By D. J. Webb
Can there be such a thing as a proposition nation? This is an interesting question, raised in the US context, but also more widely applicable to other Western countries that claim to be fostering a civic nationalism that is not based on one racial or ethnic group. The issue is also directly relevant to libertarians: the “left libertarians” support open borders, presumably in the expectation that incomers will embrace a libertarian culture as the propositional basis for the society, whereas conservative libertarians (palaeo-libertarians) see little reason to expect ethnic engulfing to support socioeconomic liberty.
Ethnic and linguistic boundaries are broadly accepted as logical national boundaries. However, the exceptions are relatively numerous: Britain, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are each different nations. As Canada is not an island and is directly contiguous to the US, the border seems nothing more than a legacy of history. Taiwan is effectively independent from China, despite having a Chinese population. The distinctions between Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine are also more than a little fuzzy: surely Belarus and the Ukraine are, in the final analysis, “Russian” — their separate languages largely play second fiddle to Russian as a spoken language on the ground, and Russian and Belarusian are in any case much closer to Russian than, say, the Taiwanese dialect is to Mandarin Chinese. The distinctions between the Arab states, the Latin American States and even India and Pakistan appear poorly grounded in ethnic or linguistic differences (there are millions of Urdu- or Punjabi-speaking Muslims living in India). Coming closer to home, the proposal for Scottish independence is not made on ethnic or linguistic grounds.
Many of these examples are essentially cases where a different political culture has emerged for historical reasons. Scotland, for example, was an independent country for centuries, and so retains a national identity quite separate to that of the English. It is argued by many that Scots prefer more public spending and greater “social solidarity” (a term that reflects a view of public spending that flatters the bureaucrats who manage it), and so, despite appearing largely identical to the English in ethnic and linguistic terms, rightly feel politically different.
Put another way, all of these examples may be instances of “proposition nations”. It is common for conservatives to argue that America is not, in fact, a proposition nation, but that is not what was indicated in the US Declaration of Independence, which began:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The rest of the document gave “causes impelling them to separation” that amounted to a list of political and economic grievances. Not one of the causes listed argued that the Americans were not, in fact, British, or did not speak English. The grievances listed centred on claims that Britain was withholding the rights of British subjects in America that ought to have been accorded to them according to England’s age-old Common Law. Somewhat awkwardly, English liberty was the “proposition” of the new nation that justified independence from England.
Of course, the distance of the American colonies from Britain, which prevented the direct incorporation of the colonies into the metropolitan state and impeded the passage of edicts and commands across the Atlantic, provides one reason why the colonists eventually demanded independence. Similarly, independence of Australia and New Zealand came about largely because these were distant discrete territories. Yet the fact that America was far from Britain was not given in the Declaration of Independence as the essential reason for demanding independence.
In the other cases adduced above, states that have successfully established their legitimacy have rested their claims to public support on elements of political culture, at least to an extent. Canada markets itself as an extreme leftist state whose population are urged to look down on the US Yahoos. Taiwan emphasizes its capitalism and independent path to democracy, both of which contrast with the culture of the Chinese Mainland. Unsuccessful states like the Ukraine have failed to win over broader public support owing to fuzzy delineation of a separate political culture: the Ukraine has failed to make the case that, despite the fact that most of the population speaks Russian on a daily basis and are in no significant cultural details distinguishable from Russians, the country is building a unique political culture that makes them non-Russian.
So it seems that national identity, commonly rooted in ethnicity and language, has a strong component of political culture too: the political culture forms a “proposition” that may become identity-forming or contribute towards the formation of a national identity. The problem for conservatives is that the left then claim that anyone in the world who adopts the national identity (the proposition) becomes part of a civic nation of passport holders who adhere to the same political norms. According to this theory, any African or Asian who supports massive state spending, loves haggis and hates the English is well on his way to becoming a Scot. In its most reductionist form, the prevailing left-wing narrative argues that nations are nothing other than their political cultures; there is no ethnic or linguistic basis at all to society. If the US becomes Hispanic or Spanish-speaking, or if France becomes Arab or Arabic-speaking, it is argued, America and France will survive, as their political cultures are sufficiently attractive to provide a coherent identity for both natives, incomers and the descendants of incomers alike. This logic justifies wholesale population replacement: an extreme dislocation, such as Sweden becoming a Muslim country, is rationalized as a natural development from the Sweden of the Middle Ages as long as the outward forms of democracy and such like continue.
