A New Age of Wandering Tribes
The Case for Ending Immigration
“This evil is almost incurable when the depopulation is prepared beforehand by interior vice and a bad government. When this is the case, men perish with an insensible and habitual disease; born in misery and weakness, in violence or under the influence of a wicked administration, they see themselves destroyed, and frequently without perceiving the cause of their destruction. Of this we have melancholy proof in the countries desolated by despotic power, or by the excessive advantages of clergy over the laity.” - Montesquieu [The Spirit of the Laws, XXIII.28]
Table of Contents
Introduction: the Issue of Our Era
Becoming Nations of Immigrants
Conclusion: Preserving Our People
Introduction: the Issue of our Era
Almost every political, economic, and social issue in the modern “West” in one way or another comes back to mass migration. Granted, it certainly wasn’t Guatemalans or Mauritanians who came up with the idea that men have periods, but even gender insanity is an extension of a mass social Balkanization into identity groups of which immigration has been a major part. In fact, perhaps the most absurd part is that the same people who want mass immigration are now commonly against assimilation, instead demanding we provide special accommodations to a dizzying array of minority groups. Whether it be to countries with some historic reason to have immigrants and diversity or not, refugees or those simply wanting work, legal or illegal, anodyne or dangerous, the immigration just will not stop. At some point, the made up concept “diversity is our strength” became a dogma pushed by all of the Western elites, yet how that is the case is left unexplained. Whether you believe there is a “Great Replacement” conspiracy or not, and regardless of what groups or organizations you wish to blame, the demographic trends are clear. Further, the birthrates in countries that are producing migrants are enormous, while those of European descent are producing fewer children: that Africa can overwhelm Europe in the next 50 years if things don’t change is an obvious demographic truth. We are told that this immigration is necessary to continue our economies, but no one earnestly believes that the majority European countries would cease to function at 1960 population levels, even if for a time it was a challenge supporting the elderly. Meanwhile, opposing immigration has been tarred as racist, creating a self-reinforcing situation where only racists- or people who don’t mind being called racist- are willing to speak against immigration. However, in a free country one of the most important questions of the public is who is allowed to join the commonwealth. The purpose and volume of immigration is a paramount political issue in a state.
The truth is that wars come and go and economies rise and fall, but assuming society continues for 1000 years, if things go on as they are, when historians look back at our time, the biggest story will be former subjects colonizing their former masters, just as Rome once fell to barbarian tribes. We have not reached the point of inevitability, but our Mandarin class is bringing us there at rapid speed, and there is little will to deal with the gravity of the problems we face; they seem to believe they can rule over such masses, in their blindness not realizing that the peoples of Africa and Asia, in sufficient quantity, will never submit to the rule of neurotic losers with Master’s Degrees in “Social Science.” The United States and Europe must face a very important question: is it time to end the policy of using immigration to increase or supplement our population?
I have been hesitant to write about this topic at length for a few reasons, one of them being that I have some mixed feelings on this issue. Much of what I have written about immigration has been pushing back on absurd fear-mongering, the promotion of brutality, or the the border crisis itself. The truth is that I like immigrants fine, but I must acknowledge that I live near two state universities and a major engineering firm, so I predominantly deal with immigrants and foreigners of a higher social class than the ones people say that you will see at the hardware store anywhere in America. Never in my life have I personally seen immigrant day laborers lining up at the hardware store, but instead the average foreign-born adult where I live is a student, professor, or works in a STEM field. That said, I do often hate professors, but it’s usually American born professors who are woke retards whereas foreign professors teach something useful. Of course, this issue generates so much passion that to one side I am a fascist for thinking that controlling your borders is a paramount function of a state, and on the other side I am a cuck for not thinking it is reasonable to believe that friendly migrants who give interviews to citizen journalists are really part of Al Qaeda sleeper cells. In truth, I know enough about Islam to understand that it isn’t inherently at odds with “Western values,” such as they are, any more than are extremist interpretations of Christianity or Judaism. “Islamization” is not my concern, though the way liberals give its faults a pass because it is “diverse,” while hating Christianity, is certainly irritating. While aside from my constant annoyance at immigrant lobbies trying to impact our foreign policy my position is not hatred-based at all, and in fact it is generally white Democrats who I hate, I have come find myself of the opinion that the United States and Europe should end immigration and naturalization almost entirely, with exceptions for such reasonable things as marrying a citizen or employing a lot of Americans. Further, we need to rethink birthright citizenship, most of all for illegal immigrants, whom one could argue are not under the jurisdiction of the United States. At the very least, we need to pause all of this for a generation to give the people who are here a chance to assimilate and breed into our population.
Becoming Nations of Immigrants
Any talk of restricting immigration to the United States is met with the refrain that “America is a land of immigrants,” which is historically true. However, that immigration was desirable in order to populate the continent, which had been depopulated by disease. It was not due to the idea that “diversity is our strength” or that somehow immigration was inherently good. During America’s colonial era and for a time after independence, labor shortages were severe, which is why so many slaves were imported despite slavery being an inefficient and immoral economic system. One of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence is that King George III prevented the populating of the colonies through immigration. Adam Smith, in his extensive section about colonies, wrote that in 1770’s America labor was so precious that a child “greatly overpays” for his maintenance by the time he becomes an adult, and then doesn’t need to divide his father’s land as he can go bust out a new farm from wasteland on his own [The Wealth of Nations, IV.VII.II.] This led to extraordinary birth rates, but still not enough to fill the country. Incidentally, Smith notes that rents and profits were low in early America and the upper orders didn’t oppress the lower one, all conditions that have gone away as America has reached social and economic maturity; if anything what plagues us most of all is that it requires a lot of labor to pay rent and the upper orders are oppressive. In fact, none of the countries allowing mass migration have sufficiently flexible economies to absorb high levels of immigration, and the political parties who support mass immigration are not by and large willing to implement the economic reforms necessary to make mass immigration work decently for their countries.
The point is that America was a land of immigrants because of a need to populate the country, and that has always been a controversial policy at times when high levels of immigration have been allowed. After 400 years in this land, the idea that we must permanently increase our population through immigration does not make sense. It could be objected that much of the US remains largely empty, but it is either well populated for the desert conditions, federal land which the government refuses to open to habitation, or both. Any expansion of housing or settlement should be used to relieve existing pressure on rent, not as an excuse to increase the demand for housing an equal or greater amount. Of all the countries which allow immigration, the two which could plausibly be said to be underpopulated are Canada and Australia, but both of those vast countries have small portions which can sustain population density, and it is not as if immigrants are busting out farms in Manitoba or ranching in the Outback: they are primarily moving into expensive large cities with no genuine need for increased population. Outside of “line goes up” absolutists who think it is extremely important that more total people lead to a higher GDP, one doesn’t speak to many who actually want the population of their country to be higher, even if they can’t square that with their human empathy towards immigrants. It’s not like there is a surplus of housing or too high of wages, and in fact the other big challenge of our age is robots making human labor obsolete, which makes it all the more important to care for the citizens we have instead of assuming new jobs will continue to arise to meet the needs of new arrivals.
Europe becoming full of immigrants is a more curious case. There has always been a fair amount of population movement within Europe, but the non-European population was historically low. Some countries in Europe do have cultural or historical reasons for having an immigrant population though. France, for example, in a last ditch effort to save conventional imperialism gave citizenship to the residents of its entire empire. In the book Inside Africa, written in the early 1950s, John Gunther notes that if this assimilationist policy is if honestly applied it would ultimately create a mixed society, not a plural society, so something more like Brazil. He wrote,
“The French may or may not look forward to this. Let the next generation worry about it. But they are a lucid people, and realize full well—if grudgingly—that something has to be done now; they are aware that (in French equatorial Africa as an example) 20,000 Frenchman cannot rule more than 4,000,000 blacks indefinitely.” [34, “The French System”]
Three generations later, the French do worry about it. How this played out is that the short-lived Fourth Republic collapsed, and in under a decade all those states were given independence [on France’s terms, besides Guinea, but that’s another story.] Those men then stopped being French citizens and became citizens of new countries. At the time citizenship was granted the French could travel anywhere in the empire, and the idea was population would be exchanged in both directions. Since independence, the French population across the former empire has continued to decline while citizens of the newly independent states keep flooding into France. What is the most important, though, is that while France’s population has increased by about 60% since 1950 to around 65 million, including from immigration, the countries which were formerly French Equatorial Africa have, collectively, experienced around 900% population growth- with net emigration- and now have around 34 million people, a trend that is not yet reversing.
