Thursday, March 10, 2011

Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part One

Below is the first installment of a four-part dossier about Muslim immigration written by El Inglés. This series was originally published as a single dossier in pdf format under the pseudonym “Pike Bishop”, but our old friend El Inglés is now able to claim credit for it under his usual pseudonym. An earlier series by Pike Bishop concerning Muslim crime in the UK has now been added to the article list at the foot of this post.

Lampedusa: boatload of refugees

A Consideration of Muslim Immigration into the UK
By Pike Bishop


I. Introduction

Despite the increasing awareness throughout Europe of the existential threat posed to European countries by Muslim immigration, we observe that, thus far, this debate has not entered the political mainstream in Britain. In contrast with the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and other countries more fortunate in this regard, no politician from any mainstream political party has directly expressed any concern about the catastrophic consequences that Muslim immigration will have for this country and its people if allowed to continue at anything like the current rate.

This state of affairs must end, and it must end now. This dossier represents our attempt to break through the thick crust of clichés and taboos that has so damaged the ability of Britain as a whole to bring about the self-correction that is required if we are to avert disaster. All runaway trains come to a halt eventually. The only question is how and at what cost.

II. Muslim Immigration—What’s in it for Us?

We would like to perform here a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis of the benefits to the British people and their country of the presence in that country of so many Muslims. Note that this is, in effect, a long-term cost-benefit analysis of Muslim immigration itself, as it is only through Muslim immigration that this Muslim population comes to exist in the first place.[1] It is not, however, an attempt, explicit or implicit, to pass judgement one way or the other on immigration per se. Muslim immigration and Australian immigration, or Polish immigration, or Zimbabwean immigration, are only variations on the same theme insofar as they all consist of people coming to Britain from abroad. There is no reason to expect different types of immigration to have the same, or even similar, effects on our country, any more than there is to expect eating steak and eating polystyrene packaging to have the same effects on our physical well-being simply because they are both acts of ‘eating.’ We reiterate this here to ensure it is understood: this section is not an examination of immigration per se.

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If we wish to evaluate the effects of Muslim immigration into Britain, we must first consider what sort of effects those are. It is a sad reflection of the state of affairs that prevails in the West today that the first effects likely to spring to mind for many when immigration of any sort is brought up are the economic effects. Countries, we are expected, and have been conditioned, to believe, are their economies, and therefore any and all effects of immigration can be viewed in their entirety through an economic prism. Those who follow the debate on immigration in the mainstream media will be familiar with the way in which it focuses, at least at present, on economic criteria. Higher or lower GDP, higher or lower economic growth, downward pressure on inflation, more flexibility in labour markets, lower wages for native workers, filling vacancies, stimulating the economy — one could fill an entire page with the jargon of economics commonly popping up in these discussions without once stopping to consider the possibility that a country was more than a machine for generating some sort of economic output.

Being old-fashioned in this regard, we feel that a country must be a little more. Even if we could give a detailed accounting of the economic costs and benefits of immigration, by no means a trivial undertaking in its own right, it would still be essential to understand that a full accounting of the costs and benefits of any type of immigration must, by definition, take all those costs and benefits into account. This point is remarkably easy to ignore. Let us highlight it here by reference to a well-known development of modern times.

We are confident that all readers of this document will have at least a superficial familiarity with the rapid and momentous economic development that has been taking place in China in the last three decades or so. In the last few years, real per-annum GDP growth has been 10% or even higher, which means that the Chinese economy is doubling in size roughly every seven years.

Now, this is a very impressive achievement as far as it goes, and we must afford the Chinese the respect they are due in this regard. However, there seems to be a developing awareness that this growth has not been unaccompanied by costs of its own, most obviously to the Chinese environment. All countries damage and pollute their environments when they industrialize, and China has been no exception in this regard. But the deforestation, desertification, water pollution, and air pollution that China has inflicted on itself to achieve its recent economic growth are also very severe.