There is also the problem that the “propositions” at the heart of the political-national projects of the Western countries are too similar, coming down to a common promotion of multiracialism and multiculturalism. It seems there are still differences: at the popular level, Americans are more interested in guns and religion than the Canadians, but at the elite level all this is deprecated, and an ideal future is envisaged where American cities become more like Canada. The French approach to multiculturalism is to demand much greater adherence to secular French values than is the case in England, symbolized by the prohibition of wearing the Muslim veil in public.
Yet there is a real process of homogenization going on here: if all Western nations see themselves as proposition nations and import millions of new citizens, the end-results will be variations on the same theme of multiculturalism, depending on whether the host nations “successfully” become hyper-diverse, like England, or end up bringing in too many migrants from one source (an Arabic France? a Hispanic America?) in a way that resembles conquest from a single source and not a multiethnic free-for-all. In the end, the similarity of the “proposition” being advanced in all Western countries is a Trojan horse for globalism: our elite view global rule by multinational bureaucracies as the ultimate goal, and de-ethnicization of the Western states prepares the way for much deeper global cooperation as elite bureaucracies meld across transnational borders.
This suffers from the flaw that a political culture is only one element in national identity. The stronger national identities define themselves in terms of language, ancestry and cultural heritage, as well as political culture. It is hard to see Japan reduced to a political proposition aside from the Japanese people, their cultural traditions and their language. American resentment of England amounts to a recognition that there are other elements to national identity than political culture, and yet all of those elements tie America to an English heritage, which cannot be fully shaken off. The differences between the two nations then resolve themselves at the detailed level in the ways in which each of them conserves or traduces some part of the common cultural heritage, including the English language, a literary tradition, a religious tradition, aspects of the Common Law and much else.
This brings us back to the original problem that the US colonists advanced a “proposition” of political and economic liberty, not as a result of abstract philosophizing, but as a defence of England’s cultural heritage. The Common Law wasn’t dreamt up in politics departments of universities, but emerged from England’s history as part of our traditions. To counterpose the political proposition to the ethnic foundation of the nation is therefore quite confused. The American proposition was an ethnic one: it amounted to a claim that the American colonists would establish to a greater extent the traditional rights of Englishmen, seen to be atrophying in England itself. The Americans were creating a new and better England, one that would be a free country only because liberty was part of England’s cultural heritage.
We notice a further logical slip in all of this: immigrants to Western nations don’t really adhere to the same political norms. If they did, why would multiculturalism have to be introduced to show respect for the refusal of ethnic minorities to integrate into Anglo-Saxon societies? Surely, immigrants who adopted our traditional political values would resent the assault on free speech and freedom of expression that enforced multiculturalism amounts to. A fundamental political proposition (or accepted cultural norms) lie at the heart of a common identity shared by most citizens of any nation, but is not the only element of that identity. So it turns out that it is not possible to integrate huge numbers of incomers from totally alien cultures in a way that ensures the survival of the political-cultural proposition. Incomers bring their political cultures with them.
Where does this leave us? We are constantly told that freedom of labour should be a libertarian right, and that libertarianism is as attractive to ethnic-minority people as it is to Englishmen. Yet the huge social experiment we have been conducting for decades shows that immigrants tend to support state power, particularly where that state is committed to egalitarianism. The political proposition we (libertarians) support only makes sense when viewed from the perspective of England’s Common Law, and will not survive the demographic transformation of our society via indiscriminate immigration. Real people bear the imprint of their upbringing and the cultures of their ancestors. Ultimately, we should be arguing for the survival of our ancestral culture and not for a bare political proposition of liberty in the abstract, which cannot be achieved without the fundamental support of a cultural heritage that subsists among people whose ancestors viewed themselves as free people.
