Identity, Immigration, and Islam

El Inglés returns with another guest essay, this time about the collision between national identity and mass immigration, especially Muslim immigration.


Identity, Immigration, and Islam
by El Inglés

We have allowed our Islamic cancer to metastasize without limits because we feared ourselves more than the enemy.

Section 1 — Identity

In November 2006, a documentary called ‘100% English’ was broadcast on British TV. Eight people who identified themselves as being entirely English were quizzed on their beliefs as to the criteria that would have to be satisfied for someone to qualify as being English. Each one of the eight also provided a DNA sample that was used to determine their genetic background by subdividing their DNA into four categories: European, Native American, Sub-Saharan African, and East Asian. The results of the tests were then conveyed to them, and their responses recorded.

The program, though interesting, was unconvincing in some regards. So many of the eight seemed to be genetically atypical for Northern Europeans that it was hard to avoid the conclusion that a larger number had in fact been involved in the production, and the less surprising results discarded. More fundamentally, though the program did a reasonably good job of exposing the difficulties of deciding what Englishness might consist of, it made no attempts to formulate any answers to this question itself, and seemed intellectually hollow as a result.

Now, needless to say, the program was not a piece of disinterested investigation, but rather a piece of implicit advocacy for a ‘We Are the World’ perspective on mass immigration. Incurable cynic that I am, I was left unmoved by this clumsy attempt at indoctrination when I recently succeeded in tracking the program down online. However, I was fascinated by the obvious sense of disapproval directed towards one of the participants who replied in the negative when asked whether Ian Wright, a black British footballer who had played for the English football team, could be considered English. Of course, decent people in the UK today are expected to vehemently disagree with those who express such opinions. But, having shed such intellectual taboos as I once possessed over the last few years, it was far from obvious to me on what grounds one might be expected to disagree at all. If the rejection of black people as being English was wrong, how was it wrong?

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast majority of people with motorcycle licenses in the UK also have normal driving licenses. If one were to argue, however, that the converse was also necessarily the case and that a majority of those with normal driving licenses also held motorcycle licenses, one would have committed a logical fallacy. Do we detect some similar logical fallacy in the claim that black people (however defined) cannot be English? I do not see that we do, for if logic had anything to say on the subject, it would surely have said it by now. A hundred years ago, virtually every English person would have rejected the potential Englishness of black people; today, a majority accept it. But this is clearly not a movement towards or away from more logical thought processes. Rejecting the notion that black people can be English is not illogical.

Moving on, if I assert that the gravitational force mutually exerted by two bodies is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance between them, I have made a claim that can be rejected as incorrect on empirical grounds. The claim is observably untrue, if one has the scientific prowess to make the requisite observations. Can we talk about the potential Englishness of black people in these terms? Could we imagine a scientist emerging from the laboratory with a test-tube fizzing away in each hand, claiming to have proved that black people can or cannot be English? I think not. One can observe black people in England, but not Englishness in black people. Rejecting the notion that black people can be English is not flawed on empirical grounds, as empirical evidence cannot be brought to bear on the question one way or the other.

There is only one other obvious sense in which the rejection of the potential Englishness of black people can be considered wrong, and that, of course, is the sense that it is morally wrong. For myself, I cannot see that the claim ‘black people cannot be English’ is a claim that has any moral content at all. It may have moral implications, but it has no moral content. One can advocate policies of whatever sort on the basis of whether or not one claims that black people can be English, but there are no policies that follow inevitably from either claim. It is perfectly possible to believe that black people should not be allowed to immigrate to England but can become English should they get there, and equally possible to believe that they should be allowed in but can never really be English however many generations they may be there for. These combinations of opinion may be uncommon, but they certainly exist.

Let me illustrate the distinction by way of a different example. There are those who would argue that if Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is correct, then human beings are merely animals and morality does not exist. Let us suppose for a moment that they are correct. Does this imbue the claim that Darwin’s theory is in fact correct with moral content? I would argue that it does not. The claim that Darwin’s theory is correct has potentially massive moral implications, but it is not intrinsically moral or immoral. It is simply an empirical claim, whether it is true or false. The claim that black people cannot be English similarly falls into a category of claim other than the moral.

I have now argued that a denial of the potential Englishness of black people in question is not a claim that can be refuted logically, undermined by any kind of empirical evidence, or criticized for its moral content, because it has none. But it is obviously some sort of claim. It is not an incomprehensible string of gibberish. What other type of claim could it be?
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The word elephant is used to refer to a large mammal, characterized by large ears, tusks, and a prehensile nose called a trunk. There is no logical, empirical, or moral reason that the word elephant should refer to said mammal, but it does nonetheless, at least in English. To rephrase slightly, there is an overwhelming consensus amongst English speakers that the word elephant refers to elephants. When we call elephants elephants, we implicitly claim that the word elephant maps onto a particular type of animal. This is to say that we make a definitional claim, which can only be considered true or false by reference to whether or not relevant parties happen to consider it true or false. I can refer to elephants as parasols, or indeed parasols as elephants, without falling into logical, empirical or moral error, though communication with other English speakers may well become difficult and tiresome whenever the subject of elephants (or parasols) comes up. But if I do so, I will be committing a definitional error, at least until such time as my usage becomes prevalent. Definitional error is rarely absolute, and can turn into definitional correctness via a physical relocation or the passing of time. The opposite is also true.