If we take it as given, for the sake of argument, that per-capita economic growth is a good thing, and that environmental destruction is a bad thing (a necessary evil perhaps, but certainly a bad thing in its own right), then we see that an accurate accounting of China’s growth must somehow take these environmental costs into account, and that it must do so by somehow converting these two sets of costs and benefits (economic and environmental) into the same currency so they can be directly compared. This is now being done. We need not concern ourselves with the methods that economists use to perform these calculations. For our purposes it suffices to note that: a) there are other costs and benefits than the purely economic, and b) these can be calculated with an acceptable degree of accuracy.

Though we cannot expect a perfect consensus on this matter, some indication of the scale of the problem can be gained from a 2006 statement by Zhu Guangyao, deputy chief of the State Environmental Protection Agency, to the effect that environmental damage was costing China roughly 10% of its total GDP of $2.26 trillion. Clearly, environmental damage of this sort is far from trivial, and casts China’s economic development in quite a different light.[2]

Just as the Chinese must take into account the environmental costs of their breakneck economic growth if they are to understand the real costs and benefits thereof, we must take into account the social costs of the breakneck growth of our Muslim population if we are to perform any meaningful cost-benefit analysis thereupon. In other words, we must take into account the effects Muslim immigration is having on our stocks of social capital.

Social capital is an important emerging concept in the social and political sciences. There are various definitions[3] of it, but we will present two here from two well-known social scientists. Robert Putnam has defined social capital as ‘features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit,’ and Francis Fukuyama has defined it as ‘the existence of a certain set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them.’ To rephrase these definitions slightly to suit our own purposes, we will say here that a society with high social capital is one in which a broad consensus on cultural and social norms results in high levels of mutual trust and therefore cooperation between members. Conversely, a society with low social capital is one in which mutual suspicion and enmity reduce cooperation between members, resulting in social friction and inter-group hostility.

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We now understand that a detailed accounting of Muslim immigration into the UK will need to evaluate two things: its net economic effects, and its net social effects (with social effects being defined as all effects that are not economic, however unacceptable this might be to any social scientists amongst our readers). The first of these tasks could be done with some accuracy if the relevant specialists were to turn their attention to the problem. As far as we are aware, they have yet to do so, but there is enough data in the public domain to allow educated guesses to be made. The second of these tasks is well beyond our capabilities if one is interested in obtaining figures that could withstand rigorous academic scrutiny, but we feel that, at the very least, the type and approximate magnitude of the social ‘contribution’ made by Muslims are sufficiently clear to be pointed out by us.

The Economic Contribution of Muslims

On April 1, 2008, the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs published the most detailed study of the economic benefits of mass immigration to date. According to The Economic Impact of Immigration,[4] the economic benefits of immigration to the extant British population were essentially nil.[5] We take this to mean that immigration into Britain is essentially balancing itself out in terms of the average effects it has on the prosperity of the extant British people.

If immigration breaks even economically speaking, and the economic performance of all immigrants is not identical, then it is clear that there must be amongst our immigrant population strong performers, who are a net benefit, and weak performers who impose net costs. This will be true both on an individual basis and on a group basis. Where might Muslim groups fall along the spectrum from net contributors through to net cost-imposers?

The Select Committee report referred to above does not concern itself with such matters, so we must look elsewhere for clues. Fortunately, we have a strong place in which to start. In September 2007, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a report entitled Britain’s Immigrants — An Economic Profile.[6] It contains a variety of socioeconomic data for different immigrant communities in the UK. The data in the main section are for first-generation immigrants only, and therefore tell us little about ethic minority groups as a whole, especially long-settled groups like the Jamaicans and Pakistanis. However, there is also a section that presents such data as exist for ethnic minorities as a whole, albeit with certain caveats. Interested parties are invited to study the document itself. Here, we will present the key data that are of relevance to Muslim immigration.

