Immigration: an immodest proposal

I think immigration is a really good thing. I’ve directly worked with many who have made a home here in the UK, as well as some who intended to return their native home. I’ve worked with 1st generation immigrants and 2nd generation.

Of the people I’ve worked with I can think of precisely none who I wished had never come to these Isles. I think they’ve all made a positive contribution to the UK. I’m glad they (or their families) chose to come here.

I also think salt is a really good thing. I love the stuff and view it as nature’s premier flavour enhancer. However, . . . .

This does not mean I want to dump 1kg of salt onto every meal I eat

The key phrase above is really “Of the people I’ve worked with”. Statistically speaking this is a highly-biased sample. Because I’ve worked in an industrial research environment the kind of people I’ve directly worked with tended¹ to be smart, motivated, and civilized (SMC’s).

If it were possible to only allow SMC immigration we’d have no problem - or perhaps far fewer problems. But this isn’t what we’ve done - we’ve opened the floodgates here in the UK to people from God knows where, with God knows what sense of morality, and with God knows what cultural operating system driving them.

Let’s suppose we arbitrarily pick a number out of thin air and suggest that, actually, even with the crazy number of immigrants (from God knows where) we’ve taken in over the last 25 years 75% of them have values which, more or less, overlap with our own and who aren’t going to cause any trouble. That would still leave a rather large number (maybe around 2 million plus) who you probably wouldn’t want to invite round to dinner anytime soon.

Is 75% too low, too high? Who knows? I believe it’s higher than 75% (probably around 90% as a guesstimate) - but maybe that’s just my general optimism and overall desire to see the best in people talking.

So, how do we do better and put in place systems that give us a high degree of assurance that we’re only allowing high quality people in?

Oh - that’s very discriminatory Mr Rigger Bigot. Too bloody right it is. I want to be able to discriminate when it comes to who I let into my home. Suppose I were to host some dinner party (how very middle class of me) and some Council busybody turned up to tell me that I needed to expand the invite list because it wasn’t inclusive enough. I think I’d have some choice words - most of them being some variant of fuck².

There is no good reason not to apply this kind of discrimination at a national level. The UK is, after all, our (wider) home.

One of the most important, and easiest, things we could do (and which we actually already do to some extent³) is the following

Ensure that direct government welfare benefits are only available to UK citizens.

I would actually go a bit further and require that immigrants pay some contribution towards things like education and healthcare. There should be some cut-off point when their tax contribution to the UK has exceeded a certain level.

If you can’t pay your way then . . . . . . . bye

I think we need to scrap the whole ILR thing too. Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) is essentially the granting of a permanent visa which gives the right to access welfare benefits. This needs to stop - and not just because of the access to benefits, but because it doesn’t make any sense. Visas should be temporary and periodically renewed after assessment. The number of non-EU holders of ILR status in the UK is not precisely known but a mid-range estimate is 720,000 (according to Google).

If you have come to the UK to live and work you should be able to bring your immediate family over (spouse, children) provided you can support them without recourse to welfare benefits. You should not, absolutely not, be able to bring over your parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and so on. Should members of your extended family wish to join you they should be treated as a separate applicant on an individual basis.

Initial visas should, mostly, be short-term and temporary with the possibility of extension after assessment. Acquiring UK citizenship should not be an easy process (and nor should it be so difficult it’s practically impossible).

If you break our laws then you should be no longer welcome. Deportation should not be some lengthy process enriching a whole bunch of parasites “human rights” lawyers, but a quick process. I simply fail to understand why it appears to be almost impossible to deport scumbags⁴ in the UK. If their home country doesn’t want them back then just dump them somewhere else and let them claim ‘asylum’ - somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s not the UK I don’t much care. Dump them in international waters for all I care.

As an aside, it’s worth remembering some of the ‘arguments’ presented in court during deportation hearings where these parasites lawyers argue that their client should remain in the UK. One that has been reported on is some variant of the “He didn’t know that rape was wrong because he comes from a different culture”. What on earth are we doing importing (male) people from this “culture” in the first place, then? And I would suggest that if someone has grown up and been steeped in a ‘culture’ like this it’s going to be nigh on impossible to ‘re-educate’ them in any way that would render them no longer a threat to women in the UK.

Obviously we shouldn’t be reaching for the sword of deportation if someone is caught speeding (for example), but if someone violates our norms and laws to a sufficient⁵ extent then deportation should be routine and not at all difficult to achieve.

Immigration should be disincentivized for those with no realistic prospect of ever contributing to the UK economy in some way. That’s the basic principle here.

I lived for 10 years in a country with immigration policies pretty much the same as I’ve outlined. It worked well and I could see nothing wrong with it. People who made arses of themselves would be deported on timescales measured in days, not weeks or months. Sometimes they’d be on a plane the very next day after making themselves sufficiently unwelcome to their hosts. And why shouldn’t the hosts have that as an option? It’s their country, after all.

The question I must ask myself here, though, is why do I want to disincentivize immigration in this way? It, basically, comes down to numbers. I’ve mentioned before that average net yearly migration (the difference between in and out) in the decade leading up to the year 2000 in the UK was around 4,000.

4,000 in a country of some 60 million people.

By the year 2025 that average yearly figure had risen by very close to a factor of 10,000%

A ten thousand percent increase.

Now, net migration figures are an imperfect measure of the issue since they’re just a difference of in vs out - but that kind of wild increase does not happen without some major, major change of policy and intent. The figures I based this simple calculation on were all drawn from Google’s AI thing that pops up when you do a search - so make of that what