D.J. Webb

The recent terrorist attack in France reminded me to write on the topic of immigration, and particularly on the distribution by national/cultural origin of immigrants. It was not the Poles who committed the outrage at Charlie Hebdo. Yet the UK debate on immigration is focused on Eastern Europeans, whereas the recent demonstrations in Germany against the “Islamisation of the West” show that in Germany it is non-EU immigration that is, much more logically, seen as more problematic.

I start from the point of view that all nations have the right to control immigration in the interests of their own citizens. We shouldn’t wish to be North Korea, with zero interaction with the outside world; but being Hong Kong, with strong trade, investment and tourism links to every other economy, while not allowing incomers to demographically overwhelm the natives, would seem a logical approach. Citizens of most nations do not need visas to visit Hong Kong, as Hong Kong is a free port, but the territory does not offer itself as a locus for welfare immigration, and so, while Bangladeshis may visit without a visa, they don’t stay in significant numbers, and Hong Kong is 97% Chinese. Why couldn’t we have done the same?

Clearly I am not talking about isolating Britain—Hong Kong is not isolated—but about maintaining a high level of contact with all countries, but without seeking population replacement. This has nothing to do with “racial hatred”, but rather with our right to maintain our own country as a haven for our culture and way of life. For example, in your own living room, your own family has its own chosen lifestyle. You would not welcome invasion by tramps. But this doesn’t mean you hate other members of the human race—you probably wish they could find somewhere to live and could manage to sort themselves out, but in their own homes, and not in yours. Britain should be primarily for the British, and we should wish all others well, but without asking them to come and replicate hostile cultures in our midst.

The Anglosphere and the EU

This means, given that there will always be some immigration, that, given the choice, we should choose the more assimilable immigrants. If we, owing to our misguided education policies, do not produce adequate numbers of doctors, dentists and nurses, it is counterintuitive to seek them in Somalia or Afghanistan, nations that have alien and largely incompatible cultures. We should start by looking to the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. There are few skills anywhere in the world that are not found in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and among the European-descended populations of South Africa and Rhodesia, not to mention Ireland, which was once part of our state. The European populations of these countries approach 250m, and if it be genuinely claimed that we don’t have all the skills we need, we should consider a generous policy of virtually free immigration of European-descended people from the Anglosphere.

This policy would allow a nation of 60m (the UK) to tap a wider labour pool of 250m. It is ludicrous to claim there are skills in Afghanistan that cannot be found in the Anglosphere. However, we are a member state of the European Union, and also of the European Economic Area, including Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, within which free labour migration has been agreed. This is a population pool of around 500m people, over and above the 250m of the Anglosphere. These people are largely racially and culturally compatible with us, people who, if they congregate in large numbers in one area (such as has apparently happened in Boston), might create a problem, but who would in one generation assimilate totally in a way that is not the case with Africans and Asians. So we are now talking of a pool of people of 750m—virtually the entire advanced world (aside from a few places such as Japan and Hong Kong). Who could really believe that we, as an economic necessity, need to look beyond these places for migrants?

Yet the question of EU migration has become high-profile in the UK, to an extent that the (greater) inflows of non-EU migrants are being overlooked. Who are the more problematic migrants? Which population groups have the highest crime rates? Which population groups come for the benefits? Which population groups are likely to foster a terrorist fifth column in our midst?

Do we need Eastern European labour?

The question is complex, to the extent that relatively high crime rates are reported among Poles, Lithuanians and Romanians in the UK. There are frequent media reports of rape and murder by Poles and Lithuanians, and of begging, thievery and anti-social behaviour by Romanians. I don’t believe Eastern European countries to be more disorderly than the UK, and I wonder whether migrant groups naturally contain within them a floating population of the underclass from whatever nation, in the same way that the English population of Spanish seaside resorts probably contains a high proportion of English ne’er-do-wells. As our overriding obligation is to our own nation first, we should deport all foreign criminals, including those from Poland, Lithuania and Romania, and not hold them in our own prisons, and such people who are deported should not be allowed readmittance.

However, crime reports are balanced by the apparently strong work ethic of Lithuanians and Poles, and it is claimed, probably correctly, that many English people have been allowed to remain on benefits for too long to be coaxed back into work. For one thing, employers don’t wish to employ the long-term unemployed. I do not believe Eastern Europeans should have access to our welfare system, and so the Lithuanians and Poles should only come for work, and not for any negative purposes, but there is a certain amount of evidence that both unskilled labour of a sort that our long-term unemployed (and supposed “sick”) are reluctant to provide and skilled work in the form of doctors, nurses and so forth is needed to a certain extent in our economy. We should review our welfare and education systems in order to become more self-reliant, but it seems to me that Lithuanian and Polish workers—those who come to work and not to commit crime or tap benefits—should be among our first ports of call (in addition to the Anglosphere) when seeking overseas workers. They certainly are more acceptable than Indians, Pakistanis and Nigerians.

