Taking in Palestinian refugees is a very bad idea

Stigmatising facts leads to bad, potentially disastrous, decisions.

Muslim migrants from the Greater Middle East (North Africa, Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan) do not, in general, make good migrants. This is very clear from the data.

A 2020 European Commission report found that migrants from outside the EU were a net drain on the fisc. This result was substantially driven by migrants from the Greater Middle East (Morocco to Pakistan). Dutch and Danish figures show that such migrants are strongly and specifically a net drain on the fisc. This is not surprising.

Countries copying existing industrial production methods could move under-used peasants into factories—as Nobel memorial economist Sir Arthur Lewis (1916-1991) analysed in his dual-sector model. This is not the situation developed democracies are now in.

Migrants from the Greater Middle East have low average human capital (skills and knowledge relevant to developed economies). Bringing them in in large numbers suppresses wages—i.e., holds wages down—and, by flattening the price and lowering the skill level of labour, discourages investment in higher productivity.

Migrants with high levels of capital, particularly human capital, tend to raise wages, as they make labour comparatively more scarce and raise the general productivity of the society. They do not suppress the Baumol effect—the tendency for competition for labour to transfer wages gains from increasing-productivity sectors across the society. If anything, they enhance the effect.

Conversely, migrants to developed democracies with low levels of skills (and other capital) tend to suppress wages, as they make labour more plentiful compared to capital and tend to lower the average productivity of the society, both of which act against the Baumol effect. What encourages investment in productivity is when the incentive is to add capital, not hire more cheap labour.

The notion that you can greatly increase the supply of something, and that will not put downward pressure on its price, is magical thinking. That downward pressure from increased supply of labour will not be realised if bringing them in increases demand for such labour more than the increased-supply effect—hence the importance of where the capital/labour ratio is going.

Nevertheless, the lower the migrants’ human and other capital—so their expected income—the less increased demand effect there will be. Especially when suppressing the Baumol effect by bringing in lots of low-skill labour means that already-resident workers generate less demand than they otherwise would. Even more so if the influx of migrants raises rents—the return to land—due to regulation retarding housing supply, as has been happening.

The greater the cultural distance from the existing population, the more the expected levels of cultural friction in day-to-day interactions and the harder to coordinate to do things such as build and maintain infrastructure. This will increase congestion costs, as folk crowd use of existing infrastructure, and depress productivity through inhibiting the supply of infrastructure. The effect is worse if high land prices and restrictive land use and other regulation inhibits the supply of infrastructure: the situation in the UK.

The disruptive end of cultural distance is importing sectarian politics. The brutal end of cultural distance are jihadi killings—remembering that Sharia are the rules of the Sovereign of the Universe, found by fiqh, and apply to everyone, hence jihadis feel entitled to kill those who commit capital “crimes” under Sharia—and industrial-levels-of rape and sexual predation.

There is also the issue of breaking up local social capital (networks and connections), making it harder for locals to respond to problems and opportunities or to force accountability on local politicians.

Moreover, the Morocco-to-Pakistan region has high rates of cousin marriage. If you marry your cousin in one generation, no big deal. Do it across 50, 70 generations—across a thousand years, fourteen hundred years—it is a big deal. Folk of Pakistani origin are four percent of British births and generate 30 per cent of British birth defects. That is the sharp end of a general sickliness from consanguineous (typically cousin) marriage that drives up health costs.

Moreover, Middle Eastern Muslims are very clannish and integrate poorly largely because they are so clannish. It is a region of strong kin-groups, made stronger by lots of marrying within said kin-groups—as their cousin marriage is overwhelmingly parallel cousin marriage, so within the (patrilineal) kin-group. Moreover, the ethics of the region stress kin-group loyalty while its religion makes very sharp distinctions between believers and non-believers. Something that gets even more bite from their clannishness.

Most non-monotheist societies have strict rules against marrying within one’s kin-group. The problem with monotheism is that its notion of a unified moral and ritual order breaks the ritual boundaries around kin-groups.¹ Marrying within the kin-groups means the daughters of the lineage are breeding sons for the lineage—not someone else’s lineage—keeps assets within the lineage and is safer for women, as they remain embedded amongst their birth-relatives rather than being embedded among those with whom they have no previous connection.

The overwhelming majority of the economic benefit of migration goes to the migrants. The overwhelming majority of the remaining fraction of economic benefit goes to holders of capital. It takes very little for local providers of labour to lose from migration. There are so many ways local providers of labour lose from migration as it actually operates—particularly low-skill migration and especially Greater Middle Eastern migration—that such migration can only be supported as a form of economic and social warfare against local workers.

The people of Cain

So, the Greater Middle East of Morocco-to-Pakistan is not a good source of migrants. But the Palestinians are worse. They have all the negative characteristics of the region plus a whole new level of disaster specific to them. For they have made themselves into the people of Cain.

In 1920, there was no Palestinian people. There certainly is now. This is a process of ethno-genesis operating within living memory. The Palestinian identity constructed over the last century is based on their (losing) struggle with Zionism and Israel.

Palestinian identity is based on Jew-hatred—for the Jews are the author of all their tragedies, of the Nakba. (Not true, disastrous Palestinian leadership and the failings of Arab states also had drastic effects, but that is the fixation).

