The liberal internationalists idea of debate on immigration

The present state of the refugee crisis – report of meeting 20 January 2016

Venue: Church of St Mary-le-Bow

Meeting chaired by Andy Burns Executive Director of Capital Mass, a charity coordinating the Anglican church in London’s response to the flood of migrants heading for Europe

Speakers

Rt Revd Dr David S Walkerm, Bishop of Manchester

Emily Bowerman Programmes Manager at the Refugee Support Network with an MSc in Migration, Mobility and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

I went to this meeting because from the personnel involved it looked nailed on to be an orgy of self-congratulatory political correct mutual grooming. Well, orgy would be the wrong word to describe what occurred because the two speakers were curiously lacking in energy with little to say beyond the banal and the meeting lasted for less than 90 minutes.  Nonetheless, the occasion was instructive for it demonstrated nicely both the blindness of the open borders supporters as to the wishes of the ordinary man and woman regarding immigration and their unspoken arrogance in imagining that they do not need to engage in debate with those who oppose mass immigration because they smugly imagine that such views can always  be safely censored out of public debate. In fact, it is not just that such people are unwilling to debate the issues raised by mass immigration , they simply do not know how to go about trying to refute the anti-immigration case so long is it since such debate regularly took place in public.

The meeting had barely begun than Martin Webster began a series of heckles with a complaint that the speakers and chairman were all drawn from the politically correct pro-immigration side. Andy Burns tried to stop Webster’s heckles by promising that he could ask questions at the end of the meeting,. This ploy was only partially successful. I must confess I am not a great fan of heckling generally because it invariably turns the audience against the heckler and if the intention is not simply to disrupt a meeting but rather to say something which you want the meeting to hear that is toxically counter -productive . Nonetheless, there was a more than an ordinarily strong case for using the tactic here because the two speakers made absolutely no attempt to address the problems, either immediate or long term, raised by mass immigration.

The Bishop produced a stream of platitudes and factual falsehoods about immigrants. He celebrated the fact that the BBC had begun to use refugees rather than migrants in their reporting of the story, blithely claimed that the immigrants were a net economic benefit to Britain and that immigration had negligible effects on the provision of public services and came out with the trite moral dictum t that to do a good thing for the individual regardless of the consequences for society was morally better than refusing to do the good thing on the grounds that it would have adverse consequences for society because the means could never justify the ends. This meant that all refugees should be helped because they were in immediate need of the good moral act.  When challenged by Webster’s heckling over why he was not addressing the effects of mass immigration and the British public’s discontent with what is an invasion by any other name, the Bishop blandly said that the wider debate about immigration was not for the meeting. He also refused to discuss the recent events in Cologne where hundreds of women were sexually and physically assaulted by immigrants.

Emily Bowerman’s role was simply to regale the audience with stories of immigrants from places as diverse as Afghanistan and North Korea who had come to Britain. The examples given were all tremendous advertisements for immigrants and immigration (natch) with no embarrassing references to immigrants behaving badly.

When it came to questions little time was given to Martin Webster or myself to put the contrary arguments against the politically correct open borders position.  However, I did manage to ask whether the speakers would support a referendum on immigration. The Bishop trotted out the weasel worded excuse that referendums were not part of the English tradition and he would not support one. I pointed out that he was no democrat but this produced no response.

Had I been allowed to speak at some length I would have made these points:

1. Conquest does not have to be by force. Mass immigration permitted by ruling elites to whom treason is second nature is arguably the most effective conquest of all because it is diffuse and gradual, while the elites who permit it can use their power to intimidate the population through the criminalisation of anti-immigrant views and that part of the elite which controls the mainstream media can be relied upon to exclude public criticism of mass immigration and its consequences.
2. That immigration on a massive scale results in a very strong tendency to form ghettos of immigrants from the same foreign places and this tendency is strongest where the immigrant groups is racially or ethnically strikingly different from the native population of the territory to which the groups migrate. The ghettos formed are unacknowledged colonies.
3. Once ghettos are established the separation from the native population is carried down the generations.
4. When an immigrant group becomes large enough to have political clout it can subvert the national interests of the native population and gain privileges and policy changes which suit them and disadvantage the native population. This can happen through native politicians selfishly putting votes for them and their party above the interests of the native population; from fear of threats of violence of immigrants within the national territory ; fear of a large nation from which the immigrant group comes acting against the recipient nation or simply adherence to an ideology such as political correctness which includes internationalism and the universality of homo sapiens.
5. There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. At the most generous estimate only one billion live in advanced developed countries which have majority white populations. For convenience let us call that the West. Of that one billion probably 200 million are non-white. Already the basis for a conquest of the West through mass immigration is established.
6. If high rates of immigration of non-whites into the West continue this will continue to dilute the ethnic balance and advantage of the Western native populations.
7. Immigrant groups, and especially those coming from outside the developed world, have larger families on average than the native white populations of the West. This will further dilute the ethnic balance and advantage of Western the native populations.
8. By 2050 the world population is projected to reach 9 billion with the increase overwhelmingly coming from non-white populations. The increase in the populations of countries from outside the developed world will cause millions more to try to reach the West.
9. The larger the immigrant populations in Western states the harder it will be to control future immigration, because the immigrant populations which have not assimilated will have ever increasing political clout and in extreme cases, immigrant populations may become the majority. For example, it is easy to see how. a country such as Sweden, with a small native population of less than ten million, n could be overrun in as little as twenty years if immigration from the developing world continues at its presents rate.
10. The threat to the native populations of the West is intensified because of the large proportion of immigrants who have been and continue to be Muslim. There is no Muslim majority country which does not disadvantage, formally or informally, non-Muslims within its midst.
11. There are precious few countries in the world with a long continuous history of representative government. The UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland qualify but no others. Some may raise an eyebrow at the omission of France but she has had five separate constitutions since the French Revolution began in 1789. The current immigration crisis could easily become so severe that the quite recent and fragile representative political systems in most of Europe broke under the strain to be replaced by dictatorships, disguised or otherwise.
12. The most striking thing about the public debate amongst established mainstream politicians throughout the West is that while the interests of the immigrants are constantly lauded the interests of the native populations are invariably ignored .