I argue here that the claim that black people cannot be English is virtually identical in nature to the claim that the word elephant refers to a certain type of animal. I am not arguing that in 21st-century Britain the rejection of the possibility of black people being English is as universal as the correct understanding of the word elephant. Nor am I suggesting that it should be. I am simply trying to point out that, in the final analysis, Englishness is whatever English people say it is and that one cannot meaningfully appeal against their decision, any more than one can appeal against the current meaning of the word elephant. It is interesting to note (and this touches on the question of whether denying the potential Englishness of black people can be considered immoral) that there is very little, if anything, in definitional claims that could be considered volitional in nature. People simply do not decide what to make of the word elephant. If you were to kidnap a man’s family and tell him to call elephants parasols and parasols elephants if he wanted them back unharmed, he would undoubtedly comply, but he will not believe that the referents of these two words have changed in any meaningful sense. So it is with identity. It can evolve over time, and it may be that certain concepts of identity will be presented as being functionally superior to others. But people will either accept them at an instinctive level or not at all.

This makes the attempts of government and large portions of the media to try to impose a new definition of British identity by fiat so alarming. Britain is now a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural country, our betters tell us. We have moved from the dull, uninspiring, vanilla Britain of the past, to a new, exciting, tutti frutti Britain, one pregnant with potential. Of course, no one really believes this anymore. No one says it with confidence, without a little voice in their head telling them that, in all honesty, things could have worked out better. Indeed, it is precisely the presence of this voice that prompts them to make such ridiculous pronouncements in the first place.

Let me put this differently by making a further refinement to the earlier notion of identity. I suggested that claims of identity are not logical, empirical, or moral claims, but definitional claims. However, there is one type of identity the existence of which can be considered an empirical matter, and that is the legal identity conferred by bureaucratic means. For our purposes, the possession of citizenship, usually symbolized by the possession of a passport, is the most obvious example of this type of identity. Its existence is undeniable, and its possession, under normal circumstances, unambiguous. I shall refer to it hereafter as formal identity.

I ignored formal identity earlier as it is qualitatively different to the informal identity I wanted to discuss. Informal identity is the wellspring of our basic societal outlook, irrespective of whether we happen to be discussing ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic, national, class identity, or some complex superimposition of them all. It is an expression of what people feel, at the very deepest level, themselves and others to be. Formal identity is, in one sense, what their politicians tell them they should feel themselves and others to be.

Political elites in European and European offshoot countries have, over the last few decades, allowed vast numbers of people not included under the umbrella of the informal identities of their respective countries to immigrate and take on formal identity. To the extent that they concerned themselves with notions of identity at all, decision-makers simply assumed that the host society’s informal identity would expand to welcome the newcomers, and that this process would be aided by the adoption of prevailing cultural norms by the immigrants. But this has not happened nearly as much as might have been hoped. Indeed, there is now a clear divergence, a mismatch, between formal and informal identities, and the ridiculous declarations of our floundering politicians are simply manifestations of it. When countries enjoy tight fits between formal and informal identities, such declarations are redundant. It is only when a growing sense of concern about the gradual ripping apart of formal and informal identity starts to take hold that politicians respond, however ineffective their responses are doomed to be.

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Section 2 — Immigration

Immigration in its own right is a natural enough phenomenon, and one which is difficult to see as being a threat per se to the social cohesion and long-term viability of any polity. Indeed, unless a polity is prepared to act in a totalitarian fashion, refusing entry to or exit from its own territory, some degree of immigration is inevitable, especially in the modern age. Millions of people of British nationality are currently living, working, or travelling abroad, and millions of foreigners are currently living, working, or travelling in Britain. Given the resultant inevitability of British and non-British people therefore meeting, falling in love, getting married and having families together, some degree of immigration (and emigration) is bound to happen unless we adopt a North Korean style of politics.

In a similar vein, it could legitimately be argued that a country that tried to completely cut itself off from the international labour market and associated movements of people would cause itself a degree of intellectual and economic stagnation that would outweigh the possible benefits of retaining a higher degree of ethnic, cultural or religious homogeneity. The merits of this sort of immigration would have to be discussed on a case-by-case basis, but there seems to be a consensus among developed countries that there is nothing intrinsically injurious about this type of immigration. Whether or not facilitating these sorts of inflows should be accomplished by providing temporary working visas or routes to permanent residency or citizenship is a separate question.

Though one may remain relatively unconcerned by these types of immigration, there is a third type of immigration which appears to be slightly more problematic. This is mass immigration, in which numbers of people, often equivalent to single-digit percentages of the host population, who are by and large statistically representative of their home countries, are permitted to settle permanently in countries on time scales that are, historically speaking, very short. They come largely for economic reasons, but also to escape the dysfunctionality that often obtains in their countries of origin, usually bringing it with them in the process. By and large, they have no particular ethnic, cultural, religious, or social similarities with the host societies, though they frequently have historic connections and often, therefore, some linguistic overlap as well. Exactly why this type of immigration has been allowed to happen at all is the subject of much debate. I will let others argue about this, being content here to observe that it has happened and needs to be discussed, as it is the root of our manifest and rapidly growing problems of social cohesion in Europe.