Similarly, it could be said there is some cause for the United Kingdom to have immigration, as everything accumulates in an imperial capital. However, before the modern era this was a small number of people who came as merchants, sailors, diplomats, and the like, and for various reasons ended up staying. While the British did settle in parts of East Africa, most notably Kenya and Rhodesia, and took private control of much of the land, in other places such as Ghana and Nigeria- now one of the most populous countries in the world- they had strict policies against white settlement; ironically, in the 1950’s the British were much more serious about keeping Britons out of Nigeria than they currently are about keeping Nigerians out of Britain. The British put a lot of effort into preparing their colonies for self-rule, once it was obvious the direction the world was going. As part of this policy they brought a lot of Africans in as students or temporary residents for various reasons, but not with the intention of any of them staying. None of this obligated them to allow permanent migration into their country, though at times it was the right thing to do, such as the long controversy about allowing the settlement of Gurkha veterans of the British military.
With many other countries in Europe there is no basis at all for such policies. Sure, some had empires, even rather large empires, but their former possessions are not the major source of their immigration. How do you explain the Scandinavian countries deciding on mass immigration? Or Germany’s Turkish population? Poland for some reason has a large Vietnamese community. I once read that the Polish think that Vietnamese are the largest minority in the country, but that in reality there are more people from other Eastern European countries. I found that kind of silly and also that the answer, which “respectable” media isn’t allowed to say, is self-evident: if a Russian or a Romanian is walking down the streets of Warsaw you can’t tell he is a foreigner unless he speaks, whereas it’s quite obvious if someone is Vietnamese instead of Polish. Sure, some people enter these countries as refugees and then have a right to claim asylum under international law, but no one took a little boat from Vietnam to Poland to escape the war. These countries obviously decided on a policy of having immigration. Sweden being a “nation of immigrants” is a recent public policy decision, and now around 1/5th of the country is foreign born [which, of course, doesn’t include the children of immigrants, making the country now around 1/3rd of foreign heritage.]
The Origins of Mass Migration
My brother used to live in Ireland, and one day observed a peculiar scene: two groups of Ethiopians were holding demonstrations on opposite sides of the street, one for the Ethiopian government and one against the Ethiopian government, when a group of Irish anti-vaccine protesters marched down the street in between them. What might they all have thought of each other?1 More importantly, what would an Irishman of 40 years ago say if you told him there were enough Ethiopians in Ireland for this event to occur? He would probably ask why, and one wonders if the modern Irishman would have any good answer besides that Ireland is in the European Union.
What was the reasoning behind these policies? Leading views are that it was seen as a necessity because low birthrates meant the tax base couldn’t support expensive social programs, it was a plot to “replace” the population and lead to a permanent left-wing majority, corporations had an insatiable demand for low-wage labor, and the liberalism had a greater focus on “values,” “fairness,” and “compassion” than on practicality or what the public wanted. There is probably some truth to all of these. Gallup Polling in the United States shows that there was never a public desire for increasing immigration, though a lot of people were fine with what they perceived as the “current level.” In Europe, increased “diversity” is even less popular, though many remain indifferent to the question.
It was in 1965 when quotas based on national origins for immigration into the United States were abolished. At the time, the country was overwhelmingly white with African Americans being the only significant minority, and of course they had been here as long as white people. The system up to that point prioritized immigration from north and west Europe. While this indeed kept the country white, it also limited immigration to being from a small part of the world which at that time was not producing a great population exodus. The amount of legal immigration allowed, for some reason or another, nearly quadrupled in a time period when the public demand for increased immigration never went above 10%.
What is particularly nefarious about this is while it was done under the guise of equality, it probably harmed the descendants of slaves the most of all, right at the same time that legal discrimination against them was ended. The popular podcaster Martyr Made pointed out recently that the entire system of “affirmative action” and the like which is now called “DEI” would have gone a lot differently if it actually had only been applied to people who deserved the “hand up” due to historic oppression:
It’s darkly ironic that the ultimate result was to discriminate against white men while the group for which benefits were designed lost out to the most ambitious people from all over the world, all in the name of “diversity” and “fairness.” Of course, a lot of right wing white people blame immigrants for the economic challenges they face, while blaming blacks themselves for their community’s lack of success following 1965. Why in the world should recently arrived immigrants who have faced no oppression in the United States be given an advantage over people whose ancestors were photographed by Jacob Riis? It doesn’t make any sense, as ever leaving one wondering if intentions were malignant or if it is just the cult of liberal “fairness” leading to unfair, bad policies and results.
In Europe there usually have been fewer laws about “diversity” due to the lack of a historically enslaved population, but even so they did ultimately arise in countries outside of France. It is hard to come to a different conclusion than that immigration was for elite benefit, most notably because of cheap labor and splitting the population into separate and weaker groups. In the United Kingdom this was Tony Blair’s “New Labour” which was responsible for starting this, even though by most accounts they didn’t really plan to transform Britain in the way it did, to the extent that by the 2011 census “white Britons,” that is to say the British, were no longer a majority in London. It’s notable that now the British government is going to widely ridiculed lengths to crack down on “hate speech,” especially in the wake of the current anti-immigrant riots. While I don’t think being abusive to the people of these groups is a justified response to the unpopular policy of mass immigration, it’s notable that after importing masses of humans they now have to use the force of the law to make the natives be nice to them. Never fear though, some lady who is clearly of immigrant heritage just wrote an op-ed in The Guardian insisting that there are no legitimate concerns about immigration; I love the smell of gaslighting in the morning.
Though it is considered racist to say it, little secret is made that mass immigration is being used to dilute white votes. Further, this creates a disunited society that is more susceptible to the depredations of moneylenders and oligarchs. In the United States it is a matter of faith among Democrats that changing demographics will give them a permanent majority. I don’t believe this for a variety of reasons, among them the socially conservative and pro-business ethos of most immigrant communities, the rapid rate at which Hispanics genuinely assimilate and are often soon just a white American with a last name like Ramirez, and the relatively youth of immigrant communities [and by extension the tendency that they will become more conservative with age.] It needs to be noted that Latin Americans are from the same broader cultural and intellectual tradition of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem as the people who originally settled the United States, something which is not true of the other source countries of immigrants. At the same time, they are resistant to assimilation unless they are a minority where they live and people raised in Spanish-speaking households start English-speaking families. Regardless, Democrats believe immigration will always favor them, and the Biden Administration is rapidly making new citizens in the lead up to the election, though Democrats may be underestimating the likelihood that people who did it “the right way” are annoyed by the illegal immigration crisis.
Rarely are the proponents of mass migration shy at taking glee in this policy antagonizing the native residents. Andrew Neather, a top advisor to Blair’s government, has openly stated part of their goal was to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” The Brexit vote was also more than anything about immigration. Though it only won narrowly, my suspicion is that everyone who voted for it wanted to greatly reduce immigration, while many who voted against it also would prefer to reduce immigration, but in more moderate ways. People may have blindly let shitty politicians do this to them in many instances, but it was never an intentional decision made by the general public.