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Excellent essay. For me, the most important point is made here:
[quote]”We notice a further logical slip in all of this: immigrants to Western nations don’t really adhere to the same political norms. If they did, why would multiculturalism have to be introduced to show respect for the refusal of ethnic minorities to integrate into Anglo-Saxon societies? Surely, immigrants who adopted our traditional political values would resent the assault on free speech and freedom of expression that enforced multiculturalism amounts to. A fundamental political proposition (or accepted cultural norms) lie at the heart of a common identity shared by most citizens of any nation, but is not the only element of that identity. So it turns out that it is not possible to integrate huge numbers of incomers from totally alien cultures in a way that ensures the survival of the political-cultural proposition. Incomers bring their political cultures with them.”[unquote]
That paragraph summarises a great unspoken dilemma of racial liberalism in the West. Why is multi-culturalism necessary if the elite are correct and political propositions do not follow ethnic patterns?
However, I think there is a rational reply to this. There has been considerable criticism of multiculturalism since the outset of mass immigration, not just from cultural conservatives, but also from the Left. The prominent critics of multiculturalism include figures as politically-diverse as Ray Honeyford, Trevor Phillips, Angela Merkel and Roger Scruton. These people, and others like them, have advocated racial integration to one extent or another, apparently as an alternative to multiculturalism, each of them styling their critique as a rejection of multiculturalism. I think this is purposefully meant to give a misleading impression.
I think Mr Webb is right when he argues that racial integration cannot happen in situation where there are disparate political and cultural propositions and identities that are alien to each other. The Establishment know this too. That is why they do not really believe in multiculturalism at all, except as a pregnant situation and as a precursor to something else. That something else is not integration as the utopian liberal-Left explicitly conceive of it, nor is it integration in the sense that the idealistic cultural conservatives would necessarily want or understand. It is ‘integration’ in the sense of racial death: a takeover, displacement and mixing of the indigenous people of the country in favour of alien incomers.
Multiculturalism is a planned ‘project’ on a utopian trajectory, rather than a naturalistic ‘end point’. Both liberal-Left and culturally conservative critics who call for ‘integration’ are, intentionally or not, arguing for the intensification of the ‘project’. Our salvation might be economic. The ‘project’ sits uncomfortably alongside the economic forces that are really driving it and causing mass human migration, and will perhaps contribute to the unravelling of that very economic system, at which point new possibilities will arise.
“Why is multi-culturalism necessary if the elite are correct and political propositions do not follow ethnic patterns?” Yes, Tom, that is the problem. If people really are interchangeable, why can’t we just be a multi-racial society based on England’s traditional culture? The problem is not that it is entirely impossible for any immigrant to assimilate: there are indeed fully assimilated black people and even people of Pakistani origin in the UK. The Pakistani former bishop of Rochester, Nazir-Ali, would be an example of a more integrated person. But this can only happen in ones and twos. US assimilation of Italians only happened because after 1924 immigration was cut off for 40 years, forcing assimilation. The effect of joint participation in the war also aided assimilation. But while some people are assimilating, a greater number of new arrivals are coming in, creating whole areas and even whole cities that are non-English, and making it harder for any further assimilation to take place. Put simply, we could assimilate 100,000 people, but not 10 million. In fact, there are indications of ABsimilation, where English people assimilate to the culture of the incomers. There is a rising number of English Muslim converts, and the young people in London, even the English ones, are now adopting the Jafaican (fake Jamaican) accent of multi-cultural London.
This is one point on which we might differ. I accept the general point that where migration is more evolutionary in nature, even alien migrant groups will tend to assimilate in the sense that most of them will come to mimic or resemble the host group, even phenotypically. However the underlying divisions will remain and will be manifested in various ways, something that I think goes some way to explaining a lot of the inter-generational social problems we have in this country, such as crime and chronic unemployment.