However, the issue is beclouded by resentment at the way in which Eastern Europeans are believed to undercut wages. I believe that in-work benefits (working family tax credit, child tax credit and housing benefit for those in work) play a role in this, in that Eastern Europeans may accept relatively low wages in the UK, topped up by benefits, whereas an Englishman on welfare may calculate that, given the panoply of benefits he is already entitled to on welfare, it is not worth his while to work 40 hours a week for a relatively small increment in his income. In-work benefits should be phased out, to avoid public subsidy of foreign (and domestic) workers working for a low wage. This would lead to higher wages for low-end work in the UK, thus possibly pricing Englishmen on welfare back into the job market. Of course, there are other considerations, such as the value of workers’ remittances once remitted back to Poland, which means a low wage might be considered acceptable to a Pole, and also the way in which economic policies to boost the housing market raise accommodation costs in a way that makes work unviable for many. These issues are worthy of discussion in another article.

However, my general point that we will always need some foreign labour, and should take it from the most assimilable groups, remains valid. No government organisation should provide information in dozens of European languages, and nothing should be done to indicate to Poles and others that there is no need to integrate in our country. Like all immigrants, they should adapt to the local culture, and a firm policy of opposing multiculturalism should assist this.

The bogeyman of racism

It seems therefore that the debate in the UK, which focus on the Poles, requires explanation. If the Poles are more assimilable and have a strong work ethic, why is it that the Poles are mentioned most frequently in discussion of immigration? Why is it that UKIP is building support for an exit from the EU on the need to exclude Eastern Europeans?

It is my belief that nearly everyone who is concerned about immigration and multiculturalism sees 1) crime and constant harping on “racism” by African and Afro-Caribbean groups and 2) crime, religious extremism and terrorism by Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Arab and other Muslim groups as the main threat to our nation. It is not the Poles we are most worried about. I have never met anyone who thought the Poles were more of a problem than the Pakistanis. Yet when it comes to discussing immigration in public, we shy away from discussing race, and focus instead on immigration from white countries. When we wish to say Somalis are unassimilable, we end up talking about Lithuanians! This is done, of course, to fly under radar, to avoid the smokescreen of “racism” erected by our opponents. But we have reached the point where large numbers of people now talk exclusively about the Poles, and sometimes about the Romanians too, when far larger inflows are being received from Africa and Asia, and recent data have shown that non-EU migration is a huge net drain on our economy, while EU migration is a (small) net positive.

In a world where large nations such as China and India are coming to the fore, it is not illogical for smaller countries like the UK and other European nations to band together to defend their interests on the world stage. A broader civilisational identity does overlay our national identity: we are both part of the Anglosphere and also a part of Europe, a continent that once defined itself by its racial identity and its Christian heritage. There is nothing extreme in this. The Chinese see themselves as a racially Chinese nation. Why shouldn’t they? The Nigerians see themselves as black. What is wrong with that? It is only the truth that we are who we are, and we are closely related to nearby nations in a way that is not true of more distant nations. In terms of religion, language, political views and much else, Poland is more comprehensible to us than Cambodia or the Guinea. Why should we pretend this is not the case? The people of the Anglosphere and Europe as a whole are our cousins, or were so in the relatively recent past, and in a more integrated world, we should seek to cooperate, and where necessary draw migrant labour, from nations that are more closely related to us.

This realisation occurred to me during a recent trip to Prague. The Czech Republic is a nation of attractive, intelligent people who have made a considerable contribution to Western civilisation, from Jan Hus (the Reformation-era preacher) to Leoš Janáček (the composer) to Milan Kundera (the author). It struck me as totally counterintuitive that if the UK left the EU it should adopt a policy of hostility to Czech national interests. The architecture, including the churches, in Prague leaves one in no doubt that this country is a core part of Western civilisation.

I do not say that the UK should abandon its own national interests to do the bidding of Eastern European nations, but merely that we do have a larger civilisational identity that does embrace other European (“white”) nations that share most of Western culture with us. Yet much of the negative debate around Eastern Europeans is influenced by the behaviour of “Roma” (Eastern European gypsies) in the UK. These people are not of European descent, having arrived ultimately from India in the late Middle Ages, and are noted in most Eastern European countries for a high crime rate. It is worth noting that UKIP’s success in the European elections earlier this year came as as a result of Nigel Farage’s telling the truth when he stated that there was a difference between the behaviour of Romanians (generally not actually white Romanians, but “Roma”, or Romany gypsies) and the behaviour of Germans in the UK. German workers in London are probably a boon; Romanian cashpoint thieves are not. We must draw this distinction in the immigration debate, and this distinction is fundamentally a racial one. White Eastern Europeans are much less likely to prove a problem in the UK.

