Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Immigration, Immigration, Immigration

"Stop it at once" sayeth Norman Tebbit in the Telegraph :

These islands are our islands. They do not belong to the political classes, the European Commission, the United Nations, nor the government of the day. We live here and it is we, the people, who have the absolute right to decide who may, and who may not, come here and upon what conditions they come. That is probably enough to have me held under suspicion of racism and worse...

I think that the massive, deliberate, uncontrolled, uncounted and often denied programme of mass immigration has more complex origins. There is within NuLab a detestation of much that is British quite unknown in the Labour Party of Attlee or Callaghan. It is often a form of self-hatred and guilt. Guilt about being born comfortably middle class, having been to a decent school and a private hospital. Guilt even about being born into a prosperous country with a glorious and proud history. Like Caliban, these people rage against their own image.
In Attlee's party, perhaps. Not necessarily in all of Callaghan's. And anyway, the 'we' who live here isn't the 'we' it used to be, and will be even less so in the future, even were all immigration to stop now.

UPDATE - Norm returns to the fray in his trademark combative style :

We could require schools to teach the history of this country, and I mean teach the history, not to teach pupils to engage in emotionally incontinent spasms about how a Roman soldier might have felt as he was mown down by Boadicea’s chariot, or how a black African being sold by other black Africans to an Arab slave trader might have have felt about that. What is needed is to teach how the people of these islands built a great nation. ...

And by the way, if you do not want your church to become a mosque, then you had best start going along and sitting in the pews.


BBC Radio Four has - for one week only, the following excellent programme :

In the past decade, Britain has experienced mass immigration on an unprecedented scale. A former government aide recently suggested this was a deliberate policy, motivated in part by a desire to increase racial diversity. David Goodhart investigates the ideological forces behind one of the most significant social changes to have affected the UK.

Andrew Neather, a former Number 10 speechwriter, recently wrote a much-discussed article in the Evening Standard in praise of multicultural London, but suggesting that those who have influenced immigration policy under Labour were politically-programmed to be relaxed about such numbers. His article was immediately seized upon by anti-immigration campaigners as evidence of a conspiracy to make Britain a more racially diverse society.

In this programme, David Goodhart investigates the truth about reasons for recent increases in migration to Britain. Political insiders, including former home secretary David Blunkett, talk candidly about the real influences behind the scenes. None of them give credence to the accusation that there was a plan to create a more multicultural Britain. An unexpected increase in asylum applications and the demand for cheap labour from employers were the main motivators, according to those who influenced policy. But, admits former Home Office special adviser Ed Owen, a nervousness about discussing immigration policy meant that New Labour was, in its first years in office, poorly prepared to deal with the issue.

We may not have witnessed a grand act of social engineering, concludes David Goodhart, but New Labour's combination of economic liberalism and cultural liberalism led it to regard mass immigration as a trend which would bring great social benefits and few disadvantages.

Interviewees include:

Rt Hon David Blunkett MP, former home secretary

Tim Finch, head of migration, equalities and citizenship, and director of strategic communications at the Institute for Public Policy Research

Andrew Neather, Comment editor at The Evening Standard and former Number 10 speechwriter.

Sir Andrew Green, Migrationwatch

Sarah Spencer, deputy director, Centre on Migration Policy and Society

John Tincey, Immigration Services Union

Ed Owen, former Home Office special adviser

Claude Moraes MEP.


Associated news story here - seems it was all a series of unfortunate events which is apparently the new narrative. The BBC seem to have decided that shouting 'racist' at any and every critic of mass immigration hasn't worked.

Podcast of the programme here - it's there for a week for download and the prog will apparently be repeated on Sun 14 Feb at 21.30. I didn't catch all of it last night, but what I did catch was good stuff. Recommended.



At Bronte Capital, an interesting piece by John Hempton on demographics and the national budget - from an Aussie perspective, but the principles apply to all welfare states.