I think even a small amount of racial mixing leaves traces, benign and otherwise, in culture and in the way that people behave. You may consider that to be ‘assimilation’, but I consider it to be just a further process of sub-division. Even though your understanding of assimilation is valid within the parameters of how the concept is conventionally understood and applied, I think the Honeyford case shows that, in the wrong hands, the assimilationist/integrationist school of thought can be a Trojan horse and encourages complacency and the deepening of these problems, not their alleviation. Race is in some respects proxied through society in other divisive identities such as class and religion. Even if we follow your (perhaps unintended) logic and integration of certain groups into the whole is accomplished (whether harmoniously or otherwise), and a ‘whitening’ process erases or minimises any apparent differences of significance, there will always be a scar – and that might not be an entirely bad thing. Those who come after us may need a constant reminder of this human folly to help them understand and not repeat these mistakes in the future.
But the point is that the Left and some cultural conservatives will not heed these warnings. That is because their role here is to rationalise the needs of capital (Lenin would uncharitably have called them ‘useful idiots’, and in the case of the utopian Left, actually did so). For the Left in particular, a fractured process of assimilation is dialectic rather than linear, and about consensualising the marginalisation and demonisation of the indigenous white identity. That is their Gleichschaltung: the harmonisation and co-ordination of the white British into a non-people, in which the problems brought by racial aliens are ‘normalised’ (which is what I think ‘Rotherham’ was really about) and the synthesis is something other than white and British. The cultural conservatives naively imagine that assimilation is linear and essentially a ‘whitening’ process along South American lines, but they – and you – should know better.
Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best essay I have read for some time, and certainly one of the best ever on a libertarian blog. It should be as widely distributed among English libertarians as possible for the benefit of those who are able to “get it.” You efficiently demolish the Leftist idea that something as important and, in Chesterton’s words, “as deep and unmanageable”, as national identity can be fully expressed in, let alone inhere in, a single written constitutional instrument. You do more than this; you tackle the problem of open borders from a libertarian and nationalist perspective simultaneously, as it should be done. I shall end by repeating the plea I made some months ago last summer in an email conversation that you should compile some of these wonderful essays and ask either John Kersey or Sean Gabb to write a Foreword.
Thank you, Keir. I’ll think about it. I wonder how many essays would go in a book – I think Dr Gabb told me 80,000 words is right for a book. DJW
That would be about right, yes, although my own attempt at a book is only 170 pages and still just about works…
Lovely evening reading, was a recommendation on part of our most venerable Director of Youth Affairs. I believe you have encapsulated most of the right wing argument against open borders and non-European migration in no more than a brief read.
I have just one question to ask you, followed by a short lecture on Eastern Europe. What is your take on migration between European societies? Especially those originating from former Warsaw Pact nations and those whose cultural heritage may have bee altered by the dominant ideology at that time, communism. Do, in your opinion, Eastern Europeans who migrate to the West have an affinity or predisposition to statism, and further, are they incompatible with the Western tradition of liberty?
As for my intended lecture: You made the slightly naive western mistake of assuming Ukraine and Belarus are very alike to Russia. Although they have many similarities and indeed did share the vast majority of modern history, their deeper cultural influences are set apart from Russia. Both of the aforementioned have an entirely separate line of history even into the early modern era. Territorially they only became Russian halfway through the 18th century, after the Polish partitions. The long-standing cultural influence of these two nations are certainly more influenced by the history of the Commonwealth than Russia, in fact, if you look at the electoral results of Ukraine, you will still see a deep electoral divide between former Russian areas which have only recently been added to Ukraine by Lenin and others following him, and the truly ethnic Ukrainian – or Ruthenian – areas which were for the most part under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later, the Second Polish Republic. I believe that this is indicative of the different cultural streams within Ukraine, and less so, Belarus. In the case of Belarus, many in fact see themselves as the true successors to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and another significant minority considers themselves to be closer to the Poles than to the Russians (primarily the Byelarussian catholics).
Jakub, I sympathize with English people in areas (like Boston in Lincolnshire) where there are very large numbers of Eastern Europeans. There has to be some kind of limit. But I sympathize with Spaniards in places like Torremolinos that have seen a huge influx of Englishmen, generally behaving badly and refusing to learn Spanish. So clearly, the raw numbers of migrants in any one area are relevant. No one wants a town of 20,000 to see 20,000 Poles arrive.
