Mass immigration - a risky experiment

Martin Woollacott reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West in the Guardian. His review is interesting because it' s the first time I have seen a Guardian writer admit that mass immigration has been detrimental to European countries.

Where he [Caldwell] is right is in underlining the fact that immigration was encouraged by elites who took a ludicrously short-sighted view of its costs and consequences. The idea was to prop up industries already in decline and, later, to staff industries, such as health and tourism, the full cost of which our societies refused (and continue to refuse) to pay. The manning of underpaid and menial positions could be maintained only by a constant influx of new migrants, since people in established migrant communities either got better jobs or chose, like many in the native white population, to depend on the welfare state and to have no jobs at all. More recently, immigration has been defended as a way of making up for falling birth rates when, as Caldwell points out, it would have to be multiplied an unfeasibly large number of times to have that effect.

So it wasn't done to give us economic prosperity and to pay for all our pensions then? Who'd have thought it, eh?

This inherently unstable and dysfunctional system was set in motion, in other words, for no good reason. Those who started it off did not foresee how big it would become, nor the mechanisms of family reunion and arranged marriages that would drive it on even when restrictions were belatedly imposed. Most of them did not imagine, says Caldwell, that the newcomers would "retain the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, marketplaces, and mosques".

Ah, that reverse colonialism again. I seem to remember Bradford council's former Race Relations Officer mentioning that.

Martin Woollacott doesn't agree with everything that Christopher Caldwell says, but he concludes:

But he is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced constitutes a risky experiment to which we need not have submitted ourselves, and of which the final result is not yet clear. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways. If his book sharpens a so far sluggish debate, it will have served an important purpose.

And that from a Grauniad journalist too!

I have ordered Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. As soon as I've read the thing, which at this rate will be sometime in the autumn, I will post a review of it here.

Comments

[Moomintroll]

Anyone who thinks that mass immigration, particularly from Islamic society, is a good thing should view this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

[Pat]

It seems to me that you can have welfare benefits at above third world wages AND strict immigrant control (if you can in fact afford the benefits, which implies paying a high price to get simple jobs done), or you can have no such benefits and open borders:- If third world workers are free to come and can get a better wage than where they come from they will do so- even if that better wage is below the legal minimum and they are therefor working illegally.
Even if immigrants are denied benefits for themselves, they will come for the work, since there is no native competition. In the end you have a large pool of people from different cultures (or worse, one particular culture which will take over and result in a success similar to that they enjoyed where they came from) who are unskilled and overstrain the entire benefit system- including healthcare, education, transport, policing, housing..........

[Horse vote]

The real reason for mass immigration as to change the ethnic composition of European countries. It was believed that it would improve them in a historicist, cultural, and eugenic manner.

[Mr Curious]

Horse vote | 14 June 2009 at 06:02 PM

"The real reason for mass immigration as to change the ethnic composition of European countries."

I've read that before elsewhere.

"It was believed that it would improve them in a historicist, cultural, and eugenic manner."

But not for those reasons unless you are being deliberately vague.

Care to elaborate and back it up?
Where did you get that from?
Says who?

[Dave]

The idea goes back a long way.
Search google for "Peaceful blending of the races"
I was looking for a specific thing but couldn't find it as there too many links.

What is going on is simply social engineering by crazy politicans who have no idea what the result will be.
I suspect it will be war of some kind, although not the same kind as WW1 and WW2.
The West can't afford its welfarism and when is collapses there will be a lot of angry people.

[Esmerelda Weatherwax]

If war comes a Civil War is the nastiest sort and to be avoided.

[Richard]

The Guardinistas are terrified. The shit is about to hit the fan.

[Martin]

The welfare state is unaffordable. It is the main reason for mass immigration & has been for a decade, since UK wages have been driven down so low.

There will be a rumbling civil war, as in Northern Ireland, which will last for decades. Putting unassimilated immigrants in parliament
will only prolong the agony.

[Michael]

The Muslim thing is a red herring. It really doesn't matter and a generation down the line they'll be West Ham supporters (if they're stupid) and Leyton Orient fans (if they've got any sense). The issue - the only issue -is numbers.

To the blindly fanatical lefties I've argued with (& been the pariah of, for suggesting nothing more than the young, multi-ethnic unemployed should have first bite of the job market before non-English-speaking incomers) I've always put forward the same question:- can you tell the difference between Blue and Five?

Most cannot.

For the avoidance of doubt, Blue is a colour - Five, a number.

[Moggsy]

Michael, Shows what you know. They are both actually boy bands that are reforming...

and most people (except fans) might probably not be able to tell the difference between them.

No job for you then I guess ^_^

[Michael]

Moggsy, that was funny (honestly) but also so very like the resistance I've met by those on the extreme left (read moderate, orthodox, Guardian left) to acknowledging the difference between Blue & Five as to be extremely telling. They can't tell the difference between Boyzone and the Boyz-to-Men.

Or more.

We're not comparing like-to-like R&B-pop performed by singers of different hues in different keys. In our changing demographic, Blue is a male voice choir and Five is Rape-Rap-Metal outfit.

And they still can't see, or admit, the difference.