Immigration: I’ve got it all wrong!

My GloB

Dec 03, 2024

Contents

1. Dearth of immigrant opinions/viewpoints - page 1

2. Colonising countries’ due returns - page 2

3. Locals turning on immigrants - page 4

4. Assimilation or multiculturalism - page 5

5. Racism - page 8

6. The management & interested parties’ issue - page 10

1. Dearth of immigrant opinions/viewpoints

It appears that the immigrant opinion has not been sought, has been obstructed or subtracted from the recent (perhaps longer) debate on immigration.

As emigrants, a status that, by the way, remains true for the total length of life of those affected by this phenomenon (it’s a permanent condition), the situation, let alone the debate is not a simple ‘in and out’ discussion.

The emigrant / immigrant / migrant makes a conscious, relatively difficult decision to exchange what s/he knows for what is not known at all but in promise. The choice is often stark and carries with it the imposition of restrictions on what will be possible in terms of existing customs, culture, and direct involvement with friends and family, and signifies a leap of faith into what appears to be a better, more prosperous, happier future.

At times, such choice is unavoidable, others it turns out to be a gamble of sorts, but, no matter what the cause, reason, or desire underlying an act of migration away from what the emigrant has known, it never turns out to be what was expected and no amount of preparation allows the emigrant to anticipate what will in fact occur. Migration is the founding of a new life in all the aspects of the emigrant’s existence.

Emigrants’ lives will never be equivalent to what their lives would have been had they remained at their place of origin. More importantly, emigrants’ lives will never be comparable to the lives of those autochthonous to the countries they arrive and settle in. Additionally, it is also relevant to highlight that despite certain (mostly superficial and tied to sentiment) cultural affinities and similarity in age, the lives of new emigrants will also be completely different to the lives of those second-generation migrants from the same country or culture whose parents took that same step one generation back.

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Perhaps a real-life example of what it is like for the emigrant, even within societies that cater for, invest in services (reception, language training, employment opportunities, etc.), and prepare themselves for the adoption of foreign individuals, may go some way to alerting the local reader about what it is like to migrate.

A new arrival stops someone in the street to ask him for directions to the nearest hospital. The local individual stops and looks at the emigrant. The emigrant asks his question in broken English and barely makes himself understood. He realises that the local is not listening to what he says, he is only listening to how he says it. As a consequence, there is little if any communication, no transfer of information, and the emigrant is left with a sour feeling that tells him yes, ‘I have to improve my English’, but also: ‘Why wasn’t he listening to me?’

Moreover, the emigrant now has to face another set of thoughts and emotions which will guide his attitude and pre-disposition for the people and the institutions of his adopted country and may be summarised as follows: ‘Is this my problem or is it his?’

Depending on how the emigrant chooses to answer the question, his start in life in the new country will be based on a decision for trust and integration or for distrust and separation.

This may not be the standard response in all countries or cultures adoptive of migrants or by everyone of their people, but it is certainly one that is prevalent and has been prevalent for long, especially as migration has increased beyond any prior recorded levels across the world.

So, when people such as Douglas Murray (to name a popular speaker) reasonably, understandably, and correctly say:

… these latest findings in Australia and across Europe are replicated of course in America. I mean most people in the developed world, most people in the countries that people want to come to are aware that we just can't take in all of the people who would like to come to our countries. I mean, Australia is in a much better position societally, financially, socially, and much more than most countries in the region and it's the same with Europe. Europe is freer, more prosperous, infinitely more prosperous even at the lowest rung of the ladder than most of the countries where people come to it from. And it's the same with America, with Central America, and Southern America. And so, the public know this but the political response as you just referred to seems to always be – whoever you have in power – more of the same. I mean, there are occasionally Prime Ministers who, and Presidents who are able to slow down the flow, but even when it is done, it is to a barely manageable level, and what these political leaders don't realize is that the public know more than them. We, the public, sense the decline in trust, the decline in safety, in all sorts of things. We sense what the changes are that happen not when migration happens, but when too much migration happens too fast, and often, of the wrong kind. And I think you know this is the big challenge of the 21st century, and so far, we haven't really thrown up politicians capable of dealing with it. [1]

If what Murray says here is correct (and there is no reason to think it isn’t), it is also reasonable to consider the example I have put forward above to be an actual/realistic, perhaps standard expression of both the feelings underlying the cold response from the local to the linguistic inadequacy and looks of the emigrant seeking help, and the migrant’s disappointment and growing doubts at the possibility of integrating into this new society.

We must pay attention, dig deep into what these long-drawn currents of societal discontent and their eruption into sporadic unrest mean, why they do not seem to go away, how they affect living standards for all involved, and how they can be stemmed without adding fuel to the fire.

Nevertheless, I find it increasingly problematic, disturbing, and unreasonable that, despite these reasonable calls for acknowledgment and understanding, for reversal of illogical measures, ‘the voice of migrants/immigrants’ is effectively omitted, excluded from even the ‘calmer waters’ of the current debate.

