Britain is an "immigrationy" nation undergoing relatively natural levels of immigration
It's a long shot, but let's try and discuss this complex and multifaceted issue in a "non-retard" way.
A lot of emotional juice gets spilled over the topic of immigration and the connected issues of restricting or permitting it. But what if the raging controversy is not even related to reality; a bit like arguing about, say, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? What if the immigration debate is simply not relevant to the situation on the ground?
This sounds counterintuitive, but think of it like two people arguing over whether water should be wet or not, or if sound should be silent. You would correctly conclude that the two parties were at very least eccentric timewasters, if not batshit crazy.
What if the "Great Immigration Debate," as it is fought on our airwaves and social media platforms, is a bit like that?
Well, it kinda, sort of is exactly like that.
Take the case of Britain. British people, by and large, hate immigration, but that is irrelevant because just like water being wet and sound being a bit noisy, the modern Britain we all know and love is in fact "immigrationy." This is despite the fact that it has been pumping out anti-immigration measures for decades, the last one being a stipulation that a British citizen marrying a foreigner must be earning at least £38,700 a year to bring their spouse into the country.
Yes, the "anti-immigration" UK is in fact quite "immigrationy," and the only way you could stop that would be with the same skillset you'd need to stop water being wet, sound being sound, and modern Britain being what it undoubtedly is today.
This means that immigration doesn't just happen by itself and then inflict itself on some poor innocent country "just because..."
Immigration is, in a very real sense, about a country's own relationship with itself and its inherent nature.
Focusing on Britain, then, what kind of relationship is Britain having with itself?
First, a few helpful data points.
(1) Personal freedom:
(2) NHS:
(3) Universities, etc. (i.e. soft service industry jobs)
(4) UK being a big world player...
These show, without too much painful reading, that Britain wants to be a country of individual liberties, where people can get free-at-the-point-of-demand health care (and welfare), while also providing cushy non-industrial jobs, like working in universities or the financial sector. Meanwhile, Britain also wants to be the bastion of "freedom" and soft power that indirectly feeds the service economy that allows it to do all this stuff.
These characteristics also override any scruples the country may have about the downside of immigration. In fact, try going against any of these points at election time and see how well you do.
Basically, without an economic, cultural, and political dismantling of the present UK and the creation of a radically different one, the "water" of UK immigration is going to continue to stay "wet," and it's pretty stupid arguing about the wetness of water.
Under present conditions, the best you can do is to debate what is "natural" immigration for an immigrationy country like Britain.
This recent, extremely lucid graph of immigration stats shows you what you pretty much would expect to see in Britain's case. In other words, it is a depiction of the "wetness of water" or the immigration of an immigrationy country:
The red line is the total, but look at the dark blue line (foreign students), orange line (workers), yellow line (family of workers, students, and students), and light blue (special refugee resettlements).
The dark blue line: A country like Britain, coasting along on its soft power capital and being the centre of the English language, is going to have a rather large university sector with a lot of foreign students. Even more so, when the
768,000 jobs it supports can be better supported by fee-paying foreigners than the domestic tax-payer (and voter).
The orange line: A country like Britain, allowing women to marry when they like, or not at all, and to have one or two kids or none, is going to have sub-replacement fertility. Right now it's below 1.5 or a more than 25% depopulation every generation. That, along with working age Brits on welfare, is going to create massive suck on the labour market. Also, a country like Britain, basking in the security of universal "free" health care, but also trepidatious of the rising costs, is going to be scouring the world looking for "competitively priced" healthcare professionals.
On the above graph, the main discrepancies shown are:(1) The effects of Covid -- a sharp drop in immigration followed by a sharp rise to compensate or over-compensate.
(2) The education sector's growing reliance on foreign fee-paying students to keep the whole industry going.
(3) The sharp uptick of resettlement visas from 2020. These are mainly special visas for the rather large numbers of Ukrainians and Hong Kong Chinese coming into the country recently, as an aspect of Britain's global role in standing up to Russia and China.
Whatever one thinks of these discrepancies and trends, they self-evidently have their own logic and justification.
We can maybe quibble about paying for the education sector through more debt and taxation and less through foreign students, or simply raise the question of downsizing it.
Likewise, we can question whether we should be taking in quite so many perfectly decent people from the Ukraine and Hong Kong, threatened, as they are, by more authoritarian regimes. But we might also want to consider what that would do to Britain's international standing, our soft power, and our global service economy.
Apart from these relatively minor points, the only legitimate debate to be had here is about how many of those workers, students, and refugees will go back to their own countries, and under what circumstances.
Allowing their family members in (the yellow line) might actually make that easier, as they would be less likely to get into serious relationships with the "immigration-hating" locals and stay forever.
NHS key worker
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
