MIGRATION
As a proportion of the world's
surface, Europe isn't very big. However, the proportion of that which is habited
is very big. Right now, Europe is far from 'full'. Of course we can't
'let everyone in', simply because if we did then we'd have a situation where
many countries began to depend almost wholly for their income on workers living
abroad, while the country itself (robbed of its tax revenue and the workers
themselves) began to collapse.
Which is the real problem
with immigration; these people come from somewhere, not out of thin air. While
the money they send home is certainly good in the short term, it doesn't really
improve their country, as simply the people aren't there to improve
it. They're cleaning toilets in South London. But we need these people
too; we need immigrants, and a continuous flow of young immigrant workers, to
keep Britain and Europe running. We have an ageing population and a falling
birthrate, and were we to stop or significantly curb immigration then we'd rapidly
find we would have to work a lot older, well into our seventies. The only other
alternatives would involve 1984- or Communist China-style social engineering,
whereby 'natives' are encouraged to breed more often, and the elderly are 'put
down' after they become a drain on the system. I'd prefer not to live in that
society, thanks.
Not
only do we need young immigrants to work, and to make up for the shortfall in
our population growth, we need an influx of them. Immigrant birth rates might
be several times higher than 'native' birthrates, but it's the jobs that immigrants
do that we need them for. Jobs that are so absolutely dire that most white people
don't even know they exist, let alone apply for them. Most of these jobs involve
substances we'd prefer never to encounter at all, and certainly not on a daily
basis. We need immigrants to wipe up after our elderly and our drunks, and to
work in hazardous or at least very unpleasant enviroments with appaling hours
and poor pay. No one who whinges about immigrants 'taking' jobs ever complains
that they take these kind of jobs. We don't hear anyone who votes BNP
declaiming, "I applied for the job of shit-scraper for the council, but
found some Paki had got it instead! I've wanted all my life to be a shit-scraper!"
Who the hell wants to do these jobs, anyway? I don't. And all the white people
who're out of work don't, either.
The reason we need an influx,
a steady 'flood' of immigration, is because I've as yet never met a second or
third generation immigrant who followed in his or her father's footsteps. That
is, I've never met a second-generation Bengali who cleans up vomit and half-eaten
kebabs, just like his father did. Nor have I met many Pakistanis who took over
their father's job picking the condoms out of the bushes on Clapham Common.
Rather, I've met second generation immigrants who went to university, started
businesses, made money, worked hard, became successful. It's no good 'letting
immigrants in' and expecting them to become our new labour slaves. Because our
immigrant policy is so strict, the people who get here are the bloody-minded
and determined sort, and in a generation or two they don't 'steal' jobs, they
create them.
The
problem, then, is that this is a temporary fix situation. We need a constant
influx of immigrants to do the jobs we don't want to, and to make up for fall
in population. But the reason this can't continue indefinitely is not because
of what it does to our country, but what it does to their country.
We can't have a situation where all the poor people in the world just move house
to where the rich people live. What we need to do is to redistribute the wealth;
not to invest in foreign countries just as a source of cheap labour to make
our plastic crap for us, but to help make these countries as rich as we
are. There's plenty of food to go around, god knows we eat most of it,
and plenty of money. The only way that the world can be stabilised is not by
halting immigration, but by halting the need to emigrate. If people
are paid a decent wage in their own country, they'd have no need to move to
London and pick the needles out of public toilets. What needs to be done, and
it really is essential, is that multinationals pay people in the Far East or
Eastern Europe the same as they pay workers in the U.S. or Western Europe. They
can afford it. We know they can afford it, because ten years ago they did
afford it, when they employed people in the U.S. for a decent wage (before closing
the plant in Michigan and relocating abroad to exploit the Indonesians.)
The problem with immigration
is that we're too damn rich. The world is lopsided. It's completely insane that
a shop-owner in Madras can move to London and earn significantly more money,
in a day, than he'd earn in India in a month. We in the West got where we are
through hard work and ruthless but clever politics, but in order for our own
countries to survive we have to redistribute our power. Of course we'll still
need someone to wipe up after our grandparents, but hopefully in a few years
we'll have robots to do that.
