Immigration and Populism in the West

 

The Future Of the West and Populism: The Disaster of Unchecked Immigration

I started reading a book called the Guns of August. 

It’s supposedly one of the best books on World War I. So far it’s giving a lot of background on the monarchies running most of Europe before the war. So many of them were related. Since the Middle Ages, kings and queens married off their kids to the kids of other rulers. After a few hundred years, Western Europe was made up of a handful of families. How much the world has changed since these monarchies lost power? World War II was the beginning of the end for most of the European dynasties. The families were able to keep their titles, but power shifted to elected governments. Obviously it’s different from country to country, but that model certainly carried the day.

The current global order with look different in the next few years as populism reasserts the need for sovereignty, after being nearly lost by mass immigration.

Global Order

The struggle is between a global order and a nationalist/populist surge. The global order got going after World War II with the Bretton Woods meeting of business and government leaders. The purpose of the meeting was to establish a way to stabilize trade and institute a rules based order on currency exchange. Partly to counter the instability of Communism, they believed economic alliances and free trade was key to stability.

In that same vein, European coal and steel industries came together in a multi country alliance after the Treaty of Paris (1951). Once those initial 6 countries (West Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands) were in a common market, additional countries (Portugal, Spain) joined the alliance. It’s been called the European Union since 1992, and includes all of Western Europe and even a few Slavic countries (Slovakia, Bulgaria).

Whatever the benefits to international organizations, the global order runs roughshod over the sovereignty of nation states. America still maintains a lot of independence in real terms, but big decisions aren’t voted on by the public. Immigration is the biggest of all.  

Cultural Stressors

 Europe, Canada and America have all made the same mistake since at least the 1980s. They’ve taken in too many immigrants from other parts of the world for mostly economic reasons. Often the cultures are very different. This isn’t a moot point either. North African Muslims think very little of females, same with Pakistani Muslims. Rape of white girls in England is a terrible problem in a lot of the cities where large populations of them live.

In America the problem is just one of rampant crime. When you don’t know who is in the country it puts a strain on everyone, law enforcement included. I’m not saying we don’t have crime or violence without illegal immigration either. But in the last 20 years or so the lack of attention to the border has become a problem. It’s really because illegal immigration benefits the globalist model that it’s been impossible to stop. The laws on emigrating to another country don’t matter if no one enforces them in the first place. The population never got a vote on immigration. After so many years of open borders, rampant crime and Visa abuses, a strong populist party began to form.

In America Republican populism pushed Trump to the presidency. In Britain it’s unclear how strong the populist sentiment is. Tommy Robinson might be the most effective spokesman for the Right, despite the mainstream media calling him a racist. He gets tossed into jail for the smallest slights. Cleary the British government fears him. Will Nigel Farage be enough of a blunt instrument to deport illegals and slam the door shut on further immigration? He seems more opportunist than agent of change, but we will see. Populism can easily go Left wing as well. It’s not a sure bet that it stays on the Right.

New York City just elected a Socialist mayor from Uganda, but in other ways the global order is in retreat. The idea that nations should decide their own fate is back in style. The question is, will Right wing populism be able to bring back sovereignty and order? Has the slide into runaway immigration gone on for too long? Can America claw back cities like Dearborn, MI and Minneapolis, MN from Muslim control? Whoever decided to turn these places into Mogadishu in the heartland should be thrown out of the country. Or at the very least, be forced live there and have their kids attend school under Sharia norms.

Disastrous History

Mass immigration will turn out to be the biggest disaster of the 21^st century. Immigration as an idea isn’t a terrible thing for a country, but without assimilation it will be a problem. I’d be in favor of a moratorium for 20 years on all immigration. This of course, while deporting those here illegally on a scale that dwarfs the recent waves of people coming in. There was a time when I would be worried about being thought of as cruel toward immigrants. After all, America has seen large groups of immigrants arrive since the early 1800s, why pull up the drawbridge for newbies?

Because we’ve been conned. The tech bros in Silicon Valley pretend that their special kind of talent can only be found in the Asian continent. They get H-1B visas for a lot of their technical help instead of hiring Americans. It’s a con, because they don’t have to pay them as much or keep them as long. Some companies will offshore the jobs connected to the visas. Why don’t Americans have the supposed skill anyway? We spend more on post-secondary school than most countries in the world, by an order of magnitude. We have around 350 million people in this country. H-1B visas are a cost saving measure for the tech industry and nothing more.

Another way we’ve been conned on visas, is believing that Americans won’t do certain jobs. I’m sympathetic to this argument to a degree. Certain industries, lawn care, construction, agriculture are labor intensive and don’t pay well at the bottom level. When unemployment pays better than cutting grass, people find ways to get fired. Add in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) fraud and you’ve just eliminated 2 very big expenses for your family. Employers are rightly put off by all the lazy Americans.

 But only with alternatives can it be said that Americans won’t do a job. Employers can say a person won’t work if there is another who will work for less. It’s not a real choice. If no second person existed to give the work to, you’d have to make accommodations with the first one. Illegal immigration changes the calculation by introducing a second person. And when you start to add other industries (trucking, restaurant and hotels) Americans get pushed out of everything except retail and marketing.

This is a two part problem requiring curbs on both immigration and unemployment. The goal is to get Americans off the dole and into the labor market. The Trump administration has gone after illegal immigration and continues to deport in large numbers. The next phase is to cut into the wasteful unemployment system and get people working again. This is much tougher because it requires getting reps to vote for less money. 

Conclusion

The monarchies in Europe thought their control would only increase before World War I, but after 1918 most were gone, replaced by republics or revolutions. Since Word War II we’ve seen a global order run by international institutions and dollar dominance. But populism is on the rise, as is nationalism. The excessive movement of people across borders has displaced native workers and caused resentment among citizens. The best case scenario is for politicians to take up the cause of their voters, both in America and Europe. Globalists want unchecked immigration; populists want enforcement of laws. No one wants revolution or civil war. In 10 years the world will look very different.