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John Carter's avatar

I would push back on Canada. It may have once been true that Canada had a meritocratic immigration system, but under Trudeau this is no more than words on paper. Temporary Foreign Worker visas and student visas are widely abused as we import the dregs of the Punjab by the planeload.

Another factor worth considering is that meritocratic immigration from incompatible ethne risks setting up alien socioeconomic elites. Yes, they will appear to integrate; they will not be welfare cases; but in the long run, their sympathies are likely to shift towards their own peoples. The result of this can be institutions falling into the hands of fifth columnists. It is also a recipe for ethnic strife, as the native born look at the upper echelons of their society and see people who are not them. Examples include the Chinese in Malaysia, and Jewish people in many parts of the world.

This has certainly happened in Canada. The Indians and Chinese we brought in have quietly taken over our institutions, helped by hiring and promotion policies that favored diversity, and then (being immensely ethnocentric) using their positions to give their own an additional leg up. The result is that white Canadians are gradually getting frozen out of their own economy. Canadians are beginning to notice this, and are not happy about it. Particularly as Canada has now passed the "meritocratic" immigration period, and embarked upon the "mass immigration" period, which if present trends continue - around 1M a year - will see Canadians reduced to an absolute minority (with no special rights) within about two decades.

In Canada, this is justified by the "Canada 2100" program: 100 million people by 2100, in order to grow the GDP (but not the per capita GDP). This seems similar to the Aussie imperative to "populate or die". Given that imperial Japan isn't so much of a national security threat to Australia anymore, the justification for mass immigration seems attenuated. But more to the point, if rapid population growth is considered desirable, this should be sought via natural growth of the existing people. Encourage a high fertility rate; make this the centre of national policy, with a dedicated National Fertility Ministry and so on. Aim for a TFR of 5 or 6 and the population will boom, without any of the tensions and detriments that accompany the importation of incompatible foreigners.

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Dum Spiro Spero's avatar

Great piece. I believe a transition has happened, one that is being made legible for the first time in the UK, as it is the furthest along this path. Immigration was initially pursued in the aftermath of WWII as a temporary measure to alleviate the burdens of a war-torn country, one pursued out of economic necessity. The narrative used by the ruling class to sell immigration to the working class was one of tolerance and acceptance, one whereby the British could differentiate themselves from the horrors of racial discrimination witnessed in Nazi Germany, thus attempting to link the acceptance of migration to a sense of national pride. This talking point can be seen in the way that anyone approaching a critical view of immigration is immediately met with accusations of being a fascist. Successive generations began to internalise this narrative used to sell immigration as the primary reason for its continuation; thus, immigration goes from being an economic necessity requiring justification to a moral imperative that is by default, 'good'. Murray (whatever you might think of him) makes this pretty clear in a passage from his book on Blair's minister for Asylum and Immigration:

"Over her period in office she repeatedly stated her ambition to transform Britain. As one colleague said, ‘Roche didn’t see her job as controlling entry into Britain, but by looking at the wider picture “in a holistic way” she wanted us to see the benefit of a multicultural society.’

Neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, were interested in questioning the new asylum policy, nor the fact that under Roche everyone entering Britain, whether he or she had a job to go to or not, was turned into an ‘economic migrant’. Wherever there was any criticism of her policy, either internally or externally, Roche dismissed it as racist. Indeed Roche – who criticised colleagues for being too white – insisted that even the mention of immigration policy was racist. What she and a few others around her sought was a wholesale change of British society. Roche – a descendant of East End Jews – believed that immigration was only ever a good thing. Ten years after the changes she had brought about she told an interviewer with satisfaction, ‘I love the diversity of London. I just feel

comfortable.’ "

It's pretty clear that the views of the people behind these policies were anything but pragmatic; if anything, I would say they bordered on the theological. This is why there has been no success in finding political solutions to the immigration problem in Britain; once the political framework internalised by the ruling class becomes one that sees the interchangeability of cultures/people as not possible, but a moral good in itself, they are left with no option but to continue to double down. Anything else would be to admit that the entire post-WWII political project in Britain has been mistaken.

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