Surely, something is missing; something essential is lost in the debate.

2. Colonising countries’ due returns

I also think that colonial countries like Britain, the US, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain should consider the influx of emigrants from their former colonies as something very normal and inevitable. When these former powers colonized the world, they presented the indigenous inhabitants of those territories then, and the generations after them, with a new set of aspirations that contemporaries and people who came after saw and have since considered something to be achieved.

From that point of view, it is not only inevitable but desirable that people be drawn to migration to the ‘adopted mother country’ since it means the culmination of that successful colonization process.

People are not only drawn to the financial benefits of a potential life in the place wherefrom all the new things they learned and many times admired came from, they also, especially when such adopted parenthood is nurtured by the inborn seed of individual freedom, democratic participation and all the advantages, material and spiritual these carry with them, become solid mainstays of determination people will not give up on easily. Fighting the desire to migrate towards these centres of liberation has proven and may yet continue to prove to be a losing battle.

To expect that people, when given a choice, may decide to give up on what their education, the terms of their upbringing and the cumulative aspirations of generations have built into a fulcrum of success is not only a little naïve on the part of those who are the object of desire but also a little selfish. The propaganda has run its marketable course for many years now, starting, at the very least, in the 1950s. The call of opportunity, freedom, and prosperity advertised through cultural means (cinema, education, propaganda proper, market instruments) has been broadcast all over the world without restriction and has also made those who did not necessarily want to boast about such benefits the object of idolatry, focussing minds and yearning in an inexorable way.

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On the other hand, for groups and ideologies to now call for restitution based on the effects of conquest, slavery, and colonisation is as absurd as what we now consider to have been the process of colonisation itself; in fact, it is even more absurd as it sediments the sentiment and social positioning that Jordan Peterson calls ‘compassionate narcissism’ (more on this in section 3 below) which not only goes against reason, creates a world of perennial victimhood, but, more importantly, asks for ‘something for nothing’. That is definitely not the way forward.

For restitution (if we are indeed to call it that) to be applied fairly across migrant and local populations, it can only be the result of the opportunity for migration being regulated according to the needs and capacity of the societies that agree to take in migrants and only according to their policies (more on this later in the essay).

There have been victims, many of them, there are still now. Compassion is one of human’s greatest virtues if only because everyone of us requires it at some stage or other in our lives and it is welcomed when received. Yet historical restitution through the financial remuneration of the great grandsons and great granddaughters of migrants and slaves on the basis of ‘past wrongs’ is neither fair on those who have to exercise it, nor is it reasonable or can do any real good for those who once were the victims of wrongdoing.

Apart from the fact that it is a practically impossible task in terms of the assessment of its scope and ways in which to carry it out, especially when it relates to ‘where the finance is to come from’, historical restitution imposes a permanent status on the condition of the aggressor or ‘bad human’ and the victim or ‘good/innocent human’. Such division, which was a reality at the time of slavery (and still is today in some countries and cultures), even if acknowledged, should not be perpetuated as it does not, in any meaningful way, represent the current reality.

Recognition and change, a change that most Western societies have now long implemented, are only valid and useful to those who have suffered the direct effects of the injustice taking place within their lifetimes. Outside this, there is no meaning to them but that imposed by ideology, false contrition or virtue-signalling by people who never took part in the atrocities, and the creation of an unsustainable precedent in social affairs that perpetuates guilt unreasonably and rewards victimhood.

3. Locals turning on immigrants

But so far, I haven’t got too far! And it is the case that, in what concerns unwelcome levels of immigration, if things do go badly as recently seen in the August 2024 UK Riots, [2] emigrants could end up being treated as outsiders despite becoming naturalized, adopting a new citizenship, and abiding by all local law and regulations. As mentioned at the beginning, the migrant condition is a permanent one.

The whole phenomenon becomes a matter of fear and the ‘coming to feel’ by locals that foreigners are taking away 'what's theirs'. That has happened before and, I think, it could happen again.

Jordan Petersons 'narcissistic compassionate' notion and the influence of cross-cultural 'fear' is perhaps a good explanation of how this anxiety of losing what we have comes into play. Peterson explains it in various ways during one of his interviews with Piers Morgan but perhaps the most explicit exposition of the concept is his explanation (drawing from long experience as a clinical psychologist) of failed relationships between men and women and how women who have never had a successful / normal / coherent relationship with a man fail to trust new men in their lives. He says:

… because there [is] no shortage of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with anyone masculine, and so they're very, they're completely unable to discriminate between narcissistic power and compulsion, and confident competence. And so, because they can't distinguish that and they're afraid, they put all of that in the same category which is something like the ‘predator category’, and that's not good for them because, well, as you said, all men aren't predators all the time, and they [still] need to establish a relationship with a man. [3]

If we apply the same psychological profile provided by Peterson to the current analysis on the confrontation between ‘local’ and ‘migrant’, regardless of who actually takes the place of ‘the narcissist’ (the possibility is open to both parties though perhaps the local may find him/herself more at ease in it due to a well-earned pride of place), we will find that such fears of the unknown, of potential loss of pre-eminence, of historic rights being breached, and invasion as both cultural and physical perceptions are by no means imaginary issues.