However, I’m not against European migration (as long as we are talking of genuine Europeans, and not gypsies, Somalis, Turks etc). Yes, I do agree that Eastern Europeans, largely because they look like us, can eventually integrate well. Some Poles in the UK do like to talk the language of “discrimination”, but I find they are much less likely to do so than blacks, Asians, etc.
I’m not too sure how much communism affected the original cultures of Eastern Europe. I’m more familiar with Russia and the Ukraine than with Poland. I’d be inclined to think the way communism worked in each Eastern European country varied in line with the culture, and that communism was affected by those cultures as much as it affected those cultures. East Germany and Albania were totally different societies. Some remnant of German efficiency remained in a communist East Germany. Maybe you should write for the LA here and explain what changes occurred in Polish culture as a result of communism, as you will know much more about this subject. I still think Poles are integratable here, as long as we don’t encourage the creation of separate Polish towns here.
[Boston is the area of England with the highest proportion of Eastern Europeans. In the 2011 census the population of those aged 3 and over was 62,243, but this included 3,006 speakers of Polish, 1,715 of Lithuanian, 1,104 of Latvian and 738 of Russian. Of course, there are larger Eastern European communities in London, but this one town was 11% Eastern European — and the number is probably higher now than it was in 2016.]
You are right that there is a Polish influence on Belarus and the Ukraine, but it dates back centuries — these countries are largely Russian-speaking today. It’s interesting that in the 2009 Belarusian census, 53% said their mother tongue was Belarusian, but a separate question asked what language was spoken in the home, and 70% said Russian. It’s a similar situation in the Ukraine, where around 80% of people claim be native speakers of Ukrainian, but government studies of the spoken language on the ground show that in nearly all parts of the Ukraine the spoken language is either Russian or Surzhyk (a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian) and to find the areas where large numbers of people are actually speaking Ukrainian you need to go to Lviv in Galicia. These people watch Russian TV shows every day and are fully integrated into Russian cultural life. However, people in Kiev have told me that they can watch Polish TV shows too — and understand about 80% of the language owing to the similarity with Ukrainian. Here are examples of the languages:
1. Ukrainian for “I understood you” – ja zrozumiv tebe
2. Russian – ja ponjal tjebja.
3. Surzhyk – ja ponjav tebe.
There is enough of a historical basis in links with Poland for the Ukraine following the Maidan to start to emphasize that, but the failure of the reform process in Kiev indicates they may be missing the boat on this…
More interesting stuff! As with several of the other anti-immigrant posts on this site, however, I am still not convinced that the centralized state can be trusted with this task of discrimination. You say that national identity cannot be captured in a constitution, but then again, how can it be captured in immigration statutes?
I would say that only individuals themselves, acting individually or as members of voluntary associations, can exercise this right of discrimination correctly. Otherwise, you simply have a majority saying the quota must be 50,000 Poles and 10,000 Turks, regardless of whether all individuals acting freely would have invited some different number of each group. I really don’t think the immigration question can be adequately answered from a libertarian perspective while relying on the statist model of immigration policy.
Also, I’m a bit skeptical of your claim that the writers of the Declaration were certain they were still Englishmen. Their separation from England was far more drastic than the later separation of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which remain Commonwealth Realms today, not fully separate republics. And the wording of that quoted paragraph certainly suggests that, while they acknowledged their common ancestry with England, they now considered themselves to become a new people and on those grounds sought independence.
If a “proposition nation” were anything other than an illusion, people wouldn’t have to immigrate. Successful political/legal systems are not like economic wealth. Any country can copy and adopt them at no cost, if they can make them work. The massive population shift we’re witnessing is all from non-white to white countries. If you use Occam’s razor to find the most likely reason for this, it’s that whites are genetically predisposed to creating nations that are more attractive to live in – more prosperous, scientifically advanced and stable. Other races can enjoy these benefits by living in white countries, but there is little evidence that they can build and sustain such systems themselves.
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the “left libertarians” support open borders, presumably in the expectation that incomers will embrace a libertarian culture as the propositional basis for the society, whereas conservative libertarians (palaeo-libertarians) see little reason to expect ethnic engulfing to support socioeconomic liberty.