I will start by making and justifying four points about mass immigration:

• That it is, in at least one important sense, based on altruistic urges;
  
• That it cannot be expected to result in a net increase in the material prosperity of the host country;
  
• That it is qualitatively different to other ostensibly altruistic policies that a country can implement; and
  
• That it is intrinsically predisposed to move beyond the control of the host country.

1) Economic Nature of Mass Immigration

Mass immigration consists of the movement of people from relatively impoverished countries to relatively wealthy countries. This is not only a characteristic of said immigration, it is the driving force behind it. People seek both material prosperity and the social conditions that allow it to exist in the first place. The size of the prosperity gap can be smaller, as in Turkish immigration to Germany, or larger, as in Bangladeshi immigration to the UK, but it is always there. It is not for nothing that the people selling pirate DVDs on the streets on London are Chinese, not Japanese. Migration between wealthy countries is more a matter of mutual drift than anything else.

Due to the extant wealth gap, the average educational deficit of the immigrant, and the linguistic and cultural gulfs that will often exist between immigrant and host society, it is clear that all groups of mass immigrants will arrive in the country at or near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. As such, one obvious way of trying to get a handle on the economic consequences of mass immigration is to ask to what extent socio-economic convergence occurs. If convergence occurs on the key indicator of GDP per capita for immigrant and native groups, then an intuitive first-order analysis (i.e. one that ignored potential secondary effects of the immigration) of the economic effects of immigration would suggest that, after convergence has occurred, the immigrant population does not constitute a net drag on the material prosperity of the country. One could claim that the catch-up period does make some slight economic drag inevitable before convergence occurs, but I will ignore this here.

The first point to be made is that when considering mass immigration, convergence tends not to occur during the timescales we have so far been able to observe. Though Jews and East Asians seem to be able to consistently outperform their host societies, they tend to make up relatively, if not overwhelmingly, small fractions of the total number of mass immigrants into those societies and therefore have only a minor impact on the larger picture. In the UK, professionally and educationally high performing Indians and, more recently, Eastern Europeans, have improved the relevant statistics. However, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, African, Caribbean, Somali and other immigrants have consistently failed to display convergence. Though individuals may do well, communal convergence is not on the cards for these groups at present, and there are no obvious reasons to believe it will ever happen at all.

It is interesting to note that this clustering of mass immigrants on the wrong side of the mean for important socioeconomic indicators is virtually inevitable. It would strain credulity to suggest that educationally, culturally, linguistically disadvantaged people from failed or failing states with little, if any, history of intellectual or technological achievement could catch up economically with the citizens of the world’s most advanced states. That Jews, East Asians, and a subset of Indians do catch up is the mystery that needs explaining, not that others fail to do so. Note also that in the case of ongoing chain immigration, convergence becomes simply impossible, as even successful immigrants are numerically swamped by the ever-growing influx of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Similarly, it takes a remarkably obtuse person to evince surprise at the disproportionate criminality of many immigrant groups. In a prosperous, free, and overwhelmingly law-abiding society, it is scarcely conceivable that large numbers of economically underachieving immigrants from impoverished and dysfunctional countries will not commit a disproportionate fraction of the types of crimes that people most worry about, such as murder, rape, and robbery. Again, it is the unusually law-abiding minorities such as, in the UK, Jews and Hindus, who require an explanation, not the criminally over-performing Jamaicans. When the immigrants in question also adhere to an intrinsically supremacist and seditious ideology like Islam, such as the North African populations of France or the Netherlands, their criminality is a foregone conclusion, and available statistics back up this conclusion with no exceptions.

Those who find the above economic analysis too impressionistic should bear in mind that in the last couple of years we have started to see the emergence of rigorous scientific studies of the economic effects of mass immigration into European countries. The House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs published a report entitled ‘The Economic Impact of Immigration’ in the spring of 2008 which concluded that there were no net economic benefits to mass immigration in the UK. In other words, the European country whose immigrant community contains the greatest fraction of law-abiding, productive immigrants still has no net economic benefit to offset the increasingly hideous social and cultural costs of mass immigration, which need no elucidation here.

Moving across the English Channel to France, an organization called Contribuables Associés (Associated Taxpayers) recently published a report finding that immigrants, who make up 11% of the population, reduce economic growth by two thirds, create a net annual tax burden of 26.19 billion Euros, and necessitate an annual security budget of 5.2 billion Euros. Immigrants therefore constitute a significant net drain on the French economy, a net drain with no obvious solution. Whatever economic benefits the French may have gained earlier from relatively targeted mass immigration are now being rapidly undone. It is widely claimed that restrictive labour laws in France hold back the economy because employers will not hire, even during a boom, people they cannot fire during an economic downturn, as the eventual costs will outweigh the immediate benefits. Ironically, France itself has not had the wit to act with similar prudence, having ‘hired’ in the 50s and 60s a large group of immigrants whose massively and uselessly bloated numbers form a constituency it cannot ‘fire’ now that times are hard. The shocking criminality and hostility these people are spewing forth into the country is too well known to be adduced here as further evidence for my claims above.

2) Altruistic Nature of Mass Immigration

I stated above that the reasons mass immigration had been permitted were many and varied, and vigorously debated. Still, it seems to me that there is at least one sense in which mass immigration has become purely altruistic in nature, and that is the sense in which those who oppose mass immigration, in the present or retrospectively, will inevitably be opposed on the grounds of altruism. As hinted at above, attempts to justify mass immigration on economic grounds are becoming increasingly feeble and perfunctory, quickly discarded as their erstwhile proponents bump into the facts and fall back to the better-fortified line of defence that altruistic reasoning supposedly constitutes.

