The Osmosis of Third World Immigration

Conservative Swede and I engage in a lively and almost non-stop correspondence via email. We discuss the Counterjihad, immigration, Multiculturalism, political correctness, the imaginary bugbear of a resurgent Nazism in Europe, and many other related issues. CS has one of the finest intellects of anybody I know, and, except for dinner-table discussions with Dymphna, there is no more stimulating conversation to be had on these issues.

CS and I exchanged a series of emails last night and this morning concerning PC ideology, Mark Steyn’s writings, and the importation of Third World immigrants into the West. The back-and-forth arguments helped clarify my thinking on the issue, and so I am presenting a slightly expanded version of them here.

Whenever Conservative Swede and I have a spirited discussion on an issue, we inevitably come to a point of agreement, after arguing through the terminology and elaborating on our respective choice of words.

This is one such case, and the essay below is as much his as it is mine.


All across the West, in virtually every country except for Japan and some of the recently-liberated former Communist countries in Central Europe, immigration from the Third World has accelerated enormously.

In the United States the flood comes in from Mexico. In Europe the newcomers originate in Turkey, Pakistan, North Africa, and the Arab Middle East. In Australia immigrants pour in from South Asia and the Chinese diaspora. Virtually anybody in the world who can scrape up the money for a plane ticket to Toronto is welcomed in Canada.

This simultaneity of action is, obviously, aided by the pernicious Multicultural ideology which has gradually infected the entire West over the last two generations. The makers of fashionable opinion have determined that it is acceptable for us to dilute, enervate, and even destroy our traditional societies, but they don’t stop there. Such cultural suicide is deemed desirable, and even a moral imperative, by the Gramscians who have imperceptibly supplanted any alternative schools of thought within the academic bastions that generate the conventional wisdom.

However, there is an additional pressure that helps to keep the immigration valves wide open in the West. The demographic debacle that is looming before all advanced Western countries creates an economic process that would be all but irresistible even if there were no politically correct ideology driving the current cultural train wreck.
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Our nations are analogous to cells in an organism, and their borders constitute a semi-permeable membrane. People passing through these membranes are like chemical compounds entering and leaving a cell. An osmotic pressure on one side or the other pushes and pulls people through such border-membranes.

This osmotic pressure is an economic one. As countries become affluent, their birthrates decline, so that eventually their populations also decline, as is happening now to the original natives in several European countries and Japan.

Affluence means that people are relatively well-educated and are accustomed to a high rate of pay and benefits. This generates high expectations — people live well, expect meaningful employment, and resist any reduction of their living standards.

To mix metaphors a bit, the modern Western nations form the “climax forest” of our sociocultural ecology. The denizens of that lofty canopy will do anything to stay up near the top, and strive vigorously against forces trying to drag them down into the dark loam on the forest floor.

But within our societies lawns still need to be mowed. Rubbish has to be collected. Bedpans in our hospitals must be emptied. There are fewer and fewer people to do these jobs, so the wages are bid upwards by ordinary economic processes. If the wage is high enough, obviously, willing workers can always be found

However, because of the welfare state, the people who might do such work are more likely to say, “To hell with that. I can live on the dole and not have to empty bedpans.”

This situation makes it possible for companies that import foreigners, or utilize those foreigners already resident, to make a lot of money by using those foreigners. If there is commercial competition within a country — and there is still quite a bit here in the USA — then the companies using cheap foreign labor will be more successful and prevail against their competitors. The result is that the whole process, acting via the “invisible hand”, tends to pull in more foreigners.

In other words, there is money to be made from doing it. That’s what I mean by “osmotic pressure” — it’s a virtually irresistible economic imperative. As we all know, when money is to be made from an activity, that activity is bound to occur. Where it is not only legal, but encouraged by elite opinion, it will flourish.

Furthermore, when you add ideology to the mix, the problem becomes much worse. In Sweden the ideological motive may far exceed the economic one, since business competition is greatly reduced in Sweden due to the overwhelming intervention of the socialist state.

But that’s not so true in Ireland, for example, which has healthy economic competition, and the Multicultural regime there is not as advanced. Yet Ireland has imported an astonishing number of Muslim immigrants in recent years. So ideology alone is not a sufficient explanation of what is occurring.

If the demographic issue were the only one in play, then the problems brought on by a declining population would be self-correcting. Eventually, when the ratio of elderly people to young people became high enough, the welfare state would collapse. Old people who could neither rouse themselves from retirement and do productive work nor be cared for by their families would be euthanized. Young people would have economic incentives to have children, since after fifteen years or so a batch of children would be a productive asset to a household.

The outcome would be ugly, unprincipled, and sometimes violent. Correction would take a couple of generations, but it would happen.

However, when you combine the multiculti ideology with an economic osmotic pressure drawing in Muslims at an accelerating pace, the problem becomes much, much worse. Hence the potential apocalypse that is rolling towards us so rapidly.


Note to those who love to quote me out of context: the nasty scenario described above is not one that I prefer or recommend. It is simply one that I deduce to be likely under the assumed premises.