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Libertarians support open borders not out of any expectation one way or another that those who cross said borders will embrace any particular culture, but from the obvious observation that libertarians should support liberty, including the liberty to move across imaginary lines drawn on the ground by street gangs.
Non-libertarians, including conservatives masquerading as libertarians (“paleo-libertarians”) try to claim the mantle for their authoritarian policy prescriptions by pretending that their authoritarian means are ultimately supportive of libertarian ends.
I agree with your objection, though I think the same thing can be raised against left-libertarians who advocate allowing mass immigration. In both cases, supposed libertarians are trying to use government policy to push for some desired social outcome, whether it be social and ethnic homogeneity or else multiculturalism. But the whole point of libertarianism, I thought, was that nobody is authorized to make grand decisions about social engineering without the consent of all individuals concerned.
There are, I think, genuine libertarian grounds for objecting to “open borders”, but the very term “open borders” misidentifies the problem, which is not open borders, but public roads. The state allows anybody to use its roads, granting people access up to the boundaries of all private homes in the country, whereas a genuinely free society would privatize the roads. Private road-owners, unlike the state, would have full rights to exclude anybody they wished, and we might find that, in order to maintain good relations with locals who pay for their use, they have to exclude unwanted outsiders. Then again, they might not, and instead find it more rewarding to allow outsiders to use them and pay for their use as well. We just can’t tell, because we don’t as individuals possess the wisdom of the market.
Sam,
Roads are a knotty issue. It hasn’t always been as simple as roads being owned by the state (as many people seem to think). I found very interesting the following monograph on the subject by Bruce Benson (long, and a bit academic in places, but worth the effort to read):
http://coss.fsu.edu/d5/economics/sites/coss.fsu.edu.economics/files/users/bbenson/roads_public.pdf
Thank you!
Knapp’s endorsement of sinister global bio-experiments conducted on the tax cattle by states is not authoritarianism, no. (It’s something far, far worse.)
It’s high time us fake libertarians learned that the mass immigration of the last 50 years was libertarian. Tony Blair was a libertarian on immigration, you fools. Ireland is just imaginary lines on a map, idiots. Thank God a fedora-American is here to explain all that.
Yeah, except that Knapp never endorsed any such thing, idiot.
It’s a framing problem. I see this more and more.
If libertarians went around arguing that there should be no healthcare, people would rightly think that we were crazy. Of course, libertarians don’t advocate this at all; they just advocate the privatization of healthcare, on the grounds that people would actually enjoy better healthcare if it were provided by the market rather than by the government.
I think “open borders” is a terrible way to describe privatization of border control. Libertarians don’t, or at least shouldn’t, in my view, be advocating abolition of border control. Border control is a good thing, just like healthcare is a good thing, which is precisely why we want it provided by the market, not the government.
I respectfully disagree, Sam.
This particular libertarian doesn’t want to see healthcare, or anything else, “privatized.” He wants to see it de-politicized. So that each individual can take it from any supplier, or leave it, as they see fit.
And “privatization of border control” is, in my view, almost the opposite of open borders. Do you think that “privatized” border controllers wouldn’t be paid, among other things, by the numbers they turn away – rightly or wrongly?
That is why, as I’ve said many times before, I don’t want open borders. I want NO borders, except those which are rooted in property rights.
I don’t understand your distinction between privatization and de-politicization. To me, they are synonymous.
My point about border control is that it’s important to recognize that individuals and voluntary associations have absolute freedom to include or exclude anyone they wish. The rhetoric of “open borders” focuses too much on alleged “right to travel”, when in fact this right only exists on one’s own property. There is a clear implication in this rhetoric that it’s bad to stop people from moving into your community, when in fact communities very much have a right to exclude undesirable outsiders for any reason they see fit, provided those communities are organized on a voluntary basis. The problem is when centralized states arrogate this right, since states impose rules of exclusion and inclusion on individuals without their consent.
My distinction is this:
“privatization” of a state function = private companies do the work, but the state still decides what is to be done.