Australia – like much of the developed world – has a demographic problem from aging baby boomers. Our dependency ration (the ratio of people of non-working age to working age) is increasing and likely to increase dramatically. Moreover the dependent group will shift from young people (who impose schooling expense) to old people who impose nursing home and medical expense. Old people generally cost more than young people and as we live in a country with (semi) socialised medicine that expense is likely to fall (heavily) on the Federal Budget.

Australia's national budget will thus become a little tighter each year. [This is in contrast to the glory days of the 70s and 80s where economic growth and baby boomers going through their years of peak productivity made the budget just a little easier to balance every year.]

The net effect is that something has to give. Either

(a) Australia cuts benefits to old people (and with socialized medicine that means deciding when you turn the respirator off) or

(b) Australia sharply increases taxes or

(c) Australia sharply change the mix of our population by having more babies or importing more people through immigration.

Some smaller things can work at the margin. For instance Australia can change ages at which people qualify for various pensions. This should keep old people in the workforce longer and hence reduce the dependency ratio. Also – as the working age population become the scarce factor wage levels for those still working should rise. The higher wages will attract some older people back into or into staying in the workforce. However these are effects are likely to be too small to overwhelm the main thesis.

With a good size baby boom and old people driving government expenditure (something that is certainly the case in the US) the problem is real and will remain intense.

The problem could be solved with very rapid economic growth – but the Australian Treasury models a quite high real rate of growth and Australia still has a problem. If economic growth were to decline to Japanese levels the fiscal imbalance by (say) 2030 would become very intense. [Australia could get very lucky with sharp increases in commodity prices. That sort of luck is possible because Australia is small – however that sort of luck will not bail out the US.]

By far the easiest solution is (c) - changing the mix of the population. Societies are not good at rationing health care expenditure for the elderly and there are limits to the ability of smaller open economies (such as Australia) to keep increasing taxes. [Though in my view a little of both these things will happen.]


Hempton comments :

Everyone that matters in Australia knows that the easiest solution is (c). Peter Costello – Australia's last Treasury (in the US context read Secretary of the Treasury) knew this and advocated women having three children – one for mum, one for dad and one for the country. **

Costello had his eye on the future fiscal balance (as he should) but there is an undertone of racism in his pronouncement. Australia's population is a matter of choice because there is an endless supply of skilled and/or needy immigrants who want to live in Australia and the main case for having babies over importing people is that the babies are probably white.

Anyway the core way that Australia is balancing the long term budget is through immigration. If you want to solve the problem that way you need very large immigration now so that in 30 years the you get the right dependency ratio. That – for better or for worse – is what the government is currently doing. Australia's immigration rate is massive – roughly 1 percent of the population per year. That level of immigration will have Australia on the path to a 50 million population (currently 21 million) by the year 2050.
Maybe I'm dumb, but it seems to me that the policy isn't any more sustainable there than it is here. So you import enough immigrants to fix the dependency ratio 30 years hence. Either their fertility tends towards the fertility of the host community, in which case you're just moving back the identical demographic problem for another generation (to be solved by another influx ? - compound interest says you'll run out of land before too long, even in Oz) , or it doesn't - in which case it's likely

a) that you've also got cultural separation

b) that the ethnic balance of the population will tip more and more towards the incomers

Those two together aren't good juju.


The Aussies have some good ideas. We could do with an Intergenerational Report - not to mention a Charter of Budget Honesty.

Under the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998 an Intergenerational Report is required every five years.

The reports focus on the implications of demographic change for economic growth and assess the financial implications of continuing current policies and trends over the next four decades.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

In australia there still the 'too old at fourty' notion regarding employment.
And it seems odd that immigration just must be of people racially an tribally as disimilar as possible.
In any nation just importing people turns the nation into a people parking lot.
How integrated is the USA?

All bearing in mind that Australia is running out of water and other goodies.

Anonymous said...

I think the whole idea is nuts.
I met a lady last week who was 80, she looked about 60 (maybe a little more), I said she was doing well, she replied her parents lived to 96.

Some of my aunts and uncles are around 70, but they are still fit, not like a 70 year old from 20 years ago.