Looking at the data for first-generation immigrants, the first table we come to is one that displays the employment status (excluding full-time students) for those of working age in each of the 26 groups studied (subdivided by country of birth): employed, unemployed (i.e. without a job but looking for work), and economically inactive (i.e. without a job and not looking for work). The five worst-performing groups here are as follows (UK and US are included for comparison):

Country of Origin Rank
(1 to 26)
 Employed (%) Unemployed (%) Economically
Inactive (%)
United States 8 81 3 16
U.K. 10 78 4 18
Iran[7] 22 51 12 36
Pakistan 23 45 5 50
Bangladesh 24 44 8 48
Turkey 25 41 7 52
Somalia 26 19 10 71

Next, we have the estimated gross annual income per economically active member of the group. The five countries above are still clustered down the bottom, as follows (UK and US are included for comparison):

Country of
Origin
 Rank
(1 to 26)
 Gross Income
(£)
United States 1 37,250
U.K. 15 21,250
Iran 18 19,450
Pakistan 21 16,450
Bangladesh 24 15,550
Turkey 25 14,750
Somalia 26 13,700

These five low-performing groups taken together will a) be overwhelmingly Muslim, and b) include a large majority of all first-generation Muslim immigrants in the UK. And it is fairly clear from the above that: a) their labour-force participation rates are woeful, and that b) those of them in employment are, statistically speaking, operating down at the low-skilled, low added-value end of the employment spectrum. Is it conceivable that such groups are making a net contribution to the prosperity of the British people?

Let us remind ourselves what we mean by this. We are asking whether the extant population of the UK has more or less wealth to enjoy, on a per-capita basis, than it would each year if these people were not here. This question is not answered directly in the report, but let us turn it on its head a moment: do the Americans, 81% of whom are in employment, with this 81% earning £37,250 per year on average, result in the extant British people being wealthier than they would otherwise be (through extra tax revenues, the extra jobs they create, and so on)? If the answer to this question is no, then it is hard to see what conceivable type of immigration or immigrant could be an economic benefit, so all intuition and common sense tell us that it must be yes. This being the case, and especially bearing in mind that, as the Select Committee on Economic Affairs has already told us, immigration has no net economic benefits, our complementary intuition, to wit, that these five Muslim groups have pernicious economic effects, must also be correct. In other words, these first-generation Muslim immigrant groups are, in the aggregate, simply parasitic with respect to the British people and state, sucking substantially more out than they put in. An unkind conclusion? Perhaps. But not, it seems, a mistaken one.

Might there be something lurking in the multi-generational, ethnic minority data that indicates that Muslims are not such a hopeless dead loss after all? That the second and subsequent generations are some sort of economic fireball, putting their parents to shame? Here, the data in the report are presented differently, by means of the tick-box ethnic categories with which we have all become so familiar. There are only two categories that can be considered unambiguously and overwhelmingly Muslim: Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (defined ethnically this time, not by country of birth). The employment data are as follows (with white British included for comparison):

 
Ethnicity
 Employed
(%)
 Unemployed
(%)
 Economically
Inactive (%)
White British 79 4 18
Pakistani 49 7 43
Bangladeshi 45 9 45

In response to this, the report’s authors say:

Asian Pakistani and Asian Bangladeshi ethnic groups seem to have consistently low rankings in the data when presented by ethnic group. This may suggest that even the British-born descendents [sic] of this group share some similar characteristics.

At the risk of appearing uncivil, we must point out that the ‘similar characteristics’ that second and subsequent generation Pakistanis and Bangladeshis share with their ancestors is that they are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Knowing that, everything else falls into place. There is no magical process of integration that turns these people into us, not in the first generation, not in any other.

It appears we must conclude that Muslims are, in the aggregate, economic ballast, which is to say that their presence impoverishes us financially, meaning we must work harder to enjoy less, as they subsist thanks to the fruit of our efforts. And we have not yet taken into account all the other economic costs that Muslims impose on us, costs that are invisible to the IPPR report. A full accounting of the economic impact of the Muslim presence in the UK (and therefore the Muslim immigration that enabled it), would have to take into account the following:

  • The direct financial costs of UK-based Muslim terrorism (infrastructural damage, etc.)
  • The indirect financial costs of UK-based Muslim terrorism (security costs, productivity costs caused through extra time required to check in at airports, tourist revenues lost, commercial activity forfeited, etc.)
  • The direct financial costs of Muslim crime (property damage, amounts defrauded, etc.)
  • The indirect financial costs of Muslim crime (police costs, prison costs, court costs, etc.)

As discussed in our earlier dossier, there is good reason to believe that the disproportionalities already visible in Muslim crime understate the true scale of the problem (and therefore its costs) by some margin. Moreover, the virtual monopoly Muslims have on serious, lethal terrorism is beyond debate.