We must open our hearts to the world. We must embrace the entire population of the world as our brothers and sisters. This is true even if they hate us, true especially if they hate us. Besides, consider the poverty so many people live in throughout the developing world. What could be wrong with giving these people a chance to prosper, to build a better life for themselves and their families back home? What are you, some kind of racist? Where is the love?

This is the bedrock opposition to doubts over mass immigration. It may not always have been so, but this is how things are today. It is often combined with a related semi-altruistic stance whereby it is argued that mass immigration will allow us to ‘build bridges’ with other people, as a result of which we will all benefit in some unspecified fashion. Strictly speaking, this is more an example of mindless intellectual candyfloss, but it is similar enough to be mentioned here.

Thus, Turkey must be allowed into the EU as a bridge between Europe and the Muslim world. The merits of actually having a bridge between Europe and the Muslim world in the first place are not explained, and decent people are not expected to enquire as to what they might be. Presumably it is thought that the rapidly growing hostility between believers and kuffar in Europe can be solved by the influx of vast numbers of Turkish believers, their culture, and their behaviour. If it is, the underlying reasoning escapes me.

3) Nature of Altruism Inherent in Mass Immigration

There are then, elements of altruism in popular support for mass immigration, whatever the reasoning of our political elites may be in this regard. Undoubtedly, this altruism is sincere for many people. But this observation leaves unanswered the question of how it might be categorized. Giving money to help 50,000 earthquake victims in Pakistan would be a type of altruism. Airlifting them into your country and giving them passports would also be a type of altruism. But it would not be the same type of altruism.

We need a special name for this type of altruism. My preferred candidate is ‘deranged altruism.’ Deranged altruism is that type of altruism in which a member of a group, X, passes some portion of the common assets of X to a member or members of an unrelated group, Y, without the permission or consent of the other members of X, in a manner likely to seriously and irrevocably compromise the interests of X. Note that Y need not be ideologically opposed to X, but that the derangement is all the more obvious if it is.

Consider the example of foreign development aid. All developed nations devote at least a portion of their budgets to trying to help less developed nations make socioeconomic progress. Though politicians may argue that economic progress in these countries will be in our long-term interests, I think it is fair to suggest that this type of aid is essentially altruistic in intent, rather than self-interested. But is it an example of deranged altruism? The answer is clearly no, because the condition of causing serious and irrevocable damage to X is not satisfied. This type of altruism could be opposed as ineffective by development economists or unethical by libertarians, but it is not deranged altruism.

So what is deranged altruism? Deranged altruism is a man donating all his worldly assets to Al Gore’s re-election campaign, thereby forcing his wife and children to make a living begging on the streets. Phrased slightly less stiffly than above, it is, for our purposes, when representatives of a nation ignore or sacrifice the interests of those they are duty bound to serve, putting ahead of them the interests of those they have little or no responsibility for, and do so in a manner which takes the country on a qualitatively different historical trajectory than that it would otherwise have followed, one of incremental degradation, decay, and destruction. This notion of trajectory is important. If a country is likely to be able to retain, more or less, its initial trajectory, the altruism in question is not deranged.

Which brings us onto the final point.

4) Intrinsically Uncontrollable Nature of Mass Immigration

The final and perhaps most important point to make about mass immigration is its intrinsically uncontrollable nature in any country which has bought into the background assumptions of European and European offshoot countries, to wit:

• That mass immigration is an unmitigated good;
  
• If it is not an unmitigated good, its benefits massively outweigh its costs;
  
• If its benefits do not massively outweigh its costs, it is still economically indispensable;
  
• If it is not economically indispensable, it is still an inescapable part of the modern world;
  
• If it is not an inescapable part of the modern world, it would still be immoral to bring a halt to it.

In such countries, allowing mass immigration to gain momentum is an act of staggering foolishness, as we can see with chilling clarity that it possesses positive feedback mechanisms that will very likely result in it turning into a runaway process.

Firstly, family reunification and the right to bring one’s spouse to live in one’s own country will very often ensure a steady flow of chain immigration into a country once a foreign population has been established there. Even if we ignore the obvious importance attached to maintaining familial, tribal, and religious links in some communities, the massive wealth disparities between source and host nations ensure that there will be a steady supply of people wanting to immigrate to our countries. Our extant immigrant communities will facilitate this flow at some rate in accordance with their own interests (not our interests) in a manner difficult to stop as long as we maintain the fiction that our immigrants are all ‘just like us’ and therefore should have exactly the same rights.

Secondly, burgeoning immigrant communities with strong loyalties to themselves and weak loyalties to everyone else will have a very obvious interest in attempting to redirect the common assets of their host nations in the direction of their own extended communities. These common assets include financial assets, which they will attempt to appropriate through disproportionate welfare payments and foreign aid, and more importantly, social capital, which they will try to allocate to their relatives and countrymen by gaining them access to the host country itself, thereby degrading total stocks of said capital. Relevant pressure groups will do everything they can to loosen immigration laws in their favour, and governments more concerned about winning votes and avoiding accusations of racism than fulfilling their responsibilities to their electorates will rush to oblige them.