To the public it is not obvious why they should have to live alongside challenges associated with immigration. There are plenty of problems with the narratives about immigration and crime, which are outside of the scope of this article, but for a stunning example, immigrants gangs have been behind a bombing epidemic in Sweden and the population are told it is racist to notice or care. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of gaslighting the public. I agree that you shouldn’t scapegoat immigrants for the ills of society, but you absolutely should be able to say when they are the ones at fault, another example being the atrocious child sex abuse cases which have arisen within immigrant communities in Britain. The hollow platitude “diversity is our strength” took over the Western ruling class as an unquestionable article for faith, and a lot of effort has been put into trying to prove this is true though they seem to have mostly found that diversity makes you more tolerant…of diversity, which is an assumed good. Studies used to show that after a small percentage of the population providing unique functions diversity harms a society by reducing social cohesion, though they seem to have found ways to modify the studies to get different results. We can easily witness the harm to social cohesion in the United States caused by immigrant communities: it was bad enough when we had people from multiple countries in Europe wanting to take sides in conflicts in Europe, but now there is no corner of the earth so far-flung that our country is not plagued by its children demanding this or that policy regarding their homeland. The fact that we all argue about this topic every day also presents a pretty compelling case that it is bad for social cohesion, though of course they attribute that to conservatives being morally bad, not any truth of how societies function.
The biggest reason for global immigration into the US and Europe is probably modern liberal ideology. Similar to free trade, large-scale immigration could be a good thing and perhaps once was, but others don’t play by the same rules and over time learn how to take advantage. Liberalism believes that what is right is also what is prudent, despite that the opposite is more commonly true. Of course, in our case this is done by incompetent cynics using it as a cover to harm us, but it would remain true if they were sincere. Further, the world provides infinite sob stories, so it seems like the morally good thing to let people in, and once illegal immigrants are in the country they are hard to deport because it looks mean. Moreso than most things, on this issue, it is easy to manipulate the public. While the corporate media is extremely supportive of mass migration, it is also true that others can easily be manipulated in opposing immigration by the media sources they follow, since the fear of foreigners victimizing your family is a strong “lizard brain” human instinct. Still, given that oligarchs who benefit from cheap labor and high rents control the media apparatus, one way or another the supporters of mass immigration generally win.
Is This Good for Anyone?
What has the modern era of mass immigration from all over the world done for the United States and Europe? The cost of living is dreadfully high in most areas, something which a basic understanding of economics would demonstrate means that the demand for jobs and housing is high. It’s true that it is not zero sum, and an expanding economy ultimately has more jobs and more housing, though it seems as if the jobs get shipped off to some of the countries that migrants come from, in some sort of particularly perverse example of neoliberals only caring about their ideology and not the impacts it has. Burke criticized the French revolutionists for being more interested in their ideas than the actual circumstances, and it feels like this applies to people who think mass migration is good for our countries:
“I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”
- Reflections on the Revolution in France
Ideology teaches them that immigration is good, and that is all that they think matters, though in reality the scheme is noxious to the countries on the receiving end of mass immigration. Even the majority of people who oppose illegal immigration say we should continue or even increase the amount of legal immigration allowed. They say Americans won’t do low skill jobs and won’t learn high skill jobs. It seems as if there could only possibly be underlying problems more worth solving than just bringing in other people to do them because our population doesn’t suffice. If that is true it means are children aren’t being raised right. If anything this takes necessary social pressure to accomplish something off of Americans. It’s certainly the case that this has not made our country function better. Instead, every day we are forced to learn new things are offensive and we’re subjected to hearing about increasingly obscure minorities being the first one of their people to attain increasingly unimpressive positions. Every time anything in the world happens there are a legion of “Americans” from that country demanding we take its side. We can’t enjoy anything without some paralyzing discussion about how it impacts non-white people, both the descendants of slaves and the immigrants who came in and occupied their pathways to success. Note that neither our first black President nor our first black female Presidential candidate have any descent whatsoever from the African American ethnic group. These things may all just be annoyances, but taken as a whole it is a trend to turn the country into a collection of squabbling ethnicities who can only agree that the white people who founded this country are the chief villain. If you think I’m exaggerating, look at this bit of the Democratic National Convention’s schedule:
Mass immigration since 1965 has not improved the country’s unity, happiness, or the economic status of the people who lived in the country before 1965. A recent article from C.A. Skeet at the right wing website PJ Media summarized this brilliantly, though I found much of the rest of the content unnecessarily polemical:
“When I ask what advantages mass numbers of third-world immigrants bring, I'm talking about tangible benefits, not theoretical paeans to "diversity." Diversity in and of itself is not a benefit. When I speak of benefits, I'm talking about a raised GDP. Safer neighborhoods and lower crime rates. Higher test scores. Stable labor markets. Respected liberties. Independence from the state welfare apparatus. Successful assimilation.
If mass immigration negatively affects all of these advantages, then sensible people will oppose it, irrespective of the argument that these migrants are simply "doing the jobs that Americans won't do." If the cost of maintaining these advantages — necessities, really, for a free people — means that we suck it up and endure the tediousness of maintaining our own yards or paying more money for actual Americans to perform low-skilled labor, then so be it.”
My only issue with this is that GDP is a stupid metric, and having more people raises it, as does government social spending on immigrants, so presumably immigration does raise GDP. The better question would be has it increased general prosperity? What we’ve actually seen since then is an incredible concentration of wealth as oligarchs benefit from disunity and cheap labor. We also need to bear in mind that it is only the liberal sense of “fairness” which causes us to think that foreign workers generally need some sort of ultimate path to naturalization. Plenty of high income countries allow a lot of foreign workers but don’t invite them to become full members of the country.
Those to the left of center in America and Europe are commonly detached from the values that everyone considered the most important one hundred years ago: faith, freedom, family, and the like. While we are told that immigration is necessary for the abstract good of “diversity” because they think it is morally bad for their children [if they have them at all…more accurately, our children] to grow up around too many white people, they have little answer for what concrete good this has done anyone. Look at a city like San Francisco which is practically unlivable due to the cost of rent and even so they declare it a “Sanctuary City” and tell more illegal immigrants to come there despite having no ability to employ or house them. When pressed, as is usually the case, these post-modern secularists who struggle to place value where it is due ultimately revert to the corporeal pleasures as the most important thing in life. This is where we get the “what about the ethnic food” argument. This really shouldn’t be taken seriously at all: I like ethnic food as much as anyone, but that is not a way to make decisions about what is best for your country and family. People running businesses that only a foreigner could do well, like a foreign restaurant, an import shop, or something of that nature do have a useful place in a country’s economy, but realistically you need one family of that ethnicity per 10,000 people to provide that service, and they are already here.
What I found still more absurd than the ethnic food argument was someone arguing that immigration is good because it makes Britain’s football team better:
I don’t personally understand sports fandom generally, but I would have thought the point of rooting for a national team is that you view them as being like yourself. I think this person must misunderstand the “Reform racists” to think they would rather England win with 8/11ths of the team not being of British heritage than to watch a team that is British try their best.
Recently, it made the news that the United States cricket team had defeated Pakistan’s cricket team, something which provoked curiosity being as no one in the United States plays cricket, and Pakistanis really like cricket. Well, the answer, unsurprisingly, is that it seems unlikely a single person on the team is of majority pre-1965 American heritage. Incredibly, almost 20% of the team has the last name Patel. Many are themselves immigrants, primarily from the former British Empire. Bear in mind this isn’t like a Dominican coming to the States to play Major League Baseball, we should assume this was all people who more or less would have moved here anyway, or at most used cricket to come to the United States as opposed to coming to the United States because of cricket.
I wouldn’t want you to think my point here is “they took our cricket jobs!” I don’t care about cricket and I am not pretending to. My point instead is this: does this feel like America beating Pakistan? I suppose it does if you have a strong ideological belief that American is “an idea,” not a nation, not a people. Would the immigration reform of 1965 have passed if you were able to show Americans at the time that this would be an American national team in 2024, even of something as unimportant as cricket? As we grow old and die, will any of us recognize the nation we were born in? And once again, it can at least credibly be said that America was founded by immigrants from many countries forming a new nation and it has always been like this in one way or another: in Europe this was made up whole cloth.