Yes, these fears may be based on pre-conceptions about the differences that exist (physical, moral, and aspirational) between the natures and nurtures being antagonised as a direct result of mass immigration, but they translate very much directly into tangible, material elements the moment migrants put foot on the territories of adoption, and they come face to face with the locals.

Let us for a moment, allow ourselves to imagine a situation where one single local individual comes into contact with one single migrant individual and look at each other from a distance. If we set this scenario in a built-up environment where no other individuals are present – they are alone with each other – and we set them face to face intent in asserting their right of place first, acknowledging each other’s presence, and then, perhaps, making contact with each other (these being the 3 basic steps a migrant will go through in getting close to the society that receives him/her), [4] we will realise how intense the scenario may become.

For the, let’s say, white, middle-aged man on the one hand, recognising in the distance a similar stature, coloured man approaching (and this may to a great extent create similar circumstances when two individuals of the same race face each other in an isolated environment) requires a re-calibration of his senses and a reconsideration of the situation. The possibility of an unknown, high-risk outcome from the encounter appears to be greater than usual. The meeting could lead to confrontation, to complete avoidance, to communication, but, allegedly, the preeminent position on both sides is one of total apprehension and, most likely fear. [5]

Why does fear arise in such a situation? Is it a fear associated with ensuring survival, or is it something else? I will dig deeper into this topic, into racism and racial difference in section 5 below but let’s say that when we confront another who looks, dresses, speaks, moves, and responds differently to the well-rehearsed prompts society and culture have instituted in our individual personality, we, by-and-large, react with greater attention, greater observance of difference and very often fail to acknowledge the striking similarities (1 head, 2 eyes, a nose, a mouth, 2 arms and 2 legs) in favour of what appears to be different, distinct, and questionable because not owned. At that point in time, what is one’s own, what is readily recognised and cherished, including one’s turf, may be considered to be at risk.

In reality, the common human characteristics (nose, mouth, eyes, etc.) are perceived and immediately assumed as being ‘probably equal’ through basic perception, and it is indeed that potential equality that engenders apprehension and then fear. We can only be challenged by those we recognise as ‘potentially equal’.

In such a situation, this is mutually felt and expressed, yet the migrant, the foreigner, finds it more difficult to assert what s/he also knows or recognises to be a ‘minority status’ generated by his/her foreignness.

We know that apprehension, anxiety, and fear are pre-requisites for potential conflict and harm. Therefore, local populations turning against what they consider a threat of invasion, usurpation of rights, possessions, services, even when this may only mean ‘sharing’ in those goods and not necessarily giving them away to others, is a real, logical, reoccurring phenomenon in societies around the world. It may not be totally justified but can certainly be explained (more on this in section 6 below).

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4. Assimilation or multiculturalism

What does the sentence: "the long-standing concerns of the British people have not been considered in the government policies regarding immigration levels" mean? [6]

Ultimately, the arguments put forward by the Murrays and Petersons and those who oppose them are just that, arguments that play no actual role in the lives of the migrants, the local populations and the interaction or lack thereof between them. They are arguments and dialogues meant to represent the plight of un/mis-represented people across democracies in the West and are directed principally to the political and academic audiences who are supposed to do something legally and structurally about the issues highlighted there.

It could be said at the risk of becoming apocryphal within an academic context that neither of their contributions, and certainly not mine in this essay, will have an effect (positive or negative) on the actual problem being discussed. The debate is academic (in the other sense of the word), it denotes the ‘ivory towery’ status of conceptual thinking in the midst of acts that are taking place and will continue to take place materially and that will require material solutions to be sorted. [7]

The migrant needs to make a very quick choice between assimilation and multiculturalism, but the choice for most of us, unless a well-developed sub-structure for our culture of origin (the word ‘ghetto’ carries very negative implications) is already in place that may provide for the basics of life, is not really an option.

A migrant, in the large majority of cases will need to abide by, adopt, and rapidly get used to the social conventions, the language, the rules, and regulations, the characteristics of his/her life in the new country if they have any chance to lead the normal, successful life they came into the country to achieve.

Multiculturalism, much like multitasking is a construct of the mind that has no real or practical application apart from that developed in the discourse of academics and artists looking for practical reason where there is little or none. I elaborate on this now.

Of course, a migrant will carry with him/her the weight of his culture of origin while first adapting to and then integrating into his/her new culture. Yet, what occurs is twofold: on the one hand ‘the new’ gradually takes more and more both qualitative and quantitative elements of the life of the migrant in terms of time, attention, and retention, while, on the other hand, the culture of origin becomes further separated from what the migrant now holds as memories in the developments that take place back home without his/her participation.

As a consequence, assimilation into the new requires separation from and diversion away from the old.