“de-politicization” of a state function = private companies offer their services in a free market to replace or supersede the good bits of what the state previously did.
Oh I see. In that case, I think we actually agree.
Neil,
Glad to see you making that distinction. It’s one of my pet peeves. And I see that it resolved a misunderstanding between you and young Samwise as well.
Though I say it who comes from the opposite side of the immigration issue, David is making a lot of sense here.
He rightly points out the differences between ethnic and political identities, and what he says about the Scots is particularly on point (though, for some reason, he doesn’t mention the Welsh who might make an even more interesting example). I think he makes a decent case, not only for Scottish independence, but also for the English to actively help that process along.
I do wonder, though, whether the reason for the active governmental encouragement of immigration – particularly by New Labour – isn’t more prosaic than David makes out. An aging population and falling native birth rates threaten the collapse of the welfare system. And if (when) that collapses, there will be much wailing and gnashing of dentures against the politicians responsible, and the apparatchiks that have lived off the system. So, from the political class’s point of view, it makes sense to invite in anyone who is young and willing to work, no matter how incompatible their culture may be with those already here. And, of course, no matter how disastrous the long term consequences may be – as long as they can get themselves off this particular hook.
One thing I’d like to clarify for all here is that I take the stance on immigration that I do because I consider political borders to be without moral foundation. I don’t regard David Cameron, or anyone else, as having any right to stop anyone crossing a line that is not on their property. Furthermore, I don’t regard anyone as having any right to declare any non-criminal individual to be “illegal” simply because they were born in the wrong place. In that, I’m on the same page as Thomas Knapp. But I want to make it clear that I have never advocated mass immigration as a good thing. Indeed, I regard any program of government encouraged mass immigration into an already overcrowded island as anathema. (See, for example, what I said about Polish immigration on the Christopher Cook thread).
So, from my point of view, the enemy on the immigration issue aren’t the people trying to get into the UK – “legally” or “illegally.” The real enemy are those that, for their own selfish reasons, want to bring large numbers of people into Britain without concern for the longer term consequences either to the native population or, indeed, to the immigrants themselves.
For me, the problem is that the liberal culture of Western civilization – the culture I care about, the culture and values which ought to unite people in Britain, the USA, Australia and many other countries, including European ones, against their common enemies – is being cynically destroyed by those enemies; that is to say, the political class. And once you see that, immigration becomes only one among many issues; and not even the biggest issue, at that.
Hear hear!
[…] http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2016/02/13/liberty-as-a-national-proposition/ […]
It’s very interesting that when we talk about liberty, we all seem to agree that it is about people’s freedom and the choices in life that we make. We should be fighting for this as regardless of whether we are left-libertarian or right-libertarian, it would show that we do have something in common.
However, we have to establish as well that liberty would also involving law-making so that we can be able to genuinely protect the individual. It’s no good that we talk about liberty with no law-making process to protect to the individual as the last thing we want is someone’s liberty infringed or even taken away by way of death.
As a Welshman, it is has been dire living in a principality that has been so used to scrounging off the state since the Welsh Assembly was created in 1999. The term ‘liberty’ to many people here would mean wasting government hand outs and doing nothing with your lives and expect other people to pick up after you. Yet, they still have the nerve to moan when that money runs out.
I dare say that I’m not alone who has to put with this attitude as I’m sure it is the same some parts of England and Scotland.
Liberty should mean freedom from state interference, handouts and social engineering and we ourselves have to show that we can be role models for what we know as liberty because it can show that it would change people’s perceptions of what it means to live our lives in freedom and set our own destiny in where we are going with our lives and our future without state interference.
This land for the last 100+ years has seen the state develop power that is becoming more intolerable and yet, who can tell us that we can’t stop it if we put our minds to it and bring in a future where we have shown that we have learned from the past and use it to stop this intolerable power.
I know that there will come a time when people will turn against the state and pro-liberty campaigners like us have to be ready to seize the opportunity and turn our words into action not just for ourselves, but for our future offspring.
Yes, there are those among us (and I am one) who are thinking about just the situation you mention. Please see my “anarchism” essay of about a week ago on this very site.