Mass Immigration is not Beneficial to Host Societies
"...a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one."
One of the arguments that we always hear from promoters of open immigration is that immigrants bring unique talents and exceptional skills which enrich and advance their host societies. If you listen to folks like Alex Nowrasteh and the Cato Institute, you’d believe that every third world immigrant introduced into an advanced Western nation creates a synergistic effect of unparalleled economic growth and technological innovation. Why this didn’t happen in the third world is a question left politely unanswered. Nevertheless, libertarians are absolutely sure that the more foreigners you introduce into a country, the better it is for all involved.
There are, of course, several problems with this thesis.
The first is that it lumps all “immigration” into one basket, which is not and never has been a rational approach to this type of question. What is the context in which the immigration is taking place? What is the number of immigrants involved? What are the characteristics and capabilities of the immigrants incoming? There is a huge difference, for instance, between an occasional high IQ Elon Musk being introduced and a million low IQ peons from the third world. To pretend that they are the exact same thing and discuss them in that way is (at best) intellectual dishonesty.
So also is trying to compare 19th century immigration into the United States with post-1965 immigration reform inflow. The one involved an open system where there were still huge opportunities for growth and expansion, the other involve(s) a closed system into which more and more people are being stuffed to distribute an increasingly limited amount of pie.
Libertarians can cry about people saying so all they want, but the fact remains that potential immigrants come with varying levels of quality and that this quality has as much to do with ethnic and cultural compatibility with the population of the host society as it does any abilities (or lack thereof) on the part of the immigrants. Something that Cato Institute types cannot seem to wrap their heads around is that people are not fungible. People are not just replaceable parts that can be swapped out from one society to another. Immigrants who come from places that are culturally closer to their host society are more easily assimilated and therefore more of them can be tolerated than from more ethnoculturally distant lands. Norway could more easily assimilate Danes or Swedes than it could Namibians and therefore in theory could handle larger numbers of the former than the latter.
And therein lies a key concept that libertarians and other open immigrationists avoid, which is that of assimilation. Liberals (which include libertarians, by the way) hate the idea of a host society requiring any immigrants it receives to assimilate. This is because assimilation, when done right, involves a lot more than just passibly learning the native language and not grossly offending the natives in public settings. It essentially means to leave behind your native culture and to fully adopt that of your host - essentially you stop being your former culture and start being the culture of your new land. This obviously doesn’t mesh with modern America in which every immigrant seems like they preface half of what they say with “in my (fill in the blank) culture back home…” To be truly assimilated means there is no “back home” anymore.
Yet, assimilation is an extremely difficult thing to do, and the more culturally distant an immigrant is from their host society, the more difficult it becomes. Indeed, when you have large numbers of immigrants in a country, they don’t assimilate but instead tend to form segregated enclaves that are characterised by increasing hostility over time toward their host society, as well as the formation of ethnic gangs which exist to exploit the “fringe economics” of their adopted polities.
Any society that does choose to accept immigration into it would be wise to engineer hierarchical structures into place that allow for immigrants to be “fostered” (so to speak) by members and institutions within the host society to enforce assimilation. Trying to accept large numbers of immigrants into an egalitarian society is a fool’s errand and will eventually break the entire system.
The testimony of this from history confirms the argument that mass immigration does, in fact, constitute invasion most of the time, even if that was not the original intention of those who began immigrating. When assimilation does not take place, the segregated enclaves I mentioned above tend to grow larger and take advantage of their host societies. This was the case, for example, with the various Germanic groups who began entering Roman territory in the late 4th century. At least at the beginning, these incursions were not necessarily meant to be outright invasions. Often the Germani were just looking for land and were willing to become Roman subjects. But as their numbers increased so did their ambitions and the rest is history.
So while small amounts of immigration from selected sources may sometimes be beneficial to a host society that needs a particular skill set or whatever, mass immigration is pretty much never a net positive for any society, and its disingenuous for open immigrationists to conflate the two types together.
The willingness to believe the fantasy that immigration is always beneficial leads these folks into their second error, which is economic in form. Libertarians, like many others in the general neo-liberal axis of modernist thought, confuse GDP and “the big number go up” for genuine economic prosperity and innovation. The problem with using GDP as a metric for growth is that it really doesn’t reflect what would traditionally have been thought of as “growth” anymore. Instead, it reflects “paper” wealth (which is really not wealth in any real sense of the term) that has more to do with corporate bottom lines than it does concrete growth or production.