Like with the fallacy of multitasking, multiculturalism presupposes the concurrent, parallel yet integrated accumulation in time and space of activities, thoughts, and emotions. While philosophically interesting and perhaps artistically ornamental, both body and mind can only perform one conscious task at a time and uphold a cultural characteristic as a singular defining trait during social interactions. The choice is made, it was made the moment the migrant entered his/her country of adoption.

Nostalgia for the past, the cuddle of sweet memories and the pants for times where the migrant was back at home, no matter how potent and well expressed, no matter how many times the individual returns physically to his birthplace, clash with the firm ground of a life lived elsewhere.

At best, the migrant carries with him/herself a cultural, psychological, conceptual complexity that may enrich, enhance, or even deplete and finally destroy his/her personality, but multiculturalism, much like multitasking, is only a self-willed synonym for a strained metaphor describing efficiency in the management or handling of successive or consecutive tasks that inevitably follow one another in the practical life lived by the migrant.

Nikos Papastergiadis, a Greek-Australian (born and bred in Melbourne) puts forward the argument for multiculturalism based on a patent societal failure to achieve a total separation from distinct cultural pasts in the process of assimilation. His argument, though referring repeatedly to the human and governmental practical inability to accurately classify minority cultures and to give them the relevance he believes they deserve, is but a conceptual stratagem that achieves no clear point of realisation within society apart from the themselves minority realms of art and academia. He writes:

Even when anthropologists have adopted a horizontal model of culture and levelled all the criteria for ranking cultural values, this has left the problem of cross-cultural judgement untouched. How do we judge between competing claims of cultural authority when both forms seek to exist in the same place? The answers offered by relativism would be impotent. Friedman’s response is equally disabling because it questions the very authority of a minority culture to assume the right to speak as a cultural entity. Friedman’s position on diasporic and hybrid culture returns us to the problem about the degree to which a cultural formation needs to be embedded in a specific place and maintain continuous practices in order to develop a coherent and distinctive worldview. Fragments and mutations that have split from the original are, in his view, inadequate forms to provide the basis for a new cultural identity. This test, if applied universally, would in fact disqualify most national claims to cultural autonomy and coherence. Who today can claim to represent a whole and unique cultural identity? While Friedman claims that immigrant societies in places like the United States and the countries of Europe are becoming less multicultural because immigrant communities are losing their distinctive grasp on linguistic and social practices, it does not lead us to the conclusion that these societies are becoming more homogeneous and assimilated. Loss of certain boundaries has not meant the disappearance of cultural differences, but rather the appearance of new forms of mixture and more complex patterns of differentiation. The challenge is to distinguish between compliant and critical hybridity. [8]

Papastergiadis is seen here to be fighting for the survival of the ‘migrant cultural element’ that links it to a rich and distant past, that still provides forms of expression full of minority cultural undertones and may somehow aid in explaining the plight of first and second-generation migrants to a new country. However, what do these expressions mean, what do they realise, who are they useful to?

He sets up the notions of ‘critical hybridity’ against ‘compliant hybridity’ as the guiding tenet of his argumentation, leading him to support what he believes is the reality of multiculturalism, when this concept is only a description of the complexity in mixed origins that mass migration, no matter how close it is felt at the individual level by each migrant, has created and has been creating since ancient time in our social and cultural constructs or societies.

But the concept of hybridity is itself problematic. The word ‘hybrid’, originating in practical biology (perhaps as a description of Greek and/or Roman swine rearing practices), refers to a combination of separate individuals from different species into a new individual (a tame sow and a wild boar originally) and was further used as the resulting individual description for plants and animals from different species but with different characteristics that came together to give birth to a new, as yet unclassified, species. There are natural hybrids and human-created hybrids, but the important point here is that both refer to the combination or coming together through biological reproduction of two separate species of beings.

Humans are all one (1) species; therefore, the term ‘hybrid’ should not be used in the context of multiculturalism or human interaction. The concept here is itself a metaphor and, as such, represents a distancing from actuality or reality, from fact, into the realm of ideology.

While I do not doubt for a second Papastergiadis’ positive intentions regarding the harmonious coming together of cultures and civilisations (his research and activism are clear proof of that), his hybrid multiculturalism is not a viable, implementable, even clearly definable model, it is rather a chimera unnecessarily ravaging the lives of settled societies through governmental interventionism and making it more difficult for different ethnic [9] groups to come together under one flag, one set of shared purposes and aspirations.

Moreover, the terms Papastergiadis proposes: “The challenge is to distinguish between compliant and critical hybridity” is in itself proof of a willing, dialectical collusion of purposes between the ‘revolutionising’ tenets of a “critical hybridity” and the unassuming and docile attitude of a “compliant hybridity”. As in the relationship between 2 humans shown in my example above and the historically unbroken reality of the intermarriage of people across cultures clearly characterise, ‘docility’ is, by far, the perennial pre-requisite winner in the practical foundation of societies, while ‘criticism’ delivers but very few, often lonesome exponents, all of which have no descendants. The preservation of difference belies the nature of our species.