The Social Contribution of Muslims

Social capital, as one might expect, is a more elusive concept than its economic equivalent, being both harder to define and harder to quantify. However, it is crucial that we have some way of characterizing the conversion of Britain from a country occupied by a relatively unified people[8] with a shared notion of who they were into a country occupied by fragmented and often mutually hostile peoples with incompatible identities.

To the extent that the effects of mass immigration on social capital are mentioned at all, they tend to be referred to obliquely, as self-appointed gutmenschen chirp inanities about ‘cultural enrichment’ over their lattes. Here, we step back from an expository role for a moment and ask our readers what images come to mind when they read the following headlines:

  • Woman dies in Bradford after being found on fire[9]
  • ‘Honour killing’ pair jailed for life[10]
  • Jury retires in acid attack trial[11]
  • Police investigate electoral fraud claims after journalist beaten up[12]
  • Lady Warsi blames lack of Tory majority on electoral fraud[13]
  • MI5 tracking ‘30 UK terror plots’[14]
  • Airline terror trial: The bomb plot to kill 10,000 people[15]
  • The British suicide bombers[16]

Earlier, we quoted Fukuyama’s definition of social capital as being ‘the existence of a certain set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them.’ Alas, we lack the specialist skills that would be required to formally estimate the effects on social capital in the UK of having a large, rapidly-growing, disproportionately criminal, desperately parasitic, terrorism-, treason-, and subversion-inclined religious group such as Muslims. Nonetheless, given informal definitions such as Fukuyama’s, it seems clear even to us laymen that a British newspaper reader confronted with the sheer horror of Muslim behaviour in the UK would have no option but to conclude that the ‘informal values’ shared by the British were not conspicuously shared by their mushrooming Islamic fifth column. Indeed, given the breathtaking degeneracy, hostility, and hopelessness of our Muslim population as a whole,[17] we feel justified in saying that the effect of that population on social capital in Britain must be akin to that of an industrial wood chipper on a two-by-four.

So far, so obvious. What is perhaps less obvious is that the parasitism of Muslims extends to social capital as much as it does to financial capital. Muslims who manage to leave for Britain from, for example, the suppurating disaster zone of a country that is Pakistan, obviously enjoy a degree of peace, stability and prosperity subsequent to their arrival here that they could not have dreamed of before. This is another way of saying that they enjoy a greater amount of social capital in Britain, by virtue of being in Britain. However, we the British people enjoy less social capital than we did before they arrived, meaning that, in effect, some portion of our social capital has been transferred to them.

This is the double-pronged attack of Muslim parasitism: Muslims benefit financially and socially through Muslim immigration, and we the British people suffer financially and socially. Furthermore, the whole process becomes self-accelerating thanks to: a) the rank insanity of Muslim family reunion immigration, and b) the high fertility Muslim rates that the British taxpayer subsidizes. Occasionally the entire affair is spiced up by a suicide bombing, a psychopathic mob clamouring for the implementation of sharia law, or a bearded fruitcake telling us how vastly superior the ways of Pakistan are to our own (leaving us to ponder why he lives in a council house in Luton). If this is cultural enrichment, we have surely had more than enough of it already. Indeed, we are feelingly decidedly over-enriched. Did the British create a peaceful, prosperous, and civilized country only to flush it down the lavatory of history in the interests of Muslims, who will suck the marrow out of Britain and then cry for seconds?

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We conclude on the basis of the foregoing discussions that Muslim immigration and its consequences are already impoverishing the British people and their country, both financially and socially, to an extent that is not at all insignificant and can only grow with time unless it is addressed, seriously, by politicians who do not take the feeling of Muslim pain to be their main priority in life. Having so concluded, let us close this section by throwing out some questions for readers’ consideration on the question of integration, a matter by no means unrelated to the core topic of this section:

  • What does it mean for an immigrant population to integrate?
  • Is an ‘integrated’ state of affairs for a given immigrant population compatible with it being hopelessly parasitic with respect to both financial and social capital, generation after generation?
  • How large a fraction of the population of a given country can this parasitic population come to comprise before its host population decides it will no longer support it?
  • If the parasitic population cannot support itself (which it cannot, by definition), and if the host population refuses to support it any longer, what happens next between host and parasite, and is it compatible with the maintenance of a civilized, prosperous society in which differences and difficulties are mediated through democratic politics rather than through violence?