Thirdly and finally, the very presence of immigrants will tend to strongly inhibit frank discussion of the costs and benefits of mass immigration. I will refrain from explaining this rather obvious point in detail, only noting here that, firstly, large sections of the host society will not consider it proper to discuss such things, and that secondly, immigrants and their fellow travellers will attempt, often with much success, to have such discussions labelled racist at best, criminal at worst.

These three dynamics taken together constitute the reasons why mass immigration will tend to become uncontrollable, and why allowing it comes to be an act of deranged altruism as defined above. Note that they are equally observable in such disparate cases as Muslim immigration to Europe and Hispanic immigration into the US.

Conclusion

Mass immigration has a powerful tendency to degrade key socioeconomic indicators such as GDP per capita and crime rates. Furthermore, it has come to be viewed by many in the host countries as fundamentally altruistic in nature. As such, this degradation is very often not accepted as an argument against it, as self interest is not the key motivating factor underlying it in the first place.

This altruism inherent in mass immigration is the type I call deranged altruism, the chief characteristic of which is that it inflicts incalculable and uncontrollable damage on the host society, damage that will unfold unpredictably over a period of time extending decades, perhaps centuries past the initial decisions. The dynamics that lead to this rolling and deepening damage are easily understood and are visible with minor variations throughout the entire Western world. Mass immigration is therefore something which will inevitably lead to a marked divergence of formal and informal identity as described earlier, as vast numbers of people in the host society simply reject the newcomers in question. It is to this subject that I now turn.

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Section 3 — Formal-Informal Identity Divergence

I have argued that mass immigration has, with remarkable consistency, forced a divergence between formal and informal identities in European and European offshoot societies. It might now be instructive to consider whether or not these divergences can be categorized, and what sorts of conclusions might be drawn from these categorizations. All observations below are made in the context of a reasonably homogenous host society taking in large numbers of mass immigrants as described above. They are therefore not applicable to, for example, relations between the white and black populations of the US, which both came into existence as a result of an entirely different set of dynamics.

1)		Demographic Stability Probably the most obvious question to ask of a divergence between formal and informal identity is whether or not the size of population excluded from informal identity is increasing or decreasing as a fraction of the whole. Most countries quite easily tolerate small minorities considered alien in some regard, and very few countries do not in fact possess such minorities. Even Japan has its Chinese and Korean communities.
2)		Criminality There is great variety in how productive and law-abiding minority groups are. Even minority groups to whom informal identity is denied can be held in high regard and viewed as a relatively benign presence rather than a problem or a threat. This will be especially true if they lack disproportionate criminality and play valuable roles in the local economy. Various parts of the global Chinese diaspora spring to mind as possible examples.
3)		Escapability Escapability simply refers to the ease with which people can separate themselves from those with whom they share formal identity but not informal identity. The most extreme form of separation is emigration, but only a relatively small fraction of people will be both willing and able to take this drastic step. More frequently, people will separate from undesirable neighbours by relocating within their own countries. But not all countries were created equal in this regard. A small, densely populated country is bound to provide less opportunities to those who would cluster with their own and insulate themselves from those regarded as other, all other things being equal. Large countries, on the other hand, may well continue to provide abundant opportunities of this sort for a long time, particularly to the white majority.
4)		Degree of Ideological Organization However unpleasant the presence in one’s country of those with whom one does not share informal identity, there is a qualitative difference between unorganized hostility stemming from the cultural incompatibility of such people and ideologically organized movements within their communities which pursue political objectives that the broader society might consider antithetical to its way of life. Political lobbying can result in new zero-sum legislation, sacrificing the interests of the host community in the interests of the new arrivals. Furthermore, such legislation will be binding upon all inhabitants of the country in question, reducing the degree of escapability as discussed earlier as an oppressive legal presence can be extended much further and faster than its physical equivalent.

Concrete Examples

Having considered the most obvious ways in which these divergences can differ from each other, I would like to consider some real-world situations to see how they might be categorized in the terms I have outlined above. I do not claim any expertise on any of the following examples, only enough familiarity to be able to plausibly consider how they might be categorized in each of the above four respects.

Hispanics in the US

1)		Demographic Stability — Hispanic immigration into the US, legal or illegal, is taking place at a terrific rate, with federal attempts to enforce immigration law feeble and insincere. Nor is the flow of immigrants likely to stop due to internal dynamics in the source nation, as Mexico is a poor, underdeveloped country with severe crime and corruption problems and a population of over 100 million people. Fertility amongst Hispanic immigrants in the country is significantly higher than in either the white or black population. Demographic stability is therefore essentially non-existent.
2)		Criminality — The Hispanic population of the US is disproportionately responsible for personal and property crime, at least in comparison with the white majority. Gang activity appears to be a particular problem in heavily Hispanic parts of the country. Additionally, crimes such as drunk-driving and driving without a licence or insurance seem to be very common, imposing a steady toll in terms of the economic, human, and social capital costs.
3)		Escapability — Clumps of Hispanic immigrants are apparently to be found in increasing numbers in surprising parts of the country, far from California and the South-West, and far from those states which were historically part of Mexico. On net balance though, the escapability of Hispanic immigration into the US is still relatively high, partly due to the sheer size and variety of America.
4)		Ideological Organization — The degree of ideological organization on the part of the Hispanic population in the US is high. Civil rights organizations and lobby groups apply pressure on various levels of government to obtain preferential treatment, concessions that should not be due illegal immigrants, revisions of immigration law in line with their interests, and ever-growing formal recognition of their language. They successfully work to have their opponents branded racists, white supremacists, or worse, all the time advancing positions predicated on a race-based tribalism themselves.

