The myths around immigration

After the media bigged up the expiration of America’s Covid-era Title 42, which enabled the US to block entries into the country, the anticipated stampede across the southern border doesn’t seem to have occurred. No worries, then? Behold the miracle of social adaptation. Before the handy illegal immigrant ejection seat was retired last week, illegal entries from Mexico had risen to 11,000 per day – if sustained, more than four million per year, and that’s after 2.3 million southern border apprehensions last year. The record-breaking influx had already become a stampede, and apparently people can get used to anything.

As for why the ever-escalating surge of visitors for life, obviously loads of rational people would rather live in the US – or the UK – than in less agreeable locations. A better question is why they are allowed to.

The myth of inexorability. Americans and Britons alike have been told that the rapid transformation of their society is inevitable, the reduced clout of what we’re now meant to call the ‘settled’ inhabitants akin to a natural process, which mere governments can no more arrest than the tides or the rising sun. We’ve been conditioned to regard minority majorities later this century as our destiny. Yet Japan, Poland and Hungary constrain immigration through muscular public policy.

The myth of the ageing society. Oh, the ageing society is no myth, but the notion that only unrelentingly high rates of immigration can solve the subsequent support-ratio quandary is a fairy tale. Because immigrants also get old, we’d have to keep bringing in more to take care of the new old people. In 2010, Migration Watch calculated that to maintain the UK’s 2008 support ratio, we’d need to absorb foreigners ‘peaking at 1.2 million per year before 2051 and up to five million per year later in the century. That would increase the UK population to 119 million by 2051 and 300 million by the end of the century’. Picture it, nearly the current population of the US crammed on to our small island. Propping up a top-heavy age structure by constantly importing a younger population is a mug’s game. Try raising the retirement age.

The snowball factor. The more who come, the more who will come. Home Office research on why the UK is such a draw is un-reliably dependent on self-reporting. People know better than to tell civil servants: ‘I came to Britain because I want a free house.’ But one oft-cited attraction is surely sincere: friends and family in country already. (Ludicrously generous family reunification policies accelerate this inducement.) Heading for the unknown is more appealing when you know people who can show you the ropes. In smartphone world, every arrival is an independent publicity agency for the US or UK. Immigrants tend to underplay the downsides of their new lives, portraying their circumstances to kith and kin in rosy terms.

For the host country? Punishment for success. The nations that immigrants flee are often a mess; in comparison, destination countries are orderly and functional. Order and functionality are the result of generations of innovation and hard work. Taxpayers’ thanks for sustaining democratic norms, rule of law and economic dynamism? Providing millions of guests with food, housing, healthcare and education. The profusion of people who prefer our countries is flattering, but we can’t finance hospitals with compliments.

For migrants? Reward for success. Nearly everyone who wants to stay does so.

Prosperity guilt and political arrogance. Rather than taking pride in having organised a nice place to live, we feel sheepish that others don’t have it so good. According to the left, too, everything bad that happens anywhere else in the world is all our fault. This arrogates to us westerners an exaggerated impression of our powers.

Short-sighted parsimony. Border enforcement and deportation are expensive. Talk is cheap. In both Britain and the US, tough rhetoric fronts for operational passivity, learned helplessness and incompetence. But the costs of capitulation are high, and they’re not all monetary.

Legal obligation, which ought to revert to discretion. We’re hogtied by our own rules, whose fine points immigrants know better than their publicly financed lawyers. I heard the UK’s Indian high commissioner explain last week that India is not a signatory to any international treaties on asylum, yet still legally admits surprisingly large numbers of immigrants – by choice. Thus we needn’t either foolishly fling open the gates or callously slam them. A viable middle course would speed applications from the highly qualified and proper political refugees (Ukrainians, Hong Kongers), while drastically reconceiving ‘asylum’, which is now a farce. We’re being played, and gullibility isn’t admirable; it’s a weakness.

Sentimentality. Sympathy for the immiserated seems to reflect well on the open borders brigade, but these people are consumed with their own moral vanity, with no interest in the practicalities of the generosity they impose on others. The left harps on the finitude of water, wilderness and energy, except when it comes to immigration, in regard to which all these quantities are suddenly inexhaustible. The flip side of progressives’ soft-heartedness is utter contempt for the rights of their compatriots.

Fiddled figures, which disguise the scale of the situation. British politicians cite only ‘net’ immigration, subtracting those who’ve left. Official estimates exclude illegal immigrants who evade detection and visa overstayers. Rishi Sunak’s focus on last year’s 45,000 arrivals in small boats distracts from last year’s astronomical legal immigration: 1.1 million – about the number of permanent visas the US granted, with five times the population.

In a recent podcast, the commonly astute Andrew Sullivan pushed back hard against Nigel Biggar’s controversial analysis of British colonialism as not altogether bad. Passionately denouncing Britain’s grabby past, Sullivan stressed what a terrible thing it was for foreigners to pour into another people’s territory and usurp its resources. As Sullivan is himself sceptical about the benefits of mass immigration, I was astonished he failed to make the connection.