Readers are invited to give due consideration to the matters raised by these questions. They will be in the exam, sooner or later.


Next: III. In Praise of Discrimination and IV. Pakistanis, Positive Feedback, and Alligators

Notes:

1. We ignore converts here, who are a tiny fraction of the whole, and who have converted mainly due to influence of one sort or another from Muslims in the UK who are only here due to immigration.
2. China Daily
3. Social Capital Research
4. Parliamentary publication (pdf)
5. We accept these conclusions here as we are unaware of any more exhaustive or detailed study. Others are free to draw their own conclusions, as always.
6. IPPR
7. The sum for Iran does not equal 100% due to rounding down of component figures.
8. We note the rather difficult situation, today and historically, in the province of Northern Ireland, and will have more to say on it later.
9. BBC
10. The Independent
11. The Independent
12. The Independent
13. The Guardian
14. BBC
15. The Telegraph
16. The Guardian
17. We refer interested parties back to our earlier dossier on Muslim crime in the UK if they wish to consider in more detail the degradation that Muslims are busy inflicting on our country day in, day out.

Previous posts by El Inglés:

2007 Nov 28 The Danish Civil War
2008 Apr 24 Surrender, Genocide… or What?
  May 17 Sliding Into Irrelevance
  Jul 5 A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 1
    6 A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 2
    8 A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 3
  Aug 25 Identity, Immigration, and Islam
  Oct 4 The Blackhoods of Antifa
    26 Racists ’R’ Us
  Nov 25 Surrender, Genocide… or What? — An Update
2009 Feb 16 Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe
  Apr 11 Pick A Tribe, Any Tribe — Part II
  May 18 To Push or to Squeeze?
  Nov 2 On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 1
  Dec 5 On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 2
    7 On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 3
2010 Mar 25 The Death of Democracy
    25 Some Fallacies On the Subject of Crime — Part 1
    28 Reflections on the Civil War in Britain
  Apr 1 A Consideration of the Criminal Investigation Process — Part One
    2 A Consideration of the Criminal Investigation Process — Part Two
    5 On Vigilantism — Part One
  Oct 29 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 1
  Nov 1 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 2
    4 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 3
    2 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 4

6 comments:

Vortac said...

I guess El Inglés must be a fan of Sam Peckinpah. Or William Holden?

philip.zhao said...

Once a child asked his parents:" What does a moon look like?" In many heavily industrial towns in China, many children often ask the same question during the Moonviwing Festival that falls on the August 15th of Lunar Calendar.

sulber nick said...

Brilliant work again by El Ingles. But everything he says is pretty obvious isn't it - El Ingles merely articulates our thoughts better than most of the rest of us can. So why aren't mainstream British politicians asking these perfectly logical and obvious questions?

Anonymous said...

I appreciate your intent, but I feel this is just a long and wordy way of saying some rather simple and obvious things.

The report published by the Equalities Commission this year "How Fair is Britain?" had some very interesting statistics on the Muslim economic contribution to Britain and in it they were specifically designated separately as Muslims. It revealed that only 47% of Muslim males were employed and 24% of Muslim females.

There is a page on my website about the Muslim economic contribution to Britain. I update it as new statistics emerge.

Tim of Angle said...

I was somewhat amused to see Gates of Vienna taken to task on a point of grammar by the Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, John Derbyshire, at National Review Corner (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/261935/unlocking-word-hoard-john-derbyshire). Well, at least he's reading, and if that's the only nit he has to pick, I suppose that constitutes an endorsement. We can has progress.

gxm said...

Yes Vortac “Pike Bishop” is a curious pseudonym. At least it is to an old American like me who also happens to be a connoisseur of old westerns. I guess you must have similar characteristics. That of course is the name of the character played by Bill Holden in Peckinpah’s 1969 film The Wild Bunch, a real classic. Perhaps it’s just coincidence though. BTW Peckinpah may have concocted that name from the fact that one James Pike was an Episcopal bishop of California.