Outlook — Rain clouds approaching fast. America’s vast size will provide an outlet for those keen to move away from Hispanicization for some time to come, but in all other regards, mass Hispanic immigration into the US constitutes a perfect storm of formal-informal identity divergence. The only saving grace is that, ideologically speaking, the Hispanic population appears to be only indirectly hostile to the interests of existing Americans. It wants what they have, but does not seek to put its boot on their neck. Yet.

Chinese in the UK

1)		Demographic Stability — The Chinese population of the UK has originated mainly from the ex-British colony of Hong Kong. It is relatively small in size, and does not reproduce at a rate significantly greater than the population as a whole as far as I am aware. Recent illegal immigration from mainland China is reshaping the nature of the ethnic Chinese community here, but has not yet introduced major qualitative change in any regard.
2)		Criminality — Though one occasionally hears about Chinese involvement in organized crime, the Chinese population of the UK is underrepresented in our prison system. One simply does not hear about Chinese people committing any significant amount of personal or property crime, either anecdotally or in the mass media. The crime most commonly committed by the Chinese in the UK is probably the crime of being in the UK without the required documentation. This is not trivial, but hardly existential.
3)		Escapability — The low numbers of Chinese in the country make them relatively easy to escape, should one be so peculiar as to feel the need. The spread of that British institution known as the ‘Chinese chippy’ beyond our main urban centres notwithstanding, the Chinese are essentially found only in the cities, their numbers hugely outstripped by those of other immigrants.
4)		Ideological Organization — There is no discernible ideological organization at all among the Chinese in the UK. There are no Chinese lobby groups. There are no Chinese celebrities. There are no Chinese politicians. There are no Chinese newsreaders. There are no Chinese footballers. Further, there are no Chinese people complaining about any of this. The insularity and apolitical nature for which the global Chinese diaspora is famed are alive and well in Britain. This is not to suggest that none of them assimilate, but there is a very definite sense of separateness to the Chinese as a whole.

Outlook — Blue skies, with a spot of cumulus on the horizon. The Chinese community of the UK is a professionally and educationally over-performing ethnic minority which places no explicit demands of any type on the host society, and no disproportionate implicit demands in the form of criminality or welfare dependence. Illegal Chinese immigration into the UK and other associated crime could become a problem if left unchecked, especially given its origins in a newly resurgent mainland China as opposed to the traditional source of Hong Kong. However, this would hardly appear to be a key issue for those concerned about the social cohesion of the UK as a whole. What formal-informal identity divergence exists with respect to the Chinese is largely benign.

Muslims in the Netherlands

1)		Demographic Stability — Though Muslims in the Netherlands come from a range of national backgrounds, their rate of growth as a fraction of the entire population can be summarized as extremely rapid, due to both endogenous and exogenous factors. Family reunion laws have been tightened in recent years, which has reduced the rate of inflow of Muslim immigrants by approximately half. However, there are no reasons to believe that this positive change can stabilize the situation, especially given the rate at which native Dutch seem to be leaving the country. Indeed, there is no reason why the growing Muslim minority might not be able to overturn these restrictions in time, and little doubt that it would like to.
2)		Criminality — Muslims are massively overrepresented in the Dutch prison system, apparently making up approximately 40% of the prison population despite only constituting 6% of the population.
3)		Escapability — The Netherlands is a small and densely populated country. Nearly half the population lives in the Randstad, a conurbation in the west of the country consisting of the four largest cities in the Netherlands. It is difficult to say anything with precision here due to my lack of familiarity with the country, but it is surely fair to suggest that the escapability of undesirable immigrants must be orders of magnitude lower than in the US. This could be partly responsible for the fact that the Netherlands seems to be reaching some sort of breaking point with respect to Islam more quickly than France, despite the fractional Muslim population of the latter being 50% again as high. Arguably, a low escapability is an advantage for a host society, forcing a showdown while time is still on its side.
4)		Ideological Organization — Muslims in the Netherlands are unified, however loosely, by a totalitarian and intrinsically seditious political ideology called Islam. As in all Western European countries, there will exist an alphabet soup of Islamic lobby groups, pressure groups, and political organizations pursuing, more or less explicitly, the goals of this ideology. These goals are the subjugation of all that is not Islam to Islam, as laid down in the foundational documents of this insanely and uniquely dangerous belief system. The swirling internal hostility to the kuffar inculcated in Muslims by Islam will be channelled more or less adroitly by different organizations at different times, but it will be there as long as Muslims continue to take their religion seriously. In this regard, it is qualitatively different to the hostility borne towards America by Mexican immigrants.

Outlook — Eye of the hurricane. The type, scale, and rapidity of the divergence between formal and informal identity in the Netherlands make a cataclysm inevitable sometime fairly soon. It is simply not conceivable that a situation of the sort that currently obtains there can remain stable for long.

