Mass Immigration In The West: Is It A Good Thing?
Mass immigration is one of the most important topics, if not the most important topics of geopolitics. It’s contributing to demographic changes in many countries which are changing their very fabric.
Birth rates predict that man native populations in Europe will be the minority by the end of the century. This used to be labeled a conspiracy theory, but it’s now a widely accepted trend. In the U.S., demographic shifts are forecasted to make the native population a minority by 2050. There’s a similar trend in other European countries such as Italy and Spain.
Countries such as Hungary and France are trying to encourage natives to have more children, others like the UK lean on mass immigration. Whatever the strategy, this is clearly an issue European governments are starting to take seriously.
But mass immigration is also an international problem; it involves international conflicts and wars, which makes refugee and other migration stemming from this important for ethics and human rights. This, again, has especially been seen in Europe.
This will be a multi-part series discussing arguments for and against the allowing of mass immigration in (mostly) Western countries. I’ll analyze the implications and arguments ranging from crime to economics and ethics.
The Communitarian argument
I’ll define this argument as the way in which people treat each other, how they build communities, and how these communities interact on a macro societal level.
Culture and community are closely intertwined, so this slightly touches upon culture. However, we’re focusing more on people’s identity. Specifically, the way they define their identity in relation to their communities, ethnicity, and other group membership.
Social trust
A very important part of community building is social trust. Are you comfortable enough to leave your doors unlocked, or do you install security systems all around your house? on an even subtler level: how much would you be willing to tell a stranger you started a chat with? would you be concerned they might use any of that information against you? to swindle you, or perhaps worse?
A growing number of research is showing that social trust is particularly low in urban areas. Urban areas are more likely to be “melting pots” of people from many different races, ethnicities, and nationalities. In contrast, urban areas are usually the opposite. The populations in these areas usually consist of completely or mostly homogenous populations. These latter populations report the highest social trust.
Talking about melting pots, isn’t the U.S. a shining example of immigration’s success? It’s considered the most powerful and successful country in the world by many metrics. Although there are issues with things such as healthcare and homelessness, it’s still a land of opportunity for many.
Examples from history?
But the situation isn’t as black and white. America’s history, as any proponent of mass immigration will probably tell you, has been filled with racism and ethnic conflict. Forget African-Americans or the Natives, or even the Chinese. Italians, Irish, and other “white” ethnicities experienced discrimination from the larger WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elites.
These ethnic groups were forced into cities for this as many reasons. This was the original American melting pot: European peoples from different places, most of whom by today’s standards would be considered white. But as history has shown, this was only temporary. These communities were eventually able to leave behind their more “humble” beginnings. You now see them all over the place, in suburbs and nicer communities. So there has been some progress.
You could say things have gotten better for most, but many would disagree. Maybe for white people, but many people think there’s still work to be done with other racial groups. BLM riots, demands for reparations, white nationalism, and general identity politics would suggest that many people don’t feel that way.
By any objective standard, our present day is the age of least discrimination. In law, in academia, in media, and in society in general. If anything, the situation has reversed and initiatives such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) now white people are the main victims of discrimination — justified or not.
So, for a melting pot that’s supposed to be such a success, people clearly aren’t satisfied. And we’ve only talked about the history of U.S. immigration so far. Ethnic conflict stemming from immigration in Europe has been a lot more problematic.
This would be good to take this time to discuss identity politics. Put simply, this is the tendency for people to form political coalitions based on their groups, all the while separating themselves from the larger political stage. These have become very common in the U.S., not to mention in Europe, and they hold significant sway over political parties.
Identity politics and in-group loyalty
Economists often talk about “expanding the pie”, which we will talk about later, to describe bringing economic prosperity to as many people as possible. Identity politics does the opposite: it encourages people to seek out benefits for their group and their group alone.
Of course, PR campaigns would never let the idea come out as crudely as I put it. However, it lines up with the tribal nature of human beings. Humans are social creatures, I doubt anyone would deny that. As social creatures, we instinctively base part of our identity around others. Our families, close communities, and nation. As people who care about these groups, we have in-group loyalties. We prioritize our groups over others.
“We have a deeply ingrained human tendency to think of the world in terms of ‘us versus them.’ This bias is a result of our evolutionary history, in which group cooperation and competition were essential for survival.”
— Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University
This has also been shown by research, history, and plain common sense. The “citizen of the world” person is a myth, or at least so uncommon that they might as well be. The idea of multicultural societies has been a rarity in history. While it is true that empires have ruled over many different groups of people, these empires often didn’t do much to change the local landscape. The ones that succeeded largely left their subjects intact.
The ones that didn’t, well, they didn’t fare as well. Not all empires were created equal. Empires that refrained from changing local cultures and ways of life were more prosperous and survived for longer. Empires such as the Persian Empire, the early Ottomans, and most of Southeast Asian empires are an example of this. This is also true in more recent history. Allowing local populations to retain their autonomy and avoid direct control by the central government also led to prosperity and stability.
Integration vs ghettoization
Continuing on this, let’s talk about ghettoization. This is a term describing the tendency of immigrants to form their own communities apart from mainstream society. This makes sense given everything we discussed; people generally prefer to be people similar to them.
Yet history has shown that governments work better when there is national unity. A nation of different ethnic enclaves each doing their own thing doesn’t sound like national unity. In fact, societies polarized among identity cleavages are more prone to civil conflict and corruption.
You don’t need to be an expert to realize this is precisely the direction the U.S. is headed. Just look at the DNC and RNC. It’s generally known that both parties are corrupt and politicians of all aisles untrustworthy. But it wasn’t always this way. Americans used to expect more, and I believe national unity was a major reason. A nation joined together by national unity and homogeneity enjoys institutional and socioeconomic advantages that the former doesn’t.
This is also one of the reasons the Nordic states have been so successful: they’re homogenous, highly group-oriented societies. Homogenous societies share much more than surface traits such as skin or eye color. They often share significant genetic overlap, are drawn together by shared history, and even experience and regulate emotions similarly. If you were ever introduced to the concepts of neurons that fire together or mirror neurons, you could get an idea to how accurate this is.
Now, an argument for the cultural and societal enrichment immigrants bring could be made if ghettoization wasn’t an issue. Having a bigger variety of food is a very low-hanging fruit talking point; I won’t harken on it. But it could still be extrapolated to make a wider point: having people from different walks of life and perspectives could enrich cultures.
This was certainly true in many periods of history. Trade of goods was beneficial for societies, but trade of ideas was just as good — if not better. The Romans owed much debt to the Greeks in creating their cultures. The Arab drew from many other cultures to form powerful Caliphates. Anthropologist Jared Diamond theorizes that Europe became dominant because it borrowed useful knowledge from all over the world.
Yet there’s another issue to consider: in the 21st Century, does this apply to every single type of immigrant? Apparently, certain types of immigrants tend to ghettoize, and certain types tend to integrate into their host society. Types such as economic migrants and illegal immigrants are of the first class. These are usually low-skill, not especially sought-after immigrants.
The second type are the types of people brought from non-developed nations through the process of brain drain. These are the H-1B Visa tech worker types: highly competent individuals are drawn to well-off countries with better quality of life. This is both because they’re competent enough that opportunities open up for them, and they’re smart enough to know they can increase their living standards.
This is a complex issue, probably mainly modulated by education and skills (which are predicted by IQ, so IQ is likely the main factor). However, if we’re talking about culturally enriching a country’s natives, very limited enrichment can happen when there are ghettos.
Unfortunately — for Europe specially — the type of migrants who are asylum seekers, illegals, or other types of unskilled migrants will tend to do just this. In contrast, immigrants such as the skilled H-1B tech workers tend to assimilate to wider society. They tend to adopt the culture, make friends with native people, and generally become akin to the native population.
Furthermore, we can safely predict the contributions of people who wouldn’t ghettoize. The brain drain crowd, being higher IQ, could be expected to contribute more to society and culture. As they would be more creative, thjey could contribute more to arts, technology, and other areas where more competent people shine at.
So far, we should take some notable points into consideration:
- The success of a nation has to do with how much national unity and trust there is.
- Certain types of people tend to integrate better and contribute more to the society they immigrate to
- These types of people are less likely to push for identity politics and form ethnic coalitions at the expense of society as a whole
This gives us some useful ideas. Although the conclusion seems to be headed in the way of creating very selective immigration policies, there are still a few issues we haven’t considered. These are the issues of economics, liberty/safety, and the ethical implications of mass imigration. I will explore these on later entries of this series.