We must do away with confusing mental constructs that help no migrant, no local person and that definitely work to create, determine, and preserve the separation between the two. And why is that? you will ask.

Ghettos, the building and maintenance of separate cultural environments that both define and preserve the muddled, individualised, and memorised habits of a different culture through the reproduction of what are always meagre, frozen-in-time renditions of the past in foods, clothing, architecture, but also in social and, many a time, religious habits, necessitate the building of a parallel, often secretive universe where a duality of rules need to be maintained, where the 'inside' and the 'outside' are made to clash and inevitably lead to separation of entire groups of people, the creation of many a time illegal partnerships with the businesses that sustain these sub-cultures, and the unavoidable propensity towards breaking the rules and challenging the status quo of the society and culture where they establish themselves.

Such is the clear outcome of so-called ‘Italian’, ‘Russian’, ‘Chinese’ and other ghettos in the history of the USA for example and, closer to our times, the growing influence and separation created by ‘Muslim’, and more particularly Sharia-led communities within European and other societies.

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5. Racism

There is no country and no culture that doesn't display forms of racism in one way or another. In fact, the term repeatedly employed to describe racially balanced societies that assert a conscious ethical and institutional design towards the eradication of racism in daily life is ‘tolerant’. This, in itself should give us a clue both to the extent of the human failure to eradicate racism as well as to the realisation (implied in the mildness of the word ‘tolerant’ and its decidedly patronising connotations) of how difficult it effectively is for humans of any ethnic background, even those from mixed backgrounds (the large majority of all of us if we believe genetic science) to rid ourselves from racial prejudice.

Racism is learnt and is therefore cultural, then ideological, and finally political as it allows itself the privilege of creating institutions and waging war on the basis of race. But that is only the end of the causal chain, and it offers little but nefarious and seemingly unavoidable consequences for all involved.

The concept of race has roots in the European project of settler-colonialism and slavery and emerged gradually over the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries (Keel, 2018; Mahmud, 1999). Race as it is understood today derives from historical and modern forms of racism and while racial thinking shares certain elements in common with other classification systems based on, say, religion or color, race differs in the specific configuration of assumptions made about the nature of human difference. Smedley and Smedley (2012) identify five ideological ingredients of the racial worldview as it developed in the United States:
1. All humans can be categorized into a universal set of self-evident, discrete, exclusive biological groups.
2. These groups are ranked hierarchically.
3. Surface-level traits used to demarcate races, such as skin color, reflect deeper, essential differences in cognitive, cultural, or moral attributes.
4. These attributes are heritable, such that essential differences remain stable over time.
5. These distinct groups exist in nature or are the product of divine creation.
These assumptions are not unique to the United States; they also characterize forms of racial classification that crystallized in other contexts of European settler-colonialism by the nineteenth century, such as in South America or Australia (Wolfe, 2016). Across these varied settings, race is fundamentally a sociopolitically constructed system for classifying and ranking human beings according to subjective beliefs about shared ancestry and innate biological similarities. [10]

The clear example of young children in the playground, aloof from parental presence and pressure is sufficient to prove such a statement. And the example given earlier (in section 3 above) where two people that look ethnically different meet and respond with greater intensity to the differences in their outward appearance than to the greater and infinitely more obvious similarities in organic structure, should fend off any real opposition to this statement.

So, where is the root of racism? Does it grow on a social, economic, scientific, artistic, religious, or ethnic foundation? Could it be a mixture of all of these terrains that nurtures this universally despised yet ever-present phenomenon? Could something positive, nurturing and enhancing of the human nature like education and the knowledge that is derived from it, be the rich soil where racist roots find sustenance?

Affirming, even proving that, if that were possible, would make no sense. The highest exponents, the most followed, most revered humans beyond their death in any of these knowledge-based areas, social interaction, economics, the arts and sciences, spiritual movements, and ethnic awareness groups, even at the height of their achievements, could never be said to have attained a total knowledge of the world, and for those who are said to have either achieved it or embodied it, it may be said safely, that even they, were not successful in making humanity in its totality take in, let alone understand what that knowledge was. Had that been the case, we would not be talking about racism today.

Therefore, knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge cannot be said to be the cause of racism. Yet, we know that it is a cultural phenomenon that ends up driving concepts and ideologies that trigger political actions invariably leading to strife and suffering, conflict and death.

Could it be that the conceptual opposite of knowledge, what we term ‘ignorance’, is the root of all evils then? I ‘hear’ an overwhelming though silent consonance with that proposition, silent perhaps because we all know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in the scheme of things, we know little, we are all ignorant. Could we all be guilty of nurturing racism? Are we the fertile soil where racism’s roots take precedence, where they cause, promote even, the phenomenon of racism?

Perhaps it is not that type of ‘ignorance’ that nurtures the root of racism. The failure to accumulate a larger, more comprehensive amount of knowledge cannot be the problem as we have just seen that not even the greatest among us could know it all, and that even if someone did know/has known it all, patently, s/he still hasn’t made all of us living receptacles for such a wondrous, cumulative knowledge.

