Immigration: a malfunctioning debate

By Pete North - August 28, 2020

There’s a weird malfunction in the immigration debate. The aid industrial complex asserts that we resolve the problem of dinghies by creating more legal routes. It’s akin with the argument for legalising heroin as a means to reduce heroin arrests. It doesn’t actually solve the problem of heroin addiction. It may remove the criminal aspect but it’s effectively an admission of defeat.

As it happens, one can make such an argument for taking such action on heroin but this isn’t something we can realistically do with immigration. The public doesn’t want that. They want a limit to immigration and for as long as there are controls there will always be attempt to subvert those controls and the public rightly expects those rules to be upheld.

Where there is serious anger is that the current state of the law means that governments are limited in what they can do and with dinghy chasing human rights lawyers doing all they can to prevent deportations, that anger is only going to foment further.

To address this issue, Turbulent Times proposes and integrated strategy of reviewing trade policies that add to the push factors while using our aid budget on development projects designed to rebuild domestic industry in LDCs.

The counter-argument, as put forward by the aid industrial complex, is that these kind of measures actually increase immigration. Migration, says Mr Clemens, is like going to university: it is an investment that wealthier and better-educated families are more able and likely to make. This makes sense. This is why we predominantly see young men sent as emissaries.

It was put to me that if you improved Nigeria’s ports (for example), people would have more income with which to invest in migrating. Lee Crawfurd, Center for Global Development, says “There’s an inverted u-shaped relationship between national income and emigration, only at quite high levels of income does more development lead to less emigration”. Why he has a problem with development making Africans wealthier I don’t know.

Paul Clist, University of East Anglia, argues that aid does not deter regular or irregular migration, so should be used for other purposes. But such is to miss the point. If investment in African infrastructure and economic development leads to more “investment in migration” then we are not in fact dealing with refugees, rather we are looking at economic migrants from those wealthier families, and if the law is such that it designates them as refugees the the law is malfunctioning. These men are illegally entering then using the system to claim refugee status.

Here we can argue that there is merit in accepting some of them by regular channels but there is no possibility of accepting all comers. That inherent limit means we must also enforce the system to deter the cheats. We argue that border controls alone are insufficient, and to a large extent wasteful in that the more effective enforcement happens behind the border, but also we must invest in international level enforcement to stop criminal smuggling activity.

Of itself, the kind of development we propose is of little use without a more fundamental review of trade policy. The theories advanced by assorted academics fail to take this into account. They should be read with caution and scepticism. Their research is seized upon by NGOs to reinforce their ideological case against any kind of immigration controls either at the border or overseas. There is an inherent humanitarian bias that ignores all other political contexts.

If the UK believes that we do have a moral obligation to take some refugees then we should be facilitating the resettlement of vulnerable refugees with a view to their eventual return. We should not be facilitating the kind of economic migration we see, especially if we are investing overseas with a view to eliminating the poverty push factors.

What we are dealing with is an aid establishment that doesn’t really see economic migration as a problem and in fact sees it entirely in terms of the economic benefits. That is another structural malfunction fo the debate in that these issues are seldom ever entirely economic. Mass migration on this scale is a driver of constant radical change meaning there is never any easement in the battery of acute social problems we are storing up already.

Were we to accept de facto open borders we would need a raft of policies designed to cope with a constant large influx. The country could not remain the same. The NHS could not remain universal or free. But in all likelihood people wouldn’t want that kind of change and the implications of it. And why should they?

We are told aid does not deter regular or irregular migration so should be used for other purposes. They don’t say how it should be spent but we can guess they mean more of the same humanitarian aid that deals only with the symptoms while also being an unwitting facilitator of people smuggling.

This, though, reinforces my belief that the merger of DfID and the FCO was the right thing to do. What we’re looking at is an aid and academic establishment groupthink where wanting to control migration is some kind of moral failing – and instead of seeking solutions that satisfy the requirements of migrants and British natives, they think the task is merely one of reprogramming attitudes and the application of moral blackmail.

There’s an immediate problem with that approach. It doesn’t work. It’s a big reason why we are leaving the EU. The entire apparatus of global governance is aimed at free movement of goods and capital and if they had their way, that would extend to people as well, effectively eradicating national sovereingty thereby erasing the nation state. The entire world is then just a free roaming grazing strip where there is no spiritual connection between land and people.

Constantly we are under pressure to surrender to this encroaching paradigm – that there is no alternative and that mass migration is an inevitability we must also surrender to. This is rule by spreadsheet sociopaths.

We are told that immigration is vital due to an ageing population bringing less fertile, but this is undoubtedly a consequence of population pressures. All parents want their children to have better lives than their own but increasingly this simply isn’t possible, so more and more are simply electing to not have children.

Little wonder then that the populist right believe that mass immigration is a deliberate replacement programme. Then as long as aid is geared at humanitarianism rather than immigration control then our own tax money is being used for the safety and comfort of our replacements. All the while we are expected to remain silent as statues are torn down, stained glass windows removed and anything resembling British traditional culture is viewed as gauche and inferior – even racist.

It would seem our policy-making class couldn’t be more out of touch if it tried. Not being subject to any of the same pressures as working class Britons, and being insulated from the consequences, there is no imperative to consider what people might actually want. For as long as it remains the case, and it likely will under such a rudderless Tory government, we can expect a resurgence of populist sentiment – and no aid money to spend on anything at all. Methinks they have not thought this through.