A pro-European EU?

The European Union would therefore make much more sense to me if it were a union of European states determined to defend their European identity. Yet oddly, we are required to accept “Roma” as Romanian citizens, to accept Arabs as French citizens, to accept Somalis as Swedish citizens, and Turks as German citizens for the purpose of migration of labour. They are required to accept Indians, Pakistanis and Nigerians as British citizens in return. I would suggest that our problems with migration would be largely solved if we allowed free immigration of white Christians from Europe and the Anglosphere, and if the EU nations collectively agreed to prevent non-white immigration into any European nation.

We can go further than this and admit that Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians share our civilisational identity, and represent a further pool of more than 200m people who ought to be integrated into the West as the rise of China and India turns into a civilisational stand-off between Europe and unrelated nations. I don’t include Chechens, Dagestanis and others in this, but only the European Christian populations that we could forge into a united force in world affairs. While China and India have large populations each exceeding 1bn, the EU, plus Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and taken together with the Anglosphere amount to a demographic force of more than 1bn people. We ought to be able to ensure our long-term security and prosperity in a future non-European-dominated world, but instead we are engaged in the madcap policy of alienating Russia and attempting to push her into some kind of alliance with the Chinese (although it is unclear whether the Chinese are interested in this, probably because the Chinese are, sensibly, aware of the racial/cultural distinction between themselves and the Russians). It is possibly the case that immigration from Russia would be a source of crime in a similar manner to the Poles and Lithuanians, but I think in most respects such immigration would still be preferable to Africans and Asians, and serve a long-term objective of integrating the European civilisation into a united political and economic force in world affairs.

Sadly, the prospect of a pro-European Europe does not seem on the cards. We seem to be determined to pursue multiculturalism rather than the defence of Western civilisation, although most of the alleged gains from immigration would be better achieved by adopting my policy, in the place of the importation of alien cultures from Africa and Asia.

This brings me back to the political debate in the UK on the EU. It is constantly pointed out that being in the EU means we can’t control migration from the European Continent. Why does no-one ever point out that nothing is being done to control migration from those parts of the world that are not in the EU? David Cameron could, in fact, make a reasonable offer to people opposed to multiculturalism if he vowed to close off non-EU migration entirely. Why is it that millions of people in India and Africa may come in on “family reunification” visas, reunifying with someone who is himself not European in the first place? Spousal visas, where someone who is not European, but has an EU passport, can bring in a spouse from Bangladesh (often an unknown person, owing to the cultural traditions of arranged marriage), also serve to fuel the increase in the non-European population in the UK and nearby countries. None of this has any positive economic impact. Family members and spouses are not required to show they are “skilled workers”. Refugees are also largely from Africa and Asia, hailing in the main from countries that are breeding grounds for terrorism. What are we playing at, inviting these people to come? The European countries are not the logical destinations for refugees, who ought to go to nearby countries on their own continents, countries where their own cultures are accepted.

If UKIP proposals are accepted, EU migration might be halted (or a moratorium imposed), but the mass immigration of family members, spouses and refugees from Africa and Asia would continue as a “human rights” obligation. UKIP spokesmen even make a great play of claiming that preferring EU migration to the immigration of Indians is “racist”. We are making a terrible mistake in this. I firmly believe all European nations should re-register their citizenship rolls to include only European people (people of mediaeval European descent). We can’t do much about the people already unwisely brought in—maybe they should get Permanent Resident cards, which would not entitle them to free migration in other European states, or to benefits, public-sector employment, immigration of family members or spouses. We ought to insist that those who are here now adapt on the basis of our culture—multiculturalism should be ended, and indeed the promotion of it in the media, in the education system and by local councils should be made a criminal offence. If all European-descended nations did the same, we might find the concept of the EU began to make more sense.

Even if we do leave the EU, we might find ourselves in the European Economic Area, with free migration still offered to other European nations. This would be a better situation than the one we are in now, as we would regain control over our own laws. We would still be part of an alliance of related nations. In any case, we should prioritise relations with related nations, the 1bn people of Western civilisation, over nations further afield. We need to reorient a debate that has been successfully skewed into a discussion of the negative repercussions of allowing hardworking white Poles into the UK into a more logical discussion of the role of Muslim communities, South Asians and Africans, which is much more uniformly negative and one that will eventually destroy our nation altogether at some point in the future if we are too timid to engage in this discussion.