Giving thanks for Arthur Calwell and John Howard

On not having a migration policy that is the weapon of a domicidal elite.

Domicide is the destruction of home. It comes in the “hard” version—the physical destruction of houses and infrastructure.

Domicide also comes in a “soft” version—flooding localities with new people, separating people from, and otherwise degrading, their heritage. When folk say Britain is becoming “unrecognisable”, it is the domicidal effect of mass migration they are referring to.

The UK is suffering from a domicidal elite, one that uses mass migration to break up working-class communities; asymmetric multiculturalism to elevate incoming cultures over those of native English (the Celtic fringe get minority brownie points); favours non-“white” faces in advertising; asymmetric race-swapping in entertainment against the native English; denigration of British history as racist, white supremacist, imperialist, colonialist, etc.

Much of this is insulting virtue-signalling allied to, or presenting, cartoonish (simplified) and caricature (distorted) history. It all undermines social cohesion. But it is the use of migration policy as a systematic weapon against the resident working class which does the most damage. Though two-tier policing—obviously treating Muslims in particular with a deference not shown to the natives, especially when it comes to policing speech—is also highly corrosive of social cohesion.

Many working-class communities in Britain were already fairly dysfunctional—though the British state is not innocent in those dysfunctions¹ — and sections of the British working class are very far from admirable. None of this justifies the use of mass migration to make things worse for such folk, however much it may help to explain the moralised class contempt that underlies so much of modern progressivism and modern managerialism.

To improve such things, to “level up”, requires a strong sense of how to create and maintain social order. Modern progressivism is strongly antipathetic to such understanding. To “level up” also requires a strong sense of custodianship, which managerialism typically lacks: particularly progressivist managerialism.

Indeed, modern feminist, progressivist, managerialism—in its lack of custodianship; lack of social solidarity;² in its antipathy to taking the problems of social order seriously—is running the British state into the ground. The post-medieval British aristocratic and mercantile elite did a much better job of state management. But those elites had mechanisms—such as duelling, that forced men to defend their reputation at the risk of their life, and grand country houses, that turned into expensive investments in social isolation if you behaved badly—that selected for character.

Nowadays, the British elite only selects for capacity and even that is being degraded by DEI undermining the signals of competence. It turns out, over the longer term, character matters more than capacity. For capacity without character selects for manipulative, anti-social personalities that degrade institutions over time.

The Chinese pioneered meritocratic selection by examination for civil service positions, which selected for capacity but not character. They also suffered the dynastic collapse cycle. Add in the immiseration effect from migration with restrictive land-use zoning driving up housing costs and you have in contemporary Britain key elements of Chinese dynastic collapse. Meanwhile, British media, civil service and political class do their best to ensure that voting does not operate as a corrective mechanism.

Migration as social weapon

Mass migration as a systematic weapon against the resident working class does damage in several ways. One is stripping voting of any value with respect to migration. For decades, the British political class has systematically lied to the voters about migration, while the British elite engages in an approach to migration that the voters have never supported, and never voted for, and which continues no matter how people vote.

If you strip voting of any value, folk will shift to other forms of social action. Which is exactly what we see in the UK riots of August 2024. While an overwhelming majority of Brits condemn the riots (as we all should), a majority of British voters—62 per cent of Labour voters, 56 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters, 78 per cent of Conservative voters and 95 per cent of Reform voters—also blame recent immigration policy for the protests and riots.

Police van burns during Southport riots on 30 July 2024. Wikimedia commons.

Meanwhile, “far-right” has become the go-to thought-terminating cliche that excuses British and other elites of any culpability. It has never been wielded as disastrously as by new British PM Two-Tier Keir in his response to riots by native Britons—especially as immediately preceding Romany and Muslim riots provoked little official response.

Mass migration breaks up the local networks—the social capital—of the existing residents of those localities flooded with new residents, undermining their ability to engage in effective social action and manage risks.

If infrastructure is slow to respond—or, worse, is decaying—then such migration flows into local communities increases crowding and congestion in the use of such infrastructure. One of the problems with ethnic diversity is that it makes it harder to coordinate social action, which easily inhibits provision of infrastructure.

If you bring in lots of newcomers from countries with a long-term history of more dysfunctional states, it tends to degrade state capacity over time. The scholarly work on this is quite clear: there is no “magic dirt”.

Those bad men Vox Day and Steve Sailer are correct (up to a point).³ Over the long-run, people matter far more than place in the functioning of a society and its institutions, while culture is persistent across generations.

Importing lots of Hispanics from much less functional Latin American states is a factor in why US state capacity is degrading. Similarly, importing lots of Middle Eastern Muslims is a factor in why British state capacity has degraded in a way that Canadian, New Zealand and Australian state capacity has not.⁴

Mass migration, particularly of low-skill workers, shifts income-share from labour to capital, including human capital. Such migration also suppresses wages of low-skill workers by suppressing the Baumol effect.

When we compare the share of foreign-born residents by country, we are confronted with an apparent paradox:

Australia 30 per cent

New Zealand 27 per cent

Canada 21 per cent

USA 15 per cent

UK 14 per cent

France 14 per cent

Australia has a much higher rate of immigration than the US, UK or France, yet migration is much more contentious in the latter three countries than it is in Australia.

One notable difference is the Muslim share of population (2010 figures):

Australia 2 per cent

New Zealand 1 per cent

Canada 3 per cent

USA 1 per cent

UK 5 per cent

France 8 per cent

The Muslim share of population is significant in the UK and France but not the US, though it is notable that Muslims are a much higher share of migrants in the latter three countries than the former three countries. It also matters where Muslim migrants are coming from: Middle Eastern Islam has quite different patterns from Balkan, Steppe or Malay/Islander Islam.