The superficiality of reasons commonly used to praise the virtues of mass immigration leads to an important question: who does like the results of mass immigration? Well, besides corporations, there are also ideologues of liberalism who want you to believe that all people are interchangeable and everyone will easily integrate. There are people arguing America is an idea anyway, though the absurdity is that those people support a shadowy cabal trying to make “democracy” even more fake and a vast censorship apparatus. There is also this bizarre phenomenon where white liberals have a strong out-group bias, meaning they prefer anyone who is not of their own group, which makes them different from basically any other group that has ever lived [though there have always been some eccentric individuals of this disposition.] There are also people from the immigrant communities which have been filling our nation for the past 50 years who feel the most comfortable around high levels of minorities because their extreme minority status means that high levels of diversity is the closest thing they will have to being a “majority” member of the community. However, for white people who aren’t liberal ideologues and black people of the African American ethnic group, this is little but the constant change of nations and communities that our people built and which were once indisputably ours. Now we’re evil if we want to preserve them.
There is another question which gets asked much less than it should: are America’s immigration policies are good for the countries from which we get immigrants, both legal and illegal? It’s for some reason rarely considered that if it is the most ambitious and strongest young men who are willing to make these treacherous journeys their own countries probably need them. It speaks to the dysfunction of source countries and America’s willingness to be had that we accept lectures from source governments about how immigrants are treated here instead of asking why they accept a status quo of having a country people want to leave. On top of that, we send people around to refugee camps putting enormous effort into only taking the best refugees but not actually taking enough to significantly relieve the suffering of those left behind, while our legal immigration brings some of the highest performing members of their general societies. All of these things in fact hinder the development of poor countries, which then promotes waves of low-skill illegal immigrants constantly coming to our counties and putting pressure on housing and labor markets, while Americans give up and don’t have kids and die from suicide and drug overdoses. Of course, due to the sheer quantity we can’t know which ones are criminals, and statistics showing illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower levels than native born Americans ignore the fact that it is easier for them to evade detection as they live in the shadows.
Looking at our own history can help us understand the impact emigration has on source countries. In the early 20th century there was a concept, now thoroughly discredited, about “The Talented Tenth” which was the most associated with the intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. The idea was, in short, that the way to uplift the black community was to train the most talented 10% of their population into high level positions such as doctors, lawyers, and professors. From there, the “rising tide would lift all ships.” Though I don’t know of them using the term, the British attempted something similar in the process of preparing countries such as Nigeria and India for self-government. This was a large part of the original idea about Affirmative Action- not to push lower performing black students and employees through, but to prioritize the absolute best ones who were entirely capable of succeeding at the education and career path opened up to them. What happened, of course, is that such people then moved out of the ghetto- some marrying whites- and left what is by extension the “Untalented 9/10ths” behind. There is a reason you don’t hear about black middle class families in the suburbs during the Democrats’ constant harangues about “racial justice,” and it is because they are completely fine. A black child in this circumstance could have parents who are both Ivy League educated professionals and live in a double six figure income household, go to an elite private school, and until 2023 would still be favored on college applications due to being historically oppressed. And as stated above, right at the time it was decided that African Americans deserved to finally get “a piece of the pie,” under the same guise of fairness a mass of immigrants were brought in from the third world to compete with them for jobs and housing, and those people were often the most enterprising and talented members of their own societies.
On an international level, this same issue of the “Talented Tenth” permanently leaving instead of improving their countries is known as “Brain Drain.” I once saw an Indian American standup comedian note that people think Indians are really smart, but in reality Indians are not smarter than anyone else, it is just that only the smartest 2% of Indians leave the country, but India is such a populous country that is still a lot of people. While brain drain is the most associated with South Asia, there is a stunning statistic that there are more Nigerian medical doctors outside of Nigeria than within Nigeria, which has a terrible shortage of doctors. Nigerians are in fact one of the most successful groups in the United States, something which has done very little for Nigeria. This is not solely the fault of US and British immigration policies, as many Nigerian doctors work in Gulf States or other places which tend to need skilled foreign workers.
Meanwhile, in US discussions about immigration, it will be described as “wasteful” that we put foreigners through our colleges then send them home instead of taking advantage of their skills. This premise is fallacious in the first place because foreigners are charged enormous amounts to attend American colleges, and are clearly subsidizing the other students. Further, where the students are provided financial support, we started these exchange programs primarily to develop the third world and build goodwill in order to counter Soviet and Chinese influence, something which doesn’t happen if we permanently keep students after they complete their degrees. Regardless, it’s perfectly easy to offer people a 5 year work permit after completing their education so that they have real skills in the field and can return home with money saved- money which would be much easier to save if mass immigration wasn’t suppressing wages and raising rents. Of course, one could argue that these poor countries are reliant on remittances, and that is often true, but this kind of dependency does not lead to economic growth and sends our prosperity away while not making the receiving countries any more productive. Overall, there is good reason to believe that immigration to the US and Europe does little to relieve population pressure from source countries, perpetuates their economic misery, and while good for the individual does not benefit mankind. The policy of taking the top of their societies legally encourages the bottom of their society to follow them illegally. Of course, we are not supposed to consider any of this: all that matters is that it is illiberal and racist to not accept immigrants from all over the world.
The Present Crisis
If the US and Europe only had their prescribed legal immigration levels things wouldn’t be so bad, though the same core problems would exist. However, there is illegal immigration on an enormous scale. I don’t need to go too deep into this crisis, because anyone sufficiently interested in politics to read this newsletter is broadly aware of the illegal immigration situation. Still, in many American minds the typical illegal immigrant remains a Mexican who comes to mow your lawn, clean your house, or pick fruit. This is an outdated perception, and in fact Mexico’s economy has improved a great deal over the last 20 years, especially its manufacturing sector. Another class of illegal immigrants to the United States which became well known around 10 years ago are Central Americans, who are said to be fleeing gang violence, and surely some of them are: disregard the fact that if we don’t secure the border we can’t be sure the gangs don’t follow them here. The reality is that migrants are coming from all over the world through Mexico. In a way, though it makes it more work to deport them, this is a sort of advantage, because it stops them from united against us, as with the tribes which ultimately collapsed Rome:
“Since all these peoples entered the empire pellmell, they got in each other’s way. And policy at that time consisted entirely in arming them against each other—which, because of their ferocity and avarice, was easy. They destroyed each other for the most part before they were able to get settled, and this resulted in the eastern empire continuing for a time.” - Montesquieu [Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, XX]
That may help things for a while, and what is the point of identitarianism if not to make a bunch of groups constantly squabble for spoils?
From January to May of 2024 1.4 million immigrants from 177 countries were “intercepted.” There are 193 UN Members, and some of them are tiny, impoverished Pacific islands and the like, so 177 is more or less every country that could realistically produce migrants. Intercepted is also a misnomer, because they voluntarily surrender to Border Patrol. Incredibly, the great majority are released after a short period of time, and given a court date that is perhaps several years away, and at times even allowed to legally work, which is to say they aren’t really even illegal immigrants anymore. What’s worse, other times they are put up in hotels and given government benefit cards! Not all of these are poor people, and almost none of them are valid asylum seekers. In Europe things are mostly the same, with boats of people from everywhere constantly washing up on the shore of any territory within the European Union while the bureaucrats in Brussels demand they be cared for and make deportation difficult.
Still, it’s confusing to Americans how someone from Senegal or the Democratic Republic of Congo would possibly even have the money to make this trip. While many of them do come from extreme poverty, in much of Africa and other poor countries people don’t use cash for a lot of things, and can save a lot of money. A 20 year old from Burkina Faso may have more money in savings than the average 20 year old in America, not because he is from a wealthy family but just because they save. People commonly live with their family and are subsistence farmers, having what they need to eat, not living on cash, and making $5 or $10 dollars here or there until they have saved a substantial amount; when you hear that someone lives on a dollar a day it is not in the way an American would imagine, of trying to buy everything they need to survive for a dollar, though such people are still extremely poor. At the same time, perhaps it is better for everyone if that money is spent starting a small business in their country instead of to buy an airline ticket to come here and take advantage of ours. Alternately, plenty of people from Latin America and other middle income regions are neither poor nor threatened at home, by the standards of their country at least, there are just no consequences and it is fun and exciting to come to America. Very few people who reach the US or Europe have anything resembling a valid claim to asylum and are at best seeking work in the wealthier countries our ancestors built. In more sane and better functioning societies it would not be a years-long process to determine such things, and in fact you could probably figure it out by looking at their phone for 10 minutes.