Perhaps the ignorance that leads to racism is of another kind. It may be one that omits, opposes, and or withdraws itself from playing an integral part in this shared game of life we’re all living. What does that mean?

As humans we often ignore that which we do not find a direct purpose for or draw a direct benefit from. Innately, in our most elemental and animal configuration as survival entities, we discard, discredit and disown anything and anyone who does not propose an immediate and direct survival-supporting addition that we can recognise and safely consume or utilise. Much like my cat, the animal in us will inspect, select and appropriate whatever benefits its survival, and reject the rest as unnecessary, possibly even dangerous.

Fortunately, the essential human does not only partake of the animal metabolism, but it also clearly belongs, through his/her mental and spiritual affinities, to the child in the playground I wrote about a few paragraphs earlier.

As this brief summary clarifies, any description of the genetic ancestry of an individual entails a decision about the relevant time depth at which to describe it. For example, given the repeated mixing and long-range migrations that have characterized all human evolution (Reich, 2018), individuals living in close proximity in Europe today, who might be characterized as of some particular regional ancestry or of “European ancestry,” trace much of their genetic ancestry also to both central Asia and the Middle East only 8,000 years ago (Haak et al., 2015), and farther back in the past their genetic ancestors lived in Africa (Wohns et al., 2022). Therefore, referring to people with recent genealogical or genetic ancestors in Europe as “white” or of “European ancestry” and people with recent genealogical ancestors in Africa and often Europe as “black” or of “African ancestry” is incomplete, incorrect, and misleading. [11]

The crux of the matter is, that, as humans acquire knowledge of the expansive kind, the one that leads to doctorates, world recognition, and personal satisfaction in philosophy and science, in financial ability, and religious orthodoxy, they tend to withdraw from, displace, omit, and finally forget the Knowledge rooted on the actual prejudice-free living we’ve all experienced, most often in our very early years, a knowledge that encompasses trust, care, the expending of one’s energy on and despite others, as well as, some would say, a supernatural ability to dismiss (albeit temporarily) the cravings associated with the survivalist animal in us.

Where racism was not found, in innocence, is where it should be cast back to. In that respect, the simpler the innate Knowledge, the greater the scope for a reduction, dare we say, an elimination of prejudice, racial and of all sorts, the less intrusive the ignorance. The simpler the approach to that other lookalike standing before us, the greater the commonality, the ampler the shared interest, the wiser the use of time and resources. Which brings me to management.

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6. The management and interested parties’ issue

Is unmitigated immigration a feature of governmental mismanagement? These days, people keep on repeating (as if – ironically – the repetition itself could help a change in attitudes and ways of moving forward) that ‘to do the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of madness’. That may well be a defining feature of the state of madness or ‘lack of reason’, but it is also a defining feature of addictions of all kinds. [12]

The debate on illegal migration is rife here in the UK, but this phenomenon is affecting all developed democracies around the world. When looking at the causes that trigger and generate this influx of people into our country, it is difficult to get it right. Much information seems to be missing, and a lot of what we know is contested by the different sources of information available to us, especially those from an official origin. [13]

I recommend you watch The Epoch Times’ documentary by Joshua Philipp [14] in which he and his team go to great lengths to identify the parties involved and the precise causes that have brought about an unprecedented influx of illegal migrants into the United States. I believe that similar pressure groups, international organisations, and interests may be at play in what Europe and the UK are also experiencing presently.

While watching it, I could not stop thinking about many other world conflicts. So many things seemed identical, and though Central America is not at war, I could not help thinking: ‘If not war, what else can we call the consequences of what is going on with illegal migrants there?’

Globally, it looks like this trend, apart from making some people rich or richer and destroying the local cultures and their futures, has as its main objective the generation of as much chaos as possible under the guise of ‘human rights protections’ that will gradually force the entry of millions of economic migrants into ‘developed’ countries while simultaneously generating major societal disruption.

The purpose of it all seems clear: to use the ‘human shield’ to push ideological agendas and, in the process, increment the importance of leading organisations as political players in the world at large. Then, as happens right now in conflicts across the world, this practice forces global opinion to support such endeavours until a jurisdiction is instituted and what is a marginal phenomenon, by sheer force of oppression, numbers of people affected, and global media diffusion, turns into something governments need to legislate for. This has already happened in the US, the UK, and the EU.