What’s one of the best ways to improve a business’ bottom line? By replacing a lot of those expensive American workers with cheaper immigrants, whether legally here under a visa program or illegally so and paid under the table. But the problem is that there’s no really solid evidence that immigrants are actually beneficial or more capable than the American workers they’re replacing. H1Bers and other “legal” immigrants are to be included in this statement as they are not, in fact, a net positive for our society. They’re doing essentially the same jobs as the Americans they replace, except generally not as well.
This isn’t just “gut instinct” either. The rate at which we have seen genuine technological innovation (i.e. not just new smartphone apps and so forth) in the West has actually been slowing down over the past few decades. This innovative glaciation tracks pretty well with the increasing “immigrantisation” of the economies of the USA and other western powers post-1965. My own experience from two decades as a scientist in a high tech industry confirmed this for me as Visa-Americans simply were not, on average, as knowledgeable, innovative, or capable as my American colleagues. Multiply that across many industries over a few decades and you have measurable economic stunting.
But the issue is being compounded by a more sophisticated version of the ethnic gang formation that I mentioned above. As immigrant economic mercenaries colonise portions of our economy (see, e.g., the “Indianisation” of the American tech sector), ethnic nepotism accelerates the process as they preferentially open doors for their co-ethnics at the expense of everyone else (including, of course, native born Americans). These in positions to do so then lobby for more visas to be made available to their own. While they’re not exactly synergising our economy, they are doing so for their own ethnic cartels. Despite libertarian claims that immigrants just “work harder” and “do better,” they’re really excelling only because their ethnic cartels are able to rig the system for them. Every game is always easier to win when you have the cheat codes.
This leads me to my third point, which is that there are several demographic-structural problems relating to immigration. As I said above, the process of companies saving money by hiring less expensive immigrants over American workers really isn’t economic growth, per se. It’s just a way to milk more of our consoooomerist society’s resources for socioeconomic elites, which is entirely in line with our late-stage demographic-structural collapse phase. In short, they “make” more money from consumers while not having to “return” as much money to the workers who labour for them, which results in a net aggregation of resources in the form of dividends and golden parachutes for elites.
Also, visa holders are basically beholden to their employers and thus form another client group which allows their industries to compete with other pressure groups in intraelite competitive situations. In return for personal mercenary benefits, immigrants are turned into clients of economic elites. As clients, they are expected to use their economic and political clout in support of their patrons. Even outside the corporate offices, immigrants are often the most supportive of progressive economic and social policies both because these are demanded by most of our elite stratum and because these tend to benefit immigrants (most of whom now qualify as minorities under our ethnic preference laws). As such, the exigencies of our collapse phase economic situation create the conditions which further accelerate that collapse by incentivising those contributing to it in the first place.
As is typical in late demographic-structural stages, what is good for the elites is usually bad for the commons. Mass immigration is no different. There are very real and very negative demographic-structural consequences to mass immigration that grossly harm societies that allow it. Mass immigration increases ethnic diversity. Despite the catchphrases to the contrary, diversity is NOT and has NEVER BEEN a strength. Instead, ethnic diversity contributes to severe structural weaknesses in any society afflicted with it. Usually, when open immigrationists tout the “benefits” of mass immigration, they point to superficial examples of “cultural enrichment” like exotic foods or clothing. Yet, access to spicy foods doesn’t outweigh the problems associated with crime, nepotism, and reduced social cohesion.
Really, even if there were merit in the “economic” arguments for mass immigration, this would still be entirely beside the point. There is more to life than “line on graph goes up.” It’s much better to have higher social cohesion and a generally happier people than it is to have a bunch of atomised and tranquilised economic consumer units mindlessly sitting in front of their Netflix in between trips to the big box stores. Certainly there’s no reason why any people should have to tolerate any other people imposing themselves on them. In times past this was known as invasion and was resisted, even if often unsuccessfully.
In summary, there are really no good arguments in favour of allowing mass immigration into Western societies. The social damage is simply too great, the loss of social cohesion too acute to be mitigated by any other factors. The supposed economic benefits, in reality, are only enjoyed by a disinterested transnational elite which is only interested in squeezing as much out of the grapefruit as they can before casting it aside. Perhaps when sanity has been restored after the beginning of the next cycle, we may once again focus on strengthening our own societies instead of turning them into charity offices for foreign economic mercenaries.