One common belief about the migrant waves in the United States and especially in Europe is that it is driven by aggressive American and NATO policies. There is something to this at times, especially the wave from around 10 years ago of people from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, though some just claim those countries as it makes them more eligible for asylum. As it stands now, the biggest way in which aggressive policies have promoted the wave of migrants is that Gadaffi in Libya helped Europe control migration and now he is not there to do that anymore. That is to say, people don’t want to leave their homes because destabilization caused by NATO, but Africans have been more able to do so because of reduced enforcement. The bigger threat from immigration regarding NATO policies is not causal, but is instead the fact that due to our prolific and often poorly planned airstrikes all over the world, some mild-mannered teenager who is an American citizen of Yemeni descent may become a terrorist after a drone strike kills 8 of his cousins back home. This risk is unavoidable while pursuing our “invade the world, invite the world” policy.
One way or another, people are coming in huge numbers, and our governments have been unable or unwilling to stop it. It’s said that 46 million foreign born humans lived in the United States in 2022. The demographic trends driving this are only set to become more extreme.
An Endless Flood
The tendency of the poor to have large families compared to the wealthy has been the subject of much discourse dating back to antiquity, though perhaps in our era the subject was most famously dealt with in the comedy film Idiocracy. In reality, intelligence is only part of the matter, while often the bigger issue is what lifestyle you feel you must support in your child and what financial legacy you have to leave them. One wonders how ancient noble lines would let themselves die out, but alternately The War of the Roses was in many ways caused by King Edward III having so many children. The point is that when you have something for your children to inherit the tendency is to want to keep together a family legacy, large families can become a source of much strife. The wealthy must balance these competing demands but ultimately tend to follow a strategy of putting a lot of effort into a small number of children instead of having many children and hoping some of them will do better than you.
In his sections about how laws relate to the number of inhabitants Montesquieu wrote the following,
“A rising people increase and multiply extremely. This is because with them it would be a great inconvenience to live in celibacy; and none to have many children. The contrary of which is the case when the nation is formed.
Men who have absolutely nothing, such as beggars, have many children. This proceeds from their being in the case of a rising people: it costs the father nothing to give his heart to his offspring, who even in their infancy are the instruments of this art…But men who are poor, only because they live under a severe government; who regard their fields less as the source of their subsistence than as a cause of vexation; these men, I say, have few children: they have not even subsistence for themselves.”
- The Spirit of the Laws [XXIII.10-11]
Of course, in many ways it doesn’t make sense to call the governments of Europe “severe” compared to despotates in Africa or Pakistan’s cabal of generals, but they are certainly meddlesome, have more laws, and are highly disheartening. However, it is also just the case that mature states produce fewer children. One strives of equilibrium, but it is not always possible.
The main surface-level reason given for immigration, besides that allowing it is the nice thing to do, is that low birth rates in developed countries require population supplementation. There are a few things wrong with this, and I have written at length about what is wrong with how our society views parenthood, and in many ways economic issues are not nearly as important as attitudes. Regardless, despite that social programs are too expensive, after some balancing out it is entirely possible to manage a population decline and Europe was not exactly a sparsely populated wasteland 50 years ago. Less competition for housing and labor should lead to higher birth rates, though we also need to break the anti-natalists of the idea that it is wrong to have children or that it ruins your life. What matters more than all of this is that some parts of the world have enormous population growth. Plenty of areas in Africa have had a 1,000% or higher increase in population since 1900. In many ways, it is surprising they have survived this long, insofar as 75 years ago people were saying population levels passed decades ago would spell doom. I will get into some solutions in this regard farther down, but we need to look at just how extreme this disparity is.
Here are the UN projections for Nigeria’s growth compared to the Europe:2
I don’t know how they gather this data or predict immigration levels, but this shows Nigeria alone having a population only around 40 million below all of Europe by 2100- presumably this factors emigration from Nigeria and immigration into Europe. Nigeria is only one country in Africa, though it is the most populous one, currently accounting for around 1/6th of the continent’s population. These same trends are playing out everywhere. Compare the “population pyramid” of France, a European country that has done far better than most at keeping birth rates up [in large part due to higher fertility among immigrant communities] to population pyramid of Senegal, which has pretty normal growth for a modern African country3:
Note that this is called a “population pyramid” because whoever invented them expected that it should be a pyramid, since after all, once a year ends, some people born that year will die in every succeeding year but no new ones will be born. It’s true that European countries have mercifully low child mortality rates, but population growth would also generally contribute to this tendency.
Now, compare the population pyramid of Italy, one of the worst countries in Europe for birth rates, to Niger, one of the highest birth rate countries in the world:
Some of the above is Niger having poor public health and thus low lifespans, but it doesn’t seem like that serious of a factor when one knows that Niger has 47.08 births per 1000 people annually and 6.82 children per woman, whereas Italy has 6.7 births per 1000 people annually and 1.2 children per woman. One Nigerien woman gives birth to more children in her lifetime than 1000 people in Italy do annually. I live in a town of 1000 people, which has the random benefit that social statistics are easy to imagine in real life; while “covid deaths” would not have been noticeable on a personal level, if my town had under 7 babies in a year it would be grim and highly obvious. My stepbrother and I both had children this year, and together our kids would represent 1/3rd of the town’s babies born on a slightly below average year. Now, imagine that perhaps another 1/3rd of those babies are not even Italian.
It is hard to explain why Italians have become the panda bears of people- especially given that they are famously amorous and the capital of Catholicism- but one way or another they just aren’t having children. The situation reminds me of Darl in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying who has the thought “It takes two people to make you and one people to die, that’s how the world is going to end.” In Italy, each two people are barely making one person. Italy is one of several countries in Europe which has only gained population due to immigration over the last 20 years, though it must be noted much of the immigration into Italy and Germany has been from within the European Union or from Ukraine. Perhaps the most striking statistic on the following chart is that tiny Liechtenstein would have lost 15% of its population due to natural causes over a 20 year period if not for migration:
Though America is doing better than Europe in most ways, and is more able to absorb immigrants and retain its character, what some now call “Heritage Americans” find themselves in the same situation. Just in the last 3 years the demographics of the United States have changed rapidly, losing over 2 million white people and gaining over 3 million Hispanics. As I said, Hispanics are the most able to assimilate into this society- if they choose to or have a reason to- but dealing with this level of demographic change is plenty challenging without an ever increasing mass of illegal aliens.
Still, population growth in other parts of the world is not entirely a bad thing, in fact there is a strong argument that Africa has long been underpopulated, the problem is that it needs increasing economic opportunities to make use of increasing human capital, something which is not currently happening at the necessary rate. Regardless, what will happen in the long run if Africans don’t stop going to Europe is obvious. One is reminded of the famous scene in the film Dances With Wolves where he tells the Indian that white people moving into the Plains will be as numerous as stars in the sky. In America, for some reason the experience of the Indians is used to argue that we must accept immigration, despite that it is a clear warning of the risks of unlimited immigration to a native population. Why anyone thinks this line of reasoning is compelling is beyond me:
The situation for Europe is much more perilous because of its lower birthrates and the fact that it is made up of many ethnostates. At a certain point immigrants and their descendants will see no cause to allow the continued European domination of Europe.
Of course, it isn’t just Africa, South Asia also continues to grow and send an outflow to Europe. India has the current population of Africa and though its growth has slowed, .6% being added on to 1.5 billion people annually is still around 12 million more humans every year, more than the total population of many EU member states. The Pakistani government released data showing more Pakistanis left for the United Kingdom from January 2023 to February of 2024 than had left for that destination over the entire prior 51 years; I find that difficult to believe but it appears to be a credible source. 862,000 Pakistanis left the country in 2023. That is just one country in the world, albeit a quite populous one.
It is easy to see that at these levels soon such populations will be absorbing Europeans instead of the reverse. None of this has even gotten as bad as it could, though we are presently at a crisis point. History is replete with examples of people leaving their homelands and taking over the homes of others. I don’t use the rhetoric that migrants are an “invading army” because they do not constitute an army, but all of the people entering the United States and Europe most certainly constitute invaders. After all, what else is it called to enter somewhere in large numbers without authorization?