As Douglas Murray predicted and shared long ago:

We have […] additionally, when migration happens at this speed, […] the problem of integrating people. I wish it were possible to integrate people. I think it is possible to integrate people into Europe, but there is no way you can do it when you have this speed and this scale of migration. That is not when you get integration that is when you get parallel communities, and parallel lives. Finally, in recent years some European politicians have woken up to this: Chancellor Merkel woke up to it, President Sarkozy, even Prime Minister Cameron woke up to this and admitted that something had gone wrong. But they don't know what to do about it. This, I would contend, is bad for us, bad for us for a range of reasons. Firstly, let's just take the example that [as] is now lusciously argued across Europe that we need ‘mass immigration’ because we get, for instance, the people who work in our National Health Service. We're always told: “You get doctors, you get high-end, skilled workers.” Of course, that's true of course, it's true in part. But do you ever think when you make that argument what the corollary of it is? Yes, you might get a very well-trained doctor from Africa. Where would you rather that a well-trained doctor from Africa was doing their best work? In the NHS in London or in Africa where they're needed most? This is an unselfish point. I think we have been selfish in recent years. We have thought that it was perfectly acceptable to ‘hoover up’ the world's talent, and in particular the Third World's talent, and to think that that would have no impact on the countries that they were coming from. One other side, a side we often hear, the low-end labour market, the opposite end, the low-end labor market issue. We're told we need immigrants because they will do the jobs that we will not do. How much of an indictment is that on our societies? That people can continue to argue that there are jobs that we Europeans cannot do, or that are beneath us? No job should be beneath us. If we need street sweepers, we street sweep the streets, we don't import people from other countries to do it. It's an appalling habit we have got into, and we need to wean ourselves off this habit of mass migration. [15]

Murray calls this a habit, and he speaks of the habit as being of European origin. Needless to say, the self-same habit endures in Asia and in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, and wherever the ‘curse of affluence’ exists; the same habit prevails, now and has prevailed throughout history. Additionally, this preference for using others in producing what we will not do ourselves may be found to be a direct or indirect corollary of the attitudes that led and continue to lead to the scourge of slavery.

I would not call it a habit however and would more likely name it an addiction because the very attributes that create it and Murray accurately highlights, namely lamentable “selfishness” and ‘laziness’, are also direct attributes of compulsive or obsessive dependency.

Nevertheless, the problem does not stop there. The governments of these developed countries are also complicit and self-interested parties in this trend. Apart from the trafficking profits they and associated parties (directly and/or indirectly) derive from the trade in human beings, modern democracies seem to me to be encouraging a new, huge wave of ‘human operatives’ entering their territories that will eventually become citizens and will be employed in low-paid jobs (cheap labour) but who, in the meantime, will nicely support the existing large-scale ‘parallel or hidden economies’ in these countries without necessarily costing them too much.

Such economies are encouraged and nurtured in part to offset the patent demographic decline we have been experiencing for decades but also because they work to provide for more comfortable treasury reporting in times of increasing national debt that would be unacceptable for those in power and whose uncovering (transparency) and reduction (cost savings), or elimination could prove a disincentive for some large businesses and investors.

It is important to note that 75% of the national debt in the UK is owed, according to the latest available statistics, to UK citizens and national institutions, while 20% of it is owed to foreign investors. [16]

A recent (2022) report on the UK hidden economy provides the following summary of findings:

The Hidden Economy has grown since 2015/16. Around 1 in 10 UK adults (9%) participated in the Hidden Economy in 2022, an increase from 2015/16 (5%). Accounting for all sources of income, 54% of people participating in the Hidden Economy had a total income above the tax threshold (£12,570). This is 5% of all UK adults – up from 3% at in 2015/16.
Possible explanations for this change include the growth of the gig economy and the impact of COVID-19 on employment, but figures may also have been affected by methodological changes from Wave 1.
Younger people, people in full time education and the unemployed were most likely to be involved in the Hidden Economy. People who reported experiencing a more difficult financial situation were also more likely to be participating in the Hidden Economy, as were those who perceived their financial situation to have worsened since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak.
For most, participating in the Hidden Economy was a transient, small-scale activity supplementing another income source
The majority of Hidden Economy activities generated relatively small amounts of income (50% below £250, and 12% none at all).
Four in five (83%) Hidden Economy activities were seen as temporary and three in four (73%) had been going on for less than a year. Almost half (45%) were carried out less often than every three months.
Reflecting this, the primary reasons given for not declaring income to HMRC was that the income was either too small (over 30% of Hidden Economy activities) or irregular or temporary (over 20% of Hidden Economy activities), and thus they did not know they had to or think it was worth the time declaring. [17]

In the UK’s case and as an example in point, we are told taxpayers are footing a daily £76 bill per person on average which multiplied by 96,000 people being supported and by 365 days in a year equals to a total of £B2.66 spent on hotels for illegal migrants. [18] The latest annual, total estimated bill for the processing of asylum seekers in the UK ranges between £B4-7.

This is not a huge amount of money when compared to the country’s overall debt (£2,537.0 billion (2023 figures), especially when it is taxpayers now and in future who will bear the brunt and when the benefits in terms of ‘keeping the economy going’ for both business and government are substantial enough.

These illegal migrants will do all the work citizens do not want to do for next to nothing in comparative terms.

Underneath it all, painfully, human suffering is accepted and used for profit and political ends.

The actual management and integration/assimilation of immigrants across the world through the use of government-led initiatives that in many cases reflect the academic/ideological drive towards some sort of multiculturalist model has proven to be a failure in most if not all cases.

