around us we are having to deal with the consequences of immigration ...

Immigration is toxic now in most of the developed world. In Britain, Gordon Brown's Government seems eager to test to destruction its insistence that tolerance is the essential facet of what it means to be British. The incomparable bungling that resulted in illegal immigrants being hired among other things to police border security would surely be parody if it were not prosaic reality ...

In Italy, Romanians are in the cross-hairs, after one of them was charged with beating and sexually assaulting a teacher. Last week the Danish Government won re-election only with the continued support of the anti-immigrant People's Party. Last month the Swiss party that goes by the same name got more votes than any party in that country since 1919, with the help of a campaign that included imagery such as a flock of white sheep kicking a black sheep off a Swiss flag. Anti-immigrant sentiment continues to boil in France and the Netherlands.

... the Governor of New York, was forced to withdraw an ill-conceived proposal to give driving licences to illegal immigrants ... and the issue looks set to become perhaps the biggest issue of the presidential election campaign - especially if, as it is currently, progress in Iraq takes the war off the front pages ...

Our political, intellectual and media elites ponder this turn of events with a disdainful eye. They shake their heads at the irredeemable bigotry of the masses and wring their hands at the primitive ignorance that drives the popular mood.

But our leaders should instead be looking hard at their own role in helping to create this rising backlash against immigration. It comes after 50 years in which, against their own will and better judgment, the masses have been directed to shed anachronistic and dangerous notions of national identity. In Europe especially, the multicultural worldview insisted that we should look with benign neutrality on global cultural diversity, to think of other cultures as no worse than our own, and in many respects quite a bit better. Patriotism equalled racism. National identity was incompatible with global peace.

So what happens when you spend decades suppressing national identity? Do you actually succeed in pouring us all into a great big melting pot? Or do you, in fact, simply nurture a subterranean sense of national selfhood; steadily curdling it over the years so that, when it reasserts itself, it is angry, illiberal and ugly? In Europe we see the consequences everywhere. The current mood, of course, is partly economic — the cheap immigrant stealing our jobs. It partly reflects heightened insecurity, especially the very specific threat posed by Islamists, the vipers in the bosoms of too many Muslim communities. But, as the Italian-Romanian incident shows, it goes much farther, and can take the unprepossessing form of raw and ancient hatreds ...

So now we have one hell of a mess. We - all of us - need immigration. We can't close our doors. In Europe, mountainous demographic challenges mean the only plausible supply of labour is from overseas. But even America cannot afford to be autarkic. It needs strong and steady flows of immigrants to power the world's most dynamic capitalist system ...

But our clumsy efforts to create deracinated “global communities” have badly backfired ...

Only by insisting that our own national identity and sovereignty is non-negotiable will we be able to continue both to welcome new immigrants and to maintain our chance at prosperity, and even survival, in a competitive and dangerous world.

To acknowledge something as toxic, but then say "we can't close our doors" is the definition of an addiction. Mark Steyn:

Whatever the virtuousness of immigration, a dependence on it is a sign of profound structural weakness, and, when all the self-congratulation about celebrating diversity has died down, that weakness ought to be understood as such.

Given the choice between mass immigration, and repairing our internal structural weakness on our own, I reckon a lot of folk would say "we'll manage and turn it around ourselves thanks". Gerard Baker, thinks that all can be fixed by just asserting our own national identity. Sure.