Though it may seem hyperbolic, it is informative to look at Machiavelli’s lines about people who leave their homeland to overrun the homelands of others,
“Peoples such as these leave their own lands…driven out by necessity, and this necessity arises either from famine or from a war and the oppression they have experienced in their own country, which has compelled them to seek new homelands. Such peoples come in great numbers, and then they violently enter the lands of others, murder the inhabitants, take possession of their property, create a new kingdom, and change the very name of the province, just as Moses did and as those other peoples did when they occupied the Roman empire.” [Discourses, II.8]
As it stands, we have been assisted by the fact that the southwest border of the United States is a harsh desert and the sea separates Europe from Africa and Asia. In the United States migrants cannot stay together in a large body in those conditions, whereas in Europe they usually travel in smaller boats, perhaps something more like how the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes ultimately took over post-Roman Britain.
Imagine, if you will, the following situation: in 20 years Nigeria has unraveled into civil war and Europe has continued to weaken under constant waves of immigration. Some plucky group of young men decides they are done with their problems in Africa, and hijacks a cargo ship and loads it with 20,000 men and takes it to Portugal. They get off, in one body, and decide to take over by violence part of the city in which they have landed. Does modern Europe actually have the mettle to deal with this? If it works the first time, will it not happen endlessly? It is said that the Viking raids caught Europe completely unprepared- politically, morally, and economically. Does anyone think modern Europe would do a good job of responding to such a thing returning to its shores? In 1000 years will more be left than a fragment of stone which speaks of sea peoples?
This video of what the Spanish call a “Cayuco” arriving at the Canary Islands, which I happened to see shortly before publishing, demonstrates that my point here is not absurd:
The instinct is to say that people have been partaking in such fear mongering for decades and it hasn’t happened yet, but on a historical timeline, this all has not been going on that long. It’s plausible that by 2100 Africa has over 2.5 billion people and Europe has under 500 million people of European heritage, the majority of whom are well over 40. It doesn’t require much imagination to see what that will mean for Europe. The situation is less dire in the United States, but remains quite scary given that one of the major factions is a coalition of minorities and self-loathing white people who blame a shrinking majority for all the ills of society but are themselves demonstrably incompetent to run that same society.
Getting Our House in Order
Machiavelli noted that it is easy to conduct affairs in a city which has not become corrupted, writing of the German states of his time,
“It is quite evident that in the province of Germany this goodness and religion are still strong among the people; this causes many republics there to flourish in liberty and to obey their laws in such a fashion that no one outside or within these republics dares to occupy them.” [Discourses, I.55]
The reality of course, is that the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe are so incredibly corrupt it is challenging to do anything right. Now, don’t go running to Transparency International ratings, because in the West we don’t have “corruption” because we call it “lobbying.” But it isn’t just that kind of corruption, it is the character of the people, bad ideas, crippling regulations and more. Have you ever thought of a sensible idea to improve the country that should be non-controversial, and then you immediately know the idiotic reasons it would be criticized or not allowed? Long gone are the days where you just declare “Operation Wetback” and toss Mexicans back over the Rio Grande. Everything is “problematic” now.
Solving mass immigration requires dealing with four main domestic issues, all of which would be straight forward in less corrupt countries that were not controlled by a cabal of over-educated Mandarin idiots. The issues are: deport illegal aliens currently in the country, secure the border, change our immigration system to one that isn’t based on increasing our population for its own sake, and change our understanding of citizenship. However, it may be near impossible to get any of these things done, even if they seem straightforward. The popular Substack author Eugyppius [who himself happens to be German] had an insightful Tweet about this a couple of months ago:
On top of the idea that the “establishment” thinks everything has to have a facade of “morality” whether or not it works, we have a serious problem where people don’t seem to understand that nothing in life works perfectly. “People will climb a wall!” Yes, you have to deploy men to guard it, and even so you just hope to get most of them. You [ideally] don’t give up on preventing violent crime just because some of it inevitably happens. Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance was recently asked how they intend to deport 20 million people and gave the sensible answer that you begin with 1 million, deporting the worst violent criminals that we know about. From there, we decide where it makes sense to go next:
I also find it somewhat funny that the “news” hack tries to scare people about the government going around knocking on doors asking for papers. My family are all American citizens, my wife and I have driver’s licenses and pay taxes and are registered to vote. The government knows who lives in my house: they don’t need to knock to find out. If my Social Security number is associated with an illegal alien it means my identity has been stolen and I would actually want the government to speak to me and figure out what is going on. Perhaps it would be worse in immigrant communities, but they don’t need to go around checking everyone’s papers, though it seems like it would be easy enough to not let day laborers line up outside of hardware stores. There is some real low-hanging fruit, including that people convicted of violent crimes are not always deported after release, and the Federal Government has the ability to get them even from cities or states that don’t want to cooperate.
Everyone knows that Rome faced many wars with the Gauls and that the empire was ultimately conquered by wandering barbarian tribes, but there is an interesting and mostly forgotten story in Book XXXIX of Livy which is relevant to situation in the United States and Europe. In the early 2nd century BC,
“Some Transalpine Gauls crossed into Venetia, without looting or hostile action, and occupied a spot for founding a town…When Roman envoys were sent across the Alps to inquire into the matter, they were given the answer that the migrants had set out without authorization of their people, who were ignorant of what they were doing in Italy.” [XXXIX.22]
The Romans were torn on what to do about this unusual situation. The Gauls surrendered when the Romans demanded they do so, and pled that they were fleeing poverty and a land shortage due to overpopulation, and so they had settled in an unpopulated area without harming anyone. Though what could be called “international law” at the time gave the Romans full possession of their property and persons to kill or sell, it would send a bad message to treat men who had surrendered when asked to in a harsh fashion. Ultimately, the Romans escorted them with all of their possessions “over the Alps to warn the Gauls to keep their teeming population at home” [XXXIX.54.] For their part, the Gallic elders criticized the Romans for being too soft-hearted, knowing that this band of Gauls had risked war between their peoples by unlawfully crossing the established border between their territories.
The lesson here is obvious: most of our illegal immigrants just want to work [or receive benefits, regardless] and are not in any danger at home. Their asylum claims are obviously spurious. All that the United States and Europe need to do is tell illegal immigrants that if they agree to leave we will give them some time to get their affairs in order and sell possessions they do not wish to take and we will send them home with all of the money they have saved. After a reasonable waiting period, having previously been in the country illegally will not be held against them if they later apply to enter the country legally. However, if we have to track them down and take them to court to deport them, we will seize all of their money, deport them anyway, and put a lien against them in our financial system for whatever costs incurred in that process were not covered by the seizure. Some can be sent home on planes and some on boats depending what is practical. We can pressure their own governments to send vehicles to fetch them. This is classic “carrot and stick” human management that a ruling class with half a brain would have thought of a long time ago. This should also do well with the public, as it will upset the immigration hawks by not being sufficiently cruel, which will make it seem comparatively kind, and then later when we get to the people who didn’t agree and worse images are shown by our nefarious media it can be said we gave them the opportunity to do this a better way.
Securing the border is also straightforward, it is simply a matter of completing the wall and deploying the military to guard the border. People cry that the military is not meant to be used in domestic law enforcement but in absolutely no way does preventing foreigners from crossing our border count as domestic law enforcement. Can you imagine trying to explain to our Founders, who were generally suspicious of standing armies, that we maintain an enormous standing army yet refuse to use it to guard the frontier? Most of what our military does has no obvious relationship to national security, whereas guarding the border most certainly does. With modern surveillance drone technology this doesn’t even require an enormous amount of men despite the border’s great length. Some will also claim “our military isn’t trained to do that” which is nonsense. For one thing, guarding a perimeter is one of the most basic functions of a soldier, and our military has guarded borders all over the world so long as they are not our own. Sometimes a concern will be expressed that they basically don’t know how to not shoot people which is also nonsense: they’re capable of following rules of engagement and if a migrant does fire on them it is fine to shoot back. These things really are not conceptually difficult, our country is just paralyzed and can always find a stupid reason to not do anything right.