Palestinian identity is also based on a murderous sense of entitlement. Their land was taken from them and whoever fights to take it back—no matter how barbaric their actions—are lauded as heroes of the Palestinian cause. The golden cause of reversing the Nakba is so grand, that it overwhelms any sense of moral constraints in pursuing that goal.

Fires in Israel and the Gaza strip - 7 October 2023. Wikimedia Commons.

This is what makes them the people of Cain. The Israelis are the people of Abel, whose efforts have been blessed by achieving a state, by achieving a democratic state, by mass prosperity, by victory in war after war. The Palestinians are the people of Cain, whose efforts have not been blessed. On the contrary, their efforts have led to failure after failure, with their cause going backwards, not forwards.

But they are the people of Cain not merely because they have repeatedly failed in their political endeavours, that they have not received the blessing of success. They are the people of Cain because their response to Zionism has been violence, and persistently violence against Jewish civilians. Their response was violence against civilians in the decades before Israel came into existence and in the decades since. Some of the killing and raping on October 7 2023 was done by (male) Palestinian civilians following the Hamas and other fighters through the breaches. In terms of their struggle, they are the people of angry, resentful murder; so the people of Cain.

The curse of Cain was to wander homeless forever. The Palestinians conceive themselves as homeless so long as they are denied the right of return to what is now Israel. The UNRWA pays Palestinians to be homeless, as it pays them as hereditary refugees, part of the Arab strategy of using Palestinians as stateless sticks to beat Israel with, the one displaced group not taken in as citizens by their ethno-religious confreres. The notion that 77 years after 1948, and 58 years after 1967, those with patrilineal descent from those who fled or were ejected are hereditary refugees, are the hereditary homeless, is the modern way of adopting the mark of Cain.

All this is, of course, an utterly disastrous basis for national identity. You end up being dominated by an organisation such as Hamas, which spent billions to turn Palestinian civilians into human shields against the IDF. You end up having leaders such as Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) and Mahmoud Abbas, who turn down offers of statehood because it would mean giving up the right of return and all that UNRWA money. You end up with leaders such as Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974), who thought allying with Hitler and helping the Holocaust were good moves, and who refused any notion of negotiation with the Jews who were bringing skills and capital to Palestine. Instead, he built structures of hate and violence rather than developing his community, a pattern Arafat would repeat after the First Intifada. Hamas absolutely follow in the footsteps of the path of Palestinian “leadership” that Amin al-Husseini began.

The Palestinian people end up not only generating poisonous political leadership, they end up being poisonous for societies who take them in. The Palestinians fractured Lebanon along its ethno-religious divides, triggering a 15-year civil war. They had earlier initiated a brief civil war in Jordan, where they were crushed by the Royal Jordanian Army. Taken in by Kuwait, they sided with the Iraqi invaders and so were expelled after Kuwait was liberated.

The consequence of all this is that no Arab country will take them. The wall between Gaza and Egypt is even more heavily fortified than that with Israel. A friend who reads Arabic commented that:

I’m struggling to work out who the Arab Street hates more: Jews or Palestinians.

The trouble is that Arabs typically see Palestinians as whiny losers who get beaten by Jews and as:

filthy, hopeless embarrassments to their fellow Arabs.

So, the folk who have observed the Palestinians across decades don’t want them, and don’t want them for entirely rational reasons. They are a worse subset of Greater Middle Eastern Muslims, and Greater Middle Eastern Muslims have persistently shown themselves to be, collectively, poor, even disastrous, migrants.

Deluded or evil?

So, what is the response of Western progressives? No ticks for guessing. It is the most self-righteously stupid of responses: yes, we should take Palestinian refugees. A view that is defended in the normal way that progressive self-righteous stupidity is defended: saying all those inconvenient facts are bad feels and anyone who utters them is a bad person who should be ignored, such views should be censored and the utterer hopefully cancelled.

Once you start stigmatising facts, not only is almost any level of lying and falsehood thereby enabled, you set yourself up to make really stupid and destructive decisions.

No, we shouldn’t take Palestinian refugees. We really, really shouldn’t. Refugees are, with few exceptions, reliably the worst-performing group of migrants. The exceptions are migrants with relatively high human capital who are productive migrants when they come normally. Australia did well out of the Vietnamese boat people: but that was largely the victorious Vietnamese Communists driving their market-dominant Chinese minority into the sea and East Asians generally make productive migrants.

Not only are Middle Eastern Muslim migrants not net-benefit migrants, the Palestinians have all their negative characteristics with a whole set of extra ones. Of course, maybe it is not self-righteous stupidity by progressives. Maybe it is deliberate. Maybe progressives want to import murderous Jew-hatred. Maybe they want to make our societies more dysfunctional.

Maybe it is social alchemy theory—the worse one makes things, the more the golden future will emerge from the leaden dross of an oppressive society. The rise in Jew-hatred is showing that oppressed/oppressor dynamics always ends up looking for kulaks.

So, that is the choice. Either the push by Western progressives to take Palestinian refugees is just purblind, self-righteous stupidity based on stigmatising “bad feels” facts or it is deliberate evil: they want to import murderous Jew-hatred and social dysfunction. Either way, Western countries should absolutely not take Palestinian refugees.

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1. Within Christendom, the Balkan clans substituted patron saints as a binding ritual focus.