People aren't just living longer in a state of ill health, people are remaining healthier for longer too.

Our economies should actually be benefiting because we should have more people 'able' to work longer.

A plus is being turned into a negative because of the political tribalism over the retirement age.

Anonymous said...

seems it was all a series of unfortunate events which is apparently the new narrative.

It was an accident.

Or maybe not:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/7198329/Labours-secret-plan-to-lure-migrants.html

The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”.

Sgt Troy 11th Dragoon Guards said...

"Maybe I'm dumb, but it seems to me that the policy isn't any more sustainable there than it is here. So you import enough immigrants to fix the dependency ratio 30 years hence......."

It's just a completely desperate and self-serving argument by the commies. They hate us, they loathe the indigenous people of these islands - even though the perverse, self-loathing malignants are mostly exactly that themselves.

We are bankrupt and sliding rapidly down the tube right now. So 30 years and so forth is a rather academic consideration anyway, in 30 years we will be a third world hell-hole the way things are going.

We haven't got a labour shortage, we have never had a labour bloody shortage - except perhaps during the Black Death

During the war we were knocking out stuff left right and centre, and there were millions in the forces.

Now we produce xxxx all

There are 8 millions "economically inactive"

It is absurd

If we are short of hands then we can have the kind of morons who wrote this Zanu report down the mines and picking cabbages in the fields

And if they start slacking they will feel my boot and the flat of my sabre!

Anonymous said...

The idea of promoting alien immigration for the 'social benefits' is a really perverse and unbalanced idea and could only be persued by people totally devoid from normal feelings of solidarity and sympathy for their own folk. Maybe its a caucasian disease only. I'm pretty sure I undestand this. It's is a kind of intellectual perversion of values. It gives me the same sort of feeling as some kind of sexual perversion which is why I use the word advisedly and I'm no prude. I am from a white working class backgroud but was once a state educated welfare state commie (a real one not a trot) and got to know the tribe - becoming brainwashed myself in the process. Strangley I'd say it was the type of commie who liked putting 'new' in front of everything. I even had tha shock of rememberance the other day when I remembered the 'New Communist Party' - which blazed the trail before New Labour. You could do a kind of 'family tree' of the groups and people involved in this and how they fed into NEW Labour in the style of the 'Rock Family Tree' familiar to everyone over 40. New Labour were the ones who wanted a career and kept out of the commie parties. The careerist ones. But they read the same garbage and breathed the same air. Your old stalinist, sick criminal fucks though they were, were unthinkingly loyal to their own land and people - in their own limited imagination. This sort of thing never occured to them. They had ethnic states in the USSR and they found this a comfortable idea. Really simple minded sods. But something happened somewhere in the 70s. Eurocommunism anyone? All that stuff and the dissapointment the intellectuals felt with the working class. They are a sepeate group - it runs in families like bohemianism. It was probably a profound disgust. The working class was not not good enough or interesting enough for them. They have no real connection with the indigenous working class outside their metropolitan bohemian areas. And there are all these awwwful people making money who have no liberal education - horror of horrors! Yorkshire mining villages are like Pakistani 'tribal areas' to them. Foreigners are so much more ..... cosmopolitan .... aren't they? They are driven by destructive hate and the desire for power. Full Stop.

Ed West said...

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."

Sgt Troy 11th Dragoon Guards said...

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly"

You really can't beat Marcus Tullius. As Consul he had the Cataline conspirators garroted - normal practice was exile, but the danger to the Republic was so extreme that resolute and merciless action was absolutely necessary. It was argued that there was no point in trying to obtain redress after Rome had been destroyed

In an epic legal action, in which he acted as prosecutor though he normally preferred acting for the defence, Cicero secured a guilty verdict against the monstrously corrupt Gaius Verres - Governor of Sicily, an evil man by all accounts, a monster

Cicero said something to the effect, and I think this apt, that once politicians had conveyed the impression to the public that they cared more about foreigners than their own people - they were finished

Mark said...