The next thing is to change who we let in legally. In the coming era of robotics and AI we have no reason to permanently let in low-skill workers besides temporary farm workers which can be dealt with on their own basis. Currently, we have some sort of global lottery program for legal immigration which could be ended entirely. We also go all over the world to fly in asylum seekers, a program which looks good to the bleeding heart but does little to meaningfully reduce human suffering and which in many ways seems to be a giveaway to big “non-profit.” We can simply stop doing both of those things. It’s also the case that we don’t need to give political dissidents asylum if they would face a normal trial and jail time in their home countries- such people are a perpetual nuisance anyway given that they hate their home government and constantly lobby ours to get involved in their affairs.
Most of all, we need to get past the idea that fairness dictates we have an even and uniform path towards citizenship. This ain’t a charity, it is our home. In ancient societies, and really any non-Enlightenment society, it was expected that citizenship was a birthright and not something which had to be fairly applied to those who desired it. For some reason Americans struggle with this, finding it unfair for foreigners to live here for a long time without the ability to become citizens, but it is not. There is no reason we have to let them join. I used to have a Persian neighbor years ago, who had permanent residency but though many of his family members had, didn’t want to become a citizen because he didn’t like the US government- not in a terrorist sort of way or anything, he was just kind of a libertarian and didn’t like the Iraq War and the surveillance state etc, really the same reasons we all hate the government; I guess he would have fit right in. Anyway, for some reason or another I was telling this to a Boomer liberal at the bar a number of years ago, who inexplicably became infuriated about how this person was taking advantage of our country by living here but not accepting the responsibilities of citizenship, which as far as I know only includes possibly being drafted. It was a strange interaction but does illustrate a point about totally failing to conceptualize that it is fine to have permanent residents who are not citizens.4 Further, new citizens should be required to renounce their prior citizenship as part of the naturalization process, which would in and of itself discourage some people from seeking American citizenship and remove valid concerns about new citizens having dual loyalty.
So who, then, should be allowed to join? Perhaps we can learn something from nature: L.L. Langstroth, the inventor of the movable comb hive, wrote of honeybees who get lost,
“As a general rule, however, a bee with a load of honey or bee-bread, after the extent of his resources is ascertained, is pretty sure to be welcomed by any hive to which he may carry his treasure; while a poverty-stricken unfortunate that presumes to claim their hospitality is, usually, at once destroyed. The one meets with as flattering a reception as a wealthy gentleman proposing to take up his abode in a country village, while the other is as much an object of dislike as a poor man, who bids fair to become a public charge.” [The Hive and Honey-Bee, X]
Our country should only be seeking skilled workers temporarily while we train people for those positions, but there is no need for a general path to citizenship for people brought here as employees. The ones we should be letting move towards citizenship are employers, not workers, those who either show up with money to invest in the country or have earned and saved it in their time here as a foreign worker. The process should also require some sort of high level sponsorship and individual approval, as opposed to meeting generic criteria. We would still want to maintain a marriage path to citizenship, which of course can be abused, but so can everything else; frankly, all the spouses I have known who gained American citizenship seem to profit little from it besides being able to vote in our idiotic elections.
There are some situations where our honor requires that we let people join our country, such as those who are stateless due to their loyalty to us. These include people like Hmong, Afghans, and Iraqis who worked with our forces. In the first place we shouldn’t have been there getting them in those situations but it did happen and there is every reason to believe such situations will arise again in the future. In the case of large groups brought in for identifiable historic reasons this becomes part of our heritage and something the public can understand. Assimilating one group which came one time is a viable prospect compared to the constant inflow of immigrants from everywhere.
The last issue is how to handle children. The 14th Amendment is clear about birthright citizenship, though it is designed to deal with drastically different circumstances than ones which currently exist [giving citizenship to all the freed slaves.] It could probably be legislated without a Constitutional Amendment that the children of people in the country illegally are not citizens because they are not “under the jurisdiction of the United States” though that would be harder to apply to anyone who had a processing asylum claim or any type of temporary residence. Regardless, it would go to the Supreme Court but it’s plausible that would be upheld. Ideally, I would like a circumstance where the children of non-citizens born in the United States or the child of one [but not two] American citizens born abroad is given lifetime residency with the opportunity to apply for citizenship at 18. It should be easy enough for someone who has graduated from high school in the United States to pass the citizenship test, though if we’re being honest the public school history classes these days may spend more time teaching about how the exposure of American GI’s to Thai ladyboys during the Vietnam War impacted our cultural understanding of gender than they do teaching about the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Going to the Source
On top of dealing with the situation domestically, there are several things which can and should be done to deal with this problem globally. The first is gaining more cooperation from the countries migrants set out from and pass through, which can be unpleasant to see up close, such as this story of a migrant being returned from Morocco to Senegal. It should not be ignored that all of this involves enormous human suffering and it is best that they don’t start the journey at all. Another example of cooperation is that the prior government of Niger was incentivized to ban assisting migrants, which was unpopular both due to the fact that they will try to cross the Sahara anyway and many will die and also that Niger is an extremely poor country and the people of the city Agadez were economically reliant on this traffick [the law was repealed under the current junta.] What the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe need to make clear to the source countries is that they take offense to illegal immigration and there is an expectation of those countries stopping it.
In the United States, it is sometimes assumed that Mexico is part of a conspiracy to undermine our country by flooding it with migrants. This isn’t true, though there are plausible accusations that Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, who has very bad relations with the United States, is doing something of that nature. For some reason immigration hawks don’t like to hear this, but the primary issue with Mexico is that they are a friendly country and their economy is based on the ease of travel and trade. They are in a difficult position, because the immigration antagonizes the United States, but they also do not want to change who they are. None of this is to say we can’t work with them and make our expectations clear, it’s just important to understand the situation. In fact, Trump and Mexico’s President Obrador got along well, including coordinating on this issue, and the “remain in Mexico” policy was a success. The reality of the situation is that people crossing through your territory to a 3rd country is one of the oldest transnational issues [in antiquity, sometimes a leader would pretend to not notice a passing army, to avoid conflict with either party, as it is generally considered hostile to grant passage to an army invading your neighbor, but the army will consider it hostile if you stop them.] Though a fair amount has been done to work with source countries, in other instances it seems as if next to nothing has been done to show displeasure, and countries are often cagey about accepting back their emigrants, either because they want remittances or because the migrants were troublemakers in the first place.
Enforcement is only a small amount of what needs to be done with the source countries. The bigger issue is actually fixing things. In particular, unless Africa becomes somewhere that people want to stay, no amount of enforcement can stop what is coming. Africa has enormous potential for economic growth, but continues to struggle. Central America is a similar situation, however the population is much smaller and the United States absorbing their “excess” population for decades is possible, if undesirable. This can be dealt with in a way that satisfies our own strategic interests. Now, I am not a China hawk by any means, but the reality is that managing our relationship to China’s rise in the world does require smart leadership. One particular weakness has been our reliance on China for low-cost manufacturing, something which is increasingly absurd as China’s manufacturing costs are now the same as Mexico’s for lower quality products farther away. Especially during covid nonsense it became apparent how reliant we are on China for a variety of goods, for one example source chemicals for pharmaceuticals. By promoting direct investment in Central American manufacturing for low-skill components, it would be possible to improve their economies and reduce migrant outflow, while decreasing our dependence on China. There is a further benefit to this diversification in that the Central American countries are not large enough to ever become strategic rivals, and they are of course uniquely positioned send and receive shipping to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Promoting the industrialization of Africa is perhaps more difficult but substantially more crucial. For a variety of reasons, including large families being viewed as a form of wealth and fear of white people doing eugenics on them, promoting birth control to the African masses is mostly a non-starter. However, like anyone else, real wealth is likely to make them have fewer children, while industrialization will help their economy support the ones they do have. Unfortunately, there is little confidence in industrial investments in Africa, because after colonialism fell no one wanted to work for whitey. As there weren’t yet educated Africans to take over running things the great majority of factories became unproductive and fell into disuse. Now, and especially if we stop letting them stay in the United States and Europe, there are plenty of educated Africans who could fill these roles and should be able to run productive factories. The population is much higher than it was back in the ‘60’s, so there is a teeming proletariat that is persistently underemployed. As long as the jobs are simple, the people who are unwilling to put in proper work can just be kicked out and replaced with someone who wants to. Any number of regions in Africa could grow up like Chicago at the turn of the century. There is also room for tremendous growth in Africa’s agricultural sector, which despite many areas of wonderful soil suffers from a lack of modern seeds, fertilizers, and equipment. Much of Africa’s agriculture also struggles because as white people left or were expelled the plantations were broken up into ever smaller segments for subsistence farming, which then ended valuable export agriculture. The only way to improve this is to go through the process whereby some Africans are able to improve their small farms and consolidate with those of neighbors who have not done as well.