Australia may be said to have been the most successful country in developing fair-minded, structurally-sound levels of reception and initiation programmes for immigrants. Reasonable levels of support, time-limited language programmes, community and institution familiarity initiatives and clear pathways to assimilation and eventual citizenship have made the migrant experience a much smoother occurrence there. Nevertheless, the tension that immigration causes, especially when local populations start to see and feel an inordinate increase in the number of arrivals, has also led to a debate which is as such unresolved and encourages the preservation of an uneasy status quo.

Juliet Pietsch, concludes chapter 24 of the ‘Australian Politics and Policy Study’ as follows:

The findings of the Australian Election Studies discussed in this chapter show that while there are many ebbs and flows in government policies and public debates on multiculturalism and immigration, there is a fairly consistent level of public support for multiculturalism, especially among those with a tertiary qualification and Labor voters. It appears that efforts among government and media elites to undermine the enduring success of multicultural Australia have had very little success, revealing the inclusivity and egalitarianism of the Australian population. [19]

Whether a “fairly consistent level … of support for multiculturalism” and the alleged fact that “government and media elites …had very little success” in opposing multiculturalism, may in themselves be considered a triumph of the policy, I’ll leave to the readers’ reasoning.

Pietsch’s conclusions can be seen to be analogous with the overall tenet of this essay in so far as those who consistently support multiculturalism, even in one of its most successful countries of implementation, are members of the elite in political positions and with a high degree of education, both of which are confirmations of the markedly ideological bent of their outlooks and predilections.

Simultaneously, those who are most opposed to multiculturalism are said to be people in a democratically elected government as well as the media elites, which, though in themselves also influenced by financial supporters and definite business interests, still need to represent, if only for the sake of votes and ratings, the population at large.

Again, we recognise a patent argumentative distancing in such studies from what the population at large may be experiencing and expressing to greater or lesser degrees.

In the UK, we have successive failures in addressing the integration of the gypsy and traveller community for instance, a migrant community of sorts. These efforts have been made at various levels and in all the nations of the Union without delivering patent results in terms of integration.

Among others, substantial differences in terms of how education is understood and undertaken by these communities, makes the whole ‘multicultural’ assertion an illusion. It is interesting to note that while official, concerted efforts started in 2012 in England and Wales in this respect, the approach has had to change and is still changing today. The objective of integration signifies the giving up and consequent loss of certain attributes, rights and privileges (depending on the angle they’re looked at and how they are perceived) that are, in fact extremely difficult to implement.

Here is one of the examples of rapprochement between communities showing the difficulty in achieving even the lowest common level of communication, trust, and integration.

Local and central government participants also recognised the importance of finding new ways to engage more effectively with Gypsy and Traveller communities to improve understanding, trust and policy development.
…We fund an advice and advocacy service…We recognise that a lot of mainstream service provision isn't tailored or trusted by these communities. So we fund partners to act as advocates to people in the community to ensure that they're able to get access to their rights, … access public services, ombudsman service, more effectively. [And] so that …people can be empowered to speak directly with politicians and commissioners and decision makers so that we can actually bring those voices in into the places where they can be heard.
Welsh Government participant [20]

The process of welcoming migrants is in no way a simple one and, apart from making sure that certain structures and services are readied in advance for the reception and initiation of foreign people, the countries so doing must also be prepared for the unexpected. This is a reality regardless of which continent such countries are located in.

A recent piece of correspondence by Archibong Edem Bassey given light on The Lancet and addressing the latest epidemic outbreak of mpox around the world states:

In the current situation where mpox and HIV converge to create a so-called syndemic effect—with each disease worsening the effects of the other—decisive action is imperative. Governments, policy makers, health-care professionals, decision makers, and other key stakeholders must prioritise the experiences of migrant populations, and value their inputs in coproducing sustainable solutions. This approach will involve working together in partnership to tackle barriers to health care (including vaccine access and treatment) and address underlying determinants that could increase vulnerabilities. [21]

Multiculturalism expects society to exercise an institutional equation of cultures leading to the harmonisation of different traditions and habits carried out at the expense of the taxpayer and implemented against the trend of historically inherited, and often in direct opposition to local traditions, habits and established acquired knowledge foundations. Its goals are unachievable, and its motivation solely based on the materially flawed concept of equality. Under such ideological framework, the expectations put on migrants and locals alike are unrealistic at best.

Assimilation through integration presupposes the gradual giving up on the part of the migrant of various elements of his/her disposition while adapting to how life is lived in his/her country of adoption. This is unavoidable, regardless of the provenance of the migrant and is solely circumscribed by the characteristics of the destination country or territory they gain admission into.

To think or attempt to make it otherwise not only aims at subverting a status quo which in democratic societies has been arrived at by years of social dialogue, strife and attention to the individuals’ needs and aspirations, it also attempts to pre-impose on society forms of group thinking that would tilt the societal and democratic balance in favour of unproven, undebated, and institutional forms of racism.

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