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Section 4 — On Mass Expulsions

As some readers may recall, in ‘Surrender, Genocide, or What?’ I advocated the mass expulsion of at least some significant fraction of the Muslim community of the UK. I will return to this in the next and final section of this essay, but would like to pre-emptively address certain concerns that people may have in this regard, as it will likely prove to be the case that some will object to this idea. Some of this disagreement will come from those who do not share my assessment of Islam and the threat it poses to the very viability of the UK. These people will, I hope, see sense in due course. Here I propose only to address the likely objections of some of those who are in broad agreement with my extremely pessimistic opinions of Islam, but uncertain that mass expulsions are the way to proceed.

Objection No. 1 — Mass Expulsions are Categorically Wrong

I can only say in response to this that I cannot see why it should be so, and that there are other and far greater evils that can easily be identified and must be prevented. For prosperous, free, peaceful countries to countenance even for a second the idea that they should risk being destroyed from within by a hostile ideological force that has extirpated entire civilizations, simply to avoid inflicting inconvenience or harm upon the adherents of that ideology, is insane, and insanely immoral. Given that Muslim immigration is a recent enough phenomenon that a significant fraction of European Muslims were not even born in Europe, I simply do not accept that mass expulsions are morally beyond the pale.

Objection No. 2 — We Must Exhaust All Other Options First

It is certainly true that mass expulsions are not a measure that should be adopted lightly. But the window of opportunity for successfully integrating Muslim immigrants into UK society has surely passed, if it ever existed at all. Should they so choose, Muslims coming to live in the UK can spend virtually their entire lives without coming into contact with non-Muslims or wider British society. Furthermore, even those Muslims who wish to break free from the oppressive norms of their religion will find it increasingly difficult to do so as it spreads its physical presence and psychological reach ever further. The facts that a) no European country has succeeded in integrating its Muslim population and that b) the problems caused by these populations are in direct proportion to their sizes suggest that there is no solution to the problem of Islam short of destroying it or quarantining it. All other options are very rapidly being exhausted.

Worse, the idea that we must exhaust all other options before expelling Muslims is not only weak in and of itself, it is psychologically dangerous. For how is one to decide whether ‘all other options’ have been exhausted? Where does prudence turn into an inability to acknowledge the sheer scale of the catastrophe that Muslim immigration into the West constitutes? Anyone arguing that we must try to solve the problem without resorting to mass expulsions should create a list of what the other options are and how, precisely, we would decide when each one had been tried. Anything less could not be considered a serious response to what we face.

Objection No. 3 — How Do We Decide Whom to Deport?

Over time, I am fairly confident that we will see a growing appreciation in the UK of the necessity of deporting some significant number of Muslims if we are to solve the existential threat that Islam poses here. But how would we decide exactly who to expel? Even those most sceptical about Islam and the blessings it has supposedly bestowed upon us are likely to acknowledge that there are a great many people in the UK who are only nominally Muslims and who pose no threat. And what about those who come from Muslim backgrounds (through one or both parents) but have never been to a mosque in their life and have never even thought of themselves as being Muslim at all? Some would undoubtedly be ruthless enough to deport anybody with any sort of link to the Islamic world, sending people ‘back’ to countries they may never have visited, and whose languages they may not even speak. However, I do not consider myself to be one of them. Leaving to one side the slightly surreal quality of a discussion of something politically inconceivable at present, let us consider how, under ideal circumstances, one might decide whom to deport and whom to give leave to remain.

Analytically speaking, there is nothing particularly novel about this situation. We have the stark choice of expelling them or allowing them to remain. We also acknowledge, if we are not the completely ruthless type described above, that some should be expelled and some should not, but that we suffer from at least a partial informational deficit with regard to their true feelings and allegiances. Therefore, we are forced to accept that some people who should be expelled will remain, and that some who should be allowed to remain will be expelled. As such, there are four possible outcomes in the case of any given individual: deserved expulsion (correct positive), undeserved expulsion (false positive), deserved leave to remain (correct negative), and undeserved leave to remain (false negative). Tightening the conditions that must be satisfied for one to remain will reduce the number of false negatives while increasing the number of false positives. Relaxing the conditions will have the opposite effect. Setting these conditions is therefore a function of deciding whether to err on the side of having more false positives or on the side of having more false negatives.

Identical situations obtain with regard to the design of decision-making systems as disparate as legal systems and smoke alarms. In the former, false positives are regarded as by far the worse of the two false decisions, hence the burden of proof rests on the prosecution. In the latter, false negatives are justifiably regarded as being the decision to avoid, thus the aggravating yet necessary sensitivity of such alarms. One can invent more accurate decision-making techniques, be they better polygraphs or more discerning particulate matter detectors, but they will always be faced with this fundamental trade-off between the different ways of being wrong.

So it would be with deciding which Muslims to expel. One would decide on one’s objectives, then tighten or relax the criteria to achieve them given the inevitable constraints of time, personnel, and financial resources. Devising the criteria would be relatively easy once the objectives had been decided upon.

Objection No. 4 — We Will Inflict Too Much Harm Upon Ourselves

Mass expulsions of Muslims to their countries of origin in a UK context are, as I argued in ‘Surrender, Genocide, or What?’, activities that would require the resources and organizational capabilities of the apparatus of state. It could be argued that giving the state this much power would be dangerous, and I am inclined to agree. Though I have been accused of advocating a totalitarian form of government in the UK to solve our Muslim problem, my general political stance actually tends towards the free-market libertarian. I have very little regard for government as an institution. I regard it as a necessary evil which should be ruthlessly confined to essential duties only.