There are several problems with how Africa is treated by outside powers, the most damaging of which is the hatred of fossil fuels by the climate change globalists, who themselves live with the benefits of civilizations built on those fuels. Still, we also must be honest and acknowledge that since independence African countries have suffered greatly from their own bad leadership and that they will not get anywhere blaming the white man for everything. Any plan needs to put a burden of responsibility on African governments. However, there are still new approaches which can help and while the sentiment that it isn’t our problem is understandable, the reality is that the outflow is already everyone’s problem. The first thing to do is to stop making foreign aid a priority because it is relentlessly corrupt and politicized from both ends and hinders development. Then, we must not treat Africa as a chess piece, but instead recognize that the continent is big enough for all the world powers to do productive and profitable business on it.
There are problems with the approaches of all of the major powers which leads to destabilization, but the worst is the struggle between the United States’ obsession with the form of “democracy” whether or not it amounts to anything good, and Russia’s love of selling African governments weapons without regard for what impact that may have. Despite their labor abuse problems and the like, China seems in many ways the least malign major power on the continent. There are enormous profits to be made in helping Africa utilize its mineral and human resources, and as with Central America, encouraging this development makes American supply chains more robust and would improve both national and economic security.
Though it is not currently the major motivating factor in migration, the United States does still need to use a lighter touch around the world and end the habit of meddling in and destabilizing countries, be it through outright military force or soft power. There is credible evidence that the United States was involved in the overthrow of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was quite popular and was empowering the public of that nation. Of course, the anti-human sanctions against Venezuela, despite that the country presents no security threat to the United States, are another example of harmful policies encouraging an outflow of migrants, and the US stance towards Venezuela makes it a challenge to justifying deporting Venezuelans.
For any of the above policies to work they need to be tied together with the thread that the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe are not obligated- legally, morally, or otherwise- to accept any large number of immigrants, and will not be doing so.
Conclusion: Preserving Our People
It’s not obvious how opposing large scale immigration is fascist, when it is the normal policy most states have had for all of human history. In most ways that is just being a state. People of certain professions may come to your city to trade and work, but it would never be expected that they could move in uncontrolled numbers. Of course, America has been a land of immigrants for its history, because it was depopulated by disease, and we needed to repopulate the vast country which we conquered from the survivors of that disease. Immigration has always been contentious, and never something the public agreed with each other about. The public in American and Europe also never agreed to this current wave of global immigration. Taking in immigrants is much harder now when a vocal faction of over-educated academics and their students thinks that assimilation is wrong and that white people are bad. It is all the more maddening when the government is putting illegal aliens up in hotels, whereas if you left them on the streets they would have been better off staying with their mother in a favela; in the modern era they have social media and their friends and family back home see how things go when they get here.
We have been a nation of immigrants by necessity but it was never an agreement that we would continue to increase our population in that manner forever. We have been in this land 400 years. The New World is not so new anymore. Even so, Europe is a much older place, rigid and weak. Europe’s prognosis is grim, though perhaps the UK can turn things around since it is outside of the EU. The decision to let the continent fill with immigrants is in many ways inexplicable, though the peoples there are tired and don’t seem to have the desire to continue their races.
To those of us who have no other home, it is maddening to hear America described as an “idea” instead of a nation, and of course as with everything else, it is “racist” to argue against it. The United States federal government put together by Madison’s Constitution is an idea, and incidentally one that is threatened and failing in many ways, but America is the home of Americans, who are a people. I believe the most recent immigrant in my family line was my mother’s great grandfather, who came here from Ireland as a child. Perhaps it was her grandfather. My father’s family came here from England in the 1850’s. I know of no other immigrants in my family line, though of course they came here at some point. It isn’t in living memory, it is in genealogical research for curiosity.
Meanwhile, our country can’t conduct any business without hearing about the home countries and heritages of all of the post-1965 immigrants, who clearly have not assimilated that well if they consider themselves something besides American. Don’t think that this is just a concern about brown people- if the last several years have shown anything it’s that letting all of the Ukrainians into this country was definitely a mistake, and many Europeans seem to regret that now as well. But Ukraine has devastatingly low birth rates, and is but one country far away. It will not overwhelm anything. Latin America, Africa, and Asia are too big for the United States and Europe to absorb even just their excess population. Africa and South Asia grow at incredible rates. The United States is at least newer and in many ways less exploited, with incredible natural resources. Europe doesn’t really have anything but productivity developed by prior generations and some coal. One can justify America as a land of opportunity people want to contribute to, but it is hard to see going to Europe as anything more than preparing to pick at the corpse of what was once a great land. They say that great nations don’t die, they commit suicide, and it is obvious that for a variety of reasons this is the current trajectory of the West, with Europe much farther along. Meanwhile, regardless of what you want to attribute it to, the fact is that black Americans did not advance as they were meant to after 1965 while white Americans struggle terribly to find a sense of purpose, increasingly hated in the land they built. I don’t even understand how Europe came to this pass, I think it just crept up on the public, and perhaps also the political leaders.
None of this is to say there haven’t been contributions to our societies from immigration in the modern era. Plenty of immigrants are nice people and many have played important roles in our society. There are patriots of a variety of backgrounds who are well integrated. At times, their optimism and lack of cynicism about how our countries function can even be frustrating to those of us from families that have been here longer. Many themselves want to restrict immigration: the idea that immigrants want unlimited immigration is just something Democrats and their European counterparts made up and decided to believe in. At the same time, they are prone to think that if immigration wasn’t allowed they wouldn’t be here. Of course, if your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle, and any number of things could have made your life different.
My wife’s grandparents were immigrants from Canada. However, it’s enough already. This country doesn’t need the population increase and our politics are already falling into infuriatingly stupid ethnic patronage that will only get worse if we allow this to continue. We need to take care of our own, and give the recent immigrants who are in this country time to assimilate instead of bringing in a never ending stream of their kinsmen who keep them tied to their original homes. We at least need a generation for them to breed into our population. If we do not take action, this is not going to stay the same. Either the situation will be dealt with or it will get drastically worse, and everything points to the latter.
Modern Europe has never been a continent of immigrants. As for the United States, it has been four hundred years. This should no longer be a nation of immigrants, but a nation of men whose grandfathers are buried here.
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
I suggested that since the World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros is a member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, it stands to reason that the anti-vaxxers should side with the pro-Ethiopian government protesters.
This is all of Europe, I can’t find a chart of the EU specifically. Since this is around 300 million more than the EU population, it must include Russia and Turkiye, the latter of which is itself growing and sends many immigrants to the EU.
I’m grabbing all of the following statistics from Wikipedia. Perhaps one could quibble over their accuracy but the broader trend is obviously real. It’s also not clear to me why Wikipedia has different population pyramid graphics for developed and undeveloped countries.
Last I heard that guy had moved to Spain, further proving the point about how not everyone needs to be brought in as a member of our republic.
I was immediately triggered by Balkanization. But who do you think invented Balkanization? Who broke up Yugoslavia and ignited a civil war for their little imperialist experiment? As Assange said, there is nothing special about the Balkans except that history happens a bit earlier there, so you had an opportunity to preview it.
This article should be printed out and read in all high schools across the country