For a range of reasons, Middle Eastern Muslims make poor migrants. Muslim Lebanese in Sydney provide the most significant failure in Australia’s postwar migration policy.

The first three countries, especially Australia, have far fewer of their Muslims being Middle Eastern Muslims than do the UK or France. This is partly propinquity but it is far more from dysfunctional migration policies that are functionally a weapon against their indigenous working class in a way that is simply not true in Australia (or New Zealand or, until recently, Canada).

Which is why Australians should give thanks to Arthur Calwell and John Howard.

Doing migration better

Arthur Calwell (1896-1973) was Australia’s inaugural Minister for Immigration (1945-9). That Australia has a Minister for Immigration, and a Department of Immigration, matters in itself. It means that there is very specific policy attention to migration, with a dedicated bureaucracy.

More to the point, migration was embraced as a specific nation-building project under the slogan “populate or perish” after the shock of how close the forces of Imperial Japan got to Australia. Migration became a nation-building project that was argued for, and over, in public.

Immigration had been an explicit issue in Australian politics since the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia, but it now became specifically a nation-building project. It was not an elite project “snuck past” the voters.

As part of this explicit nation-building, Australia developed the points system, which led to migrants having slightly higher education level than the residents. So, migrants raised, rather than lowered, the capital/labour ratio. This minimised the economic negatives of migration.

The points system also led to migrants being lots of little groups rather than “large lumps”. The result has been significant conformity to Anglo-Celtic norms and having the Anglo-Celtic majority feel much less threatened, as it has remained by far the biggest group in the population.

Migration policy did, however, begin to evolve in a voter-excluding direction under the guise of migration “bipartisanship”. This was the familiar notion that ordinary voters could not be trusted to have a choice on migration, as wrong passions would be inflamed.

John Howard (PM 1996-2007) eventually broke this with his “stop the boats” border control policy. Without border control, voters have no effective say over migration policy. Moreover, lack of border control makes it explicit that voters lack such say. By embracing a “stop the boats” policy, John Howard re-established voters having a say over migration.

This did several things. First, it led to a surge in popular support for migration: it turns out giving folk a say makes them more relaxed about outcomes and more committed to them. That is, after all, one of the basic benefits of Parliamentarianism—having a wider section of the community participate in, and so become committed to, political bargains.

It also enabled John Howard’s Government to run the least Eurocentric migration policy in Australian history up to that time while still running a substantial migration intake.

That Australia has compulsory voting—so one cannot drive the working class away from the polls—and preferential voting—thus Parties of government have to aim at getting majority support—definitely helped the process. Nevertheless, having John Howard break the attempt to have elites freeze voters from having a say on migration—and then sticking to it—was crucial.

So, having an explicit nation-building migration policy (Arthur Calwell) and an explicit and effective policy of border control (John Howard) is how Australia can have 30 per cent of its population be foreign-born and yet migration be much less politically contentious than it is in the US, UK and France, with much lower levels of foreign-born residents.

Stupidity through arrogance

None of this is rocket science. Unfortunately, it is very convenient for elites to use migration as a weapon against their resident working class, and to play favour-divide-and-dominate games to their own advantage. There are also an array of thought-terminating cliches—such as “far right”—to rationalise and moralise such elite dominance games. Modern liberal-progressives have developed an array of ways to make themselves stupid through their arrogance.

But self-serving arrogance by elites that blind them from understanding how they are seen by, and affecting, others has been a recurring pattern in human history. If such elites behave so for long enough, some event comes to trigger a spreading revolt.

Afterwards, with 20-20 hindsight, folk go “but of course”. But that is after the fact. Before the fact, elites making themselves stupid through their arrogance is a recurring pattern in history.

The modern progressive-managerialist elite is achieving remarkable levels of stupidity-through-arrogance by thinking it owns morality, owns knowledge, owns understanding. Yet it lacks that most elementary element of wisdom—the humility to see themselves with any accuracy.

Elections are supposed to provide a corrective mechanism. But in their arrogant stupidity, the British elite and political class have stripped voting of any such role with respect to migration.

If they had any respect for the heritage of their own society, of its rich Parliamentary history, they might have managed such glimmering of the deep foolishness of doing so. But in their domicidal arrogance, they lack such wisdom. They may even lack a path to achieving it.

And so Britain begins to burn. If the stupid-in-its-arrogance response of Two-Tier Keir and his Government continues as it has, even if the current riots peter out, in the longer run, worse will come.

References

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, HarperCollins, 2021.

Douglas Allen, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Abdulbari Bener, Ramzi R. Mohammad, ‘Global distribution of consanguinity and their impact on complex diseases: Genetic disorders from an endogamous population,’ The Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics. 18 (2017) 315–320.

Joyce F. Benenson, Henry Markovits, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Diana Geoffroy, Julianne Flemming, Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Males' Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers,’ Psychological Science, 2009 20: 184.

George Borjas, ‘Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 2013.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233.

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2022.

Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, Penguin, 2018.

Peter McLoughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, New English Review Press, 2016.

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34.

Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127.

1. For a particularly brutal depiction in fiction of the dysfunctional British welfare state—especially its school system—see Christopher Nuttall’s Mystic Albion series, especially the first book.

2. Feminisation of institutions and discourse has tended to degrade social solidarity, see Benenson et al, 2009. The most conspicuous example of this in the UK is how uncouth it is in elite circles to mention the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of underage working class girls by overwhelmingly Muslim gangs. The contrast with the public outrage over sexual exploitation of lower class girls in late Victorian Britain is stark.

3. Culture clearly matters more than genetics, see Jones, 2022.

4. Another factor is 47 years in the EEC-cum-EU (1973-2020), as deference to Brussels meant a loss of skills within the UK civil service.