Western Civilization Is Not Just a Data Point

In the Telegraph Wednesday, a headline declared: “Migration has failed to drive economic growth, warns report.” That much was already quite evident to those with ears to hear, eyes to see, and the capacity for critical thinking. But now, the British paper reports, the data appears to have caught up with the powers of basic observation:

Record-high levels of immigration have failed to boost the economy while making the housing crisis worse, a leading think tank has warned.

In a report co-authored by former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) urged the Government to introduce caps on legal immigration to stop a drain on British infrastructure and public services that is not offset by economic growth.

In particular, high levels of immigration are “significantly exacerbating the housing crisis”, it said.

The report undermines almost every popular argument for mass immigration, which has strained Britain to the breaking point — across housing, public services, infrastructure, civil society, and even the living standards of native Brits. (“British consumers are suffering the longest drop in living standards in the G7,” the Telegraph noted.) “[I]f large-scale migration of the sort we’ve seen is really so great for the economy, we have to ask ourselves why we are not seeing this in the GDP per capita data,” CPS concludes.

The British Conservative Party’s betrayal of its own voters on this issue is even more pronounced than the GOP’s decades-long track record of broken promises and about-faces on our southern border. The Tories rode the coattails of Brexit — a referendum that was, fundamentally, an expression of British anger about mass migration — to historic majorities, then promptly presided over the greatest increase in immigration in their small island nation’s history. The polls and a slate of recent local elections suggest the party is heading for a drubbing in the upcoming election — the mood within party leadership has been likened to that of a “death march” by Politico. It’s difficult to think of another time in recent history when electoral annihilation was more richly deserved.

The obvious and indisputable fact is that mass Third World migration is bad for Western countries — existentially bad, in fact. This has been true for as long as mass Third World migration has been happening at scale, and, in spite of the preponderance of studies attesting to that danger, the fundamental threat transcends any one statistic or numerical data point. Proponents of sane, patriotic immigration policy get bogged down, at times, by debates over the finer points of GDP growth numbers or macroeconomic trends. Empiricism has its place, but it can distract from our ability to see what is right in front of us. The rationalist “has no sense of the cumulation of experience,” as Michael Oakeshott put it — “only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into a formula.”

To be sure, there are many practical arguments against the flood of immigration up from the Global South and into the West: Downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing prices, strain on public services, importation of crime, drugs and violence, fraying civic bonds, social and political instability, and so on. All of these, to varying degrees, are true. The European experience here is arguably even starker than that of the United States — so much so, in fact, that elites in some European nations have sought to suppress or hide official government statistics on the matter.

Practically every European country that opened its doors to large-scale refugee resettlement in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis has experienced related spikes in criminal violence, for example — especially the most horrific and savage kinds of crimes, such as gang rapes. Flash points in this saga include the 2015 New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne, when hundreds of German women were jumped, sexually assaulted, and raped by roving gangs of immigrant men, most of whom “were from the North African-Arabic region,” the German DW reported. (“Packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them.”) But the trend is much more systemic. In Germany — which received the largest share of refugees in Europe — Afghan immigrants are a breathtaking 70 times more likely than Germans to be suspected of gang rapes, according to the latest data from the German government; African immigrants are a still-shocking 40 times more likely. Foreign nationals make up just 12 percent of the German population but account for 67 percent of all gang rape cases. The same is consistently true across Europe and across various kinds and categories of crime. Per a 2022 RealClearInvestigations study:

RCI collected homicide data for the European Union from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for 11 years, from 2010 to 2020, and compared it to rising percentages of each country’s foreign-born population. Even after accounting for variations among countries, the data show that each one percentage point increase in immigrant population is associated with a 3.6 percent increase in the homicide rate.

Binders full of data attesting to all this can come in handy, at certain junctures. But one need not prove that a large influx of Middle East and North African immigrants will invariably lead to a sharp uptick in gang rapes; or that Pakistani grooming gangs in England are a direct result of — you guessed it — Pakistani immigration; or even that immigration writ large has failed to stimulate economic growth. While each of these data points has a grave story to tell, the civilizational implications of mass migration are larger than the sum of their parts.

The simple truth is that the people coming into our country are not like us. They are different. There is nothing wrong with human difference, in the abstract; it gives color and variety to our world. I have traveled to countries like India, South Africa, and Tanzania because they are different from mine — exotic, distinctive, and fascinating in their own right. But I do not want America — my country — to come to resemble theirs; I like America the way that it is. I like it better than theirs, in no small part because it is mine. It belongs to me and my fellow Americans. It is not an “idea,” or a “universal nation,” or an economic zone, or a low-tax parking space for global capital — it is our home. I, for one, would like it to remain that way — and I don’t need studies or data to tell me so.

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