However, in the face of Islam, it is hard to see that temporarily increasing the power of government would be the worst of all evils. It has happened before, most obviously in wartime, without resulting in a permanent descent into authoritarianism or worse. It would surely be a grave error to underestimate the deep roots that democracy and consensual government have in the UK, allowing our Islamic cancer to metastasize without limits because we feared ourselves more than the enemy. There is most certainly a discussion to be had here. We need to abandon our taboos and start talking.

Objection No. 5 — We Will ‘Lose’ If We Deport Them

In the ridiculous age we live in, it has become all too common to complain that parties to a conflict somehow ‘lose’ if they step over some ethical boundary, real or imagined. They can prevail in any obvious sense, physical or territorial, but in a deeper and presumably more cosmic sense, they lose anyway.

Thus, the Israelis have already ‘lost’ in their conflict with the Palestinians due to the brutality with which they have supposedly pursued this conflict. Does this mean that the Palestinians have won? Why no, not at all. Only that the Israelis have ‘lost.’ Similarly, if we in the UK were to introduce draconian policies of expulsion with respect to Muslims, we would have ‘lost’ too. Not lost in the sense that our territory had been occupied or our country destroyed as a polity, nor in the sense that we would have been reduced to slavery or penury. No, we would have lost cosmically. Similarly, some would no doubt claim that the Americans ‘lost’ the Pacific War when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, though one rather doubts that the Japanese would have arrived at the same conclusion. Others might argue that both we the British and the Americans ‘lost’ World War II when we reduced Dresden to ashes, so morally corrupt did this act make us. Or that the Mongols ‘lost’ when they took over most of Eurasia due to their unfortunate habit of exterminating hundreds of thousands of civilians when resistance had been offered to their advance.

I am not here comparing the wartime acts of the Allies to those of the Mongols. Nor am I suggesting that morality does not or should not exist in war. I am simply suggesting that real defeat is too serious an affair to be confused with the post-modern version that some would have us believe awaits us should we display any degree of ruthlessness at all with respect to Islam. Given the remarkable evil that Islam is and the blundering complacency with which we have so far treated it, it will surely be some time before we are in danger of ‘losing’ any moral battles with it, mass expulsions or no.

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Section 5 — Islam

The notion that a mass expulsion of Muslims from the UK was the only way to save it from their vicious, obscurantist, and totalitarian ideology was something tagged onto the end of my essay ‘Surrender, Genocide, or What?’ so as to make it clear that I was not advocating genocide. It only partially succeeded in this regard. But, more importantly, it was a stand-alone position, not obviously supported by any line of argument. Here I attempt to fill in the gaps.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever read any of my other essays that my concerns about Islam prompt me to write this essay in the first place. The analysis of the divergence between formal and formal identity with respect to Islam in the Netherlands detailed above could be applied with only minor variations to many European countries (Sweden, Belgium, France), and others to which it could not yet be applied are surely not that far behind in this regard (Germany, the UK, Spain). Given that Muslim immigration into European countries is qualitatively similar in key regards that are too painfully familiar to be spelled out yet again here, what general conclusions can we draw about how to respond to it?

In this essay, I have so far argued the following points:

1)		That questions of informal identity are definitional in nature, and will be determined on the basis of bottom-up, instinctive criteria.
2)		That informal identity exists in parallel with formal identity, and that the two will not necessarily overlap.
3)		That mass immigration as seen in post-War Europe has an almost irresistible tendency to force a divergence in formal and informal identity.
4)		That this divergence can be characterized in certain key regards, and that Muslim immigration must be so characterized as being of the catastrophic type.

I hereby claim that Muslims cannot be British, that Britishness, whatever it may be, is simply not compatible with being a Muslim. As a definitional claim pertaining to informal identity, this claim is neither moral nor immoral in its own right. However, I suggested earlier that definitional claims could have moral implications, and the claim that Muslims cannot be British most certainly does have moral implications. Given the nature of the formal-informal identity divergence Islam has brought about, to wit, its obvious demographic instability, its breathtaking criminality, its rapidly declining escapability, and its ideological organization and hostility, the inevitable conclusion is that the only acceptable response to Islam in the UK is to expel as many of its adherents as we may deem necessary.

When I say that this conclusion is inevitable, I mean a number of things. Firstly, I mean that, in my opinion, those who are serious about defending their country from Islam will eventually conclude that this is how to do it. Secondly, I mean that I have no moral qualms about it, believing that it would be morally justifiable and proportionate to the threat Islam poses. Thirdly, I mean that, barring the emergence of factors qualitatively different to those I have foreseen, it will eventually be ordered and implemented by brutal and ruthless men of the sort who fight and win wars, assuming these people can act in time.

As spelled out in some detail in ‘Surrender, Genocide, or What?’, there are good reasons to believe that European countries have either passed or will soon pass a point of no return with respect to Islam, beyond which the possibility of resolving the Muslim problem in even a semi-peaceable fashion fast approaches zero. So be it. Our situation must be analyzed as clearly as possible, appropriate measures formulated, and, eventually, contingency plans implemented as necessary. A time will come when the unthinkable becomes inevitable, and opportunities for action present themselves.