Tebbitt's trumpet blast in the Telegraph may be rousing stuff but he (and other Tories from the Thatcher vintage) should ask themselves this question- what did they do when in power to plug the glaring loophole in our electoral laws that grants commonwealth citizens full voting rights on arrival in the UK ?

They did nothing, of course, despite knowing full well that commonwealth citizens from the subcontinent, West Africa, and the Caribbean, were and are overwhelmingly Labour voting (if they vote at all!). Why then did they hold back from a measure restricting the franchise for commonwealth citizens when it was actually in their electoral interest to do so (quite apart from it being the right thing to do, as no other commonwealth country reciprocates such a right to UK citizens) ?

This loophole is certainly one of the 'other benefits' Neather and his ilk referred to in their unredacted report from 2000, now out in the open thanks to the Migrationwatch FOIA request. Large scale immigration from the 'new commonwealth' means, in electoral terms, the augmentation of an already significant Labour-leaning vote bank. (Or at least it did mean that until 2005- see below*)

* One of the reasons New Labouristas were so angry at Galloway winning Bethnal Green in 2005 was the sense of betrayal they felt after 'all they had done' for the Bangladeshis in the constituency over the years- the abolition of the 'primary purpose' rule, and all that casework assisting them in accessing social housing, welfare benefits & healthcare, and in getting 'family reunion' visas for their relatives. And then they have the cheek to vote Respect, not NuLab ! What ingratitude !

Anonymous said...

Laban,

compare and contrast. The Times has an article by an Asian journalist who thinks illegals should be legalised and The Telegraph has 3 articles about New Labour's plan to destroy Britain through mass immigration.

The next election is going to be critical. What ids your take Laban? I think the only option is abstain. If enough of us do that it could precipitate a real political crisis.

Anonymous said...

Ed West,

who you quoting?

my comment should read:

'what is your take, Laban?'

'I think the only option is to abstain.'

Sorry, should not type when pissed off.

Richard

Anonymous said...

I have spent the past 35 years earning my living, and paying tax and NI. I have also kept every payslip I have ever had, so I have been able to calculate my total income tax NI deductions. So far it is above £300 000. I'm just a bit above the average wage, but it mounts up over the years. Out of what I had left, I paid for my private pension, and VAT on everything I ever bought. Can't even calculate that.

When I retire, they will give me something in the region of £5000 per year. If I'm still around, 15 years after my retirement(optimistic), I will have had £75 000 total return on about £350 000 of deductions.

We are carrying far too much dead weight in our welfare state. It's the idlers we can't afford. They can get annual benefits of far more than $5K a year, and get it every year of their lives. Just one scrounger gets all the rest of the deductions that I have paid. Often far more.

That is the problem we should be dealing with. Not allowing folk to work all their lives and then as soon as they retire pretend they are a burden to society.

Sgt Troy said...

"Ed West,

who you quoting?"

He's quoting Marcus Tullius Cicero

Roman lawyer and politician

bodo said...

If we really are facing a demographic timebomb, and I'm not convinced we are, then there are only two sensible ways to counter it, either encourage the natives to produce more children, or introduce fixed term work permits for foreigners -- rigorously enforced so they return home when the permits expire. The work permit scheme works just fine in lots of other countries, plenty of willing participants, and all the benefits (?) of a flexible pool of labour without any of the unwanted side-effects of mass immigration. If only we had had such a policy over recent decades the country would be a much better shape, and with a much brighter future.

Foxy Brown said...

@Ed West & Sgt. Troy,

He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

How unfortunate that the death penalty for treason was abolished in 1998.

Borealis said...

Costello had his eye on the future fiscal balance (as he should) but there is an undertone of racism in his pronouncement. Australia's population is a matter of choice because there is an endless supply of skilled and/or needy immigrants who want to live in Australia and the main case for having babies over importing people is that the babies are probably white [etc., etc.]

Ya know, I can't be the only one out here who's become deeply, deeply, deeply weary of these "Man is made for the economy, not the economy for Man" jackasses. Sorry, but there is something missing, something profoundly "off" in people like Hempton, with their "applied autism" approach to human existence. If people are merely inter-changeable widgets (and what kind of racist thinks otherwise?) then importing people is inarguably a wiser choice than "growing your own", because children, unlike workers brought in in their prime, are unproductive "cost centers" for a time, and therefore the sort of widgets that a prudent manager will ruthlessly reduce to a minimum to maximize profit.

So I have to wonder if Hempton's invocation of "racist overtones" was really as eye-rollingly stupid and juvenile as it came across, or if it's used consciously and cynically to advance the preferred Widget Agenda of the empty de-cultured globe-ots.

I think I've read variants of this "interesting piece" a thousand times in the last decade, but I've long since stopped taking these Infinite Growth clowns seriously. Do they sincerely believe that they have some omniscient insight into not-terribly-predictable fertility trends? That societies cannot adjust to the (passing) problems brought on by "too many oldsters" (alternating eternally with "too many babies") for the next few decades? Is it really inconceivable to them that a nation can muddle through the inevitable breakdown of generational Ponzi schemes and runaway entitlement growth? (You think mankind had never seen worse times.) Are they really so daft, so delusional about basic human nature, that they think that policies guaranteed to balkanize (at best) or (at worst) lay waste to centuries of build-up of social capital are some kind of "fix"? Fix? Hooh yeah, they'll fix it good.

(And, btw, I'd like to have a chat about "dying Japan" with some of these guys 50 years hence. I don't have the clairvoyant powers they claim, but, you know what? I confidently claim that the Japanese will still be around, their race and culture alive and kicking. Not a has-been island of centenarians tended by robots, either)

Brittanicus said...

There is an illegal alien deterrent gaining momentum in the United States. It is called E-Verify, a computer program that could be adapted for Britain's use.Through not mandated, is becoming very popular in the business sector. Using the Social Security, Homeland Security data bases it identifies unauthorized workers. Right now penalties are not that strict, but public attention is reigning in corrupt politicians who are pandering to open border lobbyists. If you want to learn more go to NUMBERSUSA Dot Com and JUDICIAL WATCH Dot Org in America for inspiration that patriotic indigenous British/English can use. INTRODUCE THIS IDEA TO YOUR MORE HONEST CONSERVATIVE AND LABOR REPRESENTATIVES?

isle of man mansions; said...

What about freedom of movement?

Anonymous said...

Funny, we worry about elderly dependents being too numerous to cope with but don't bat an eyelid when extending the age at which working life is expected to start for the young.

As far as I can see there is enough housing, food and heating for all of us indigenous Brits to live happily ever after without too much effort. Only 1% of GDP is made up by farming - so presumably it doesn't take so many man houre to create a lifetimes supply of food? You do the math. The cost of housing is inflated only by our willingness to sell our working souls to the bank. We are being played and immigration and the excuses that lie behind it are part of the game.

It is time for the middle classes and the working classes to unite against the political class. But we are all too busy working to take them on.

Anonymous said...

"It is time for the middle classes and the working classes to unite against the political class. But we are all too busy working to take them on."

Check out 2 mins 32 secs into this youtube clip when a top US left politico says the middle classes won't notice they are bing screwed in relation to the US stimulus plan going to favoured groups.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opxuUj6vFa4

Anonymous said...

The subtext to policy was all about Liebour importing voters.

Anonymous said...

I think all these played a part:-

making Britain multicultural (and thus weakening its strongly anti-socialist native culture)

importing cheap labour for government expansion of the NHS etc.

importing socialist voters

placating existing ethnic minority voters

fear of ethnic voters and possible accusations of racism

a belief that "lifeboat Britain" should save as many of the poor souls in less affluent countries as possible.

An unwillingness to admit that EU laws on movement of labour were ruining the ability of the British working class to compete in the marketplace.

An unwilligness to admit that the BNP are a left-wing organisation with support mainly from the working class.

These factors play a part in whatever Western country has a socialist government, whenever they have power. At the moment, almost 50% of Labour's vote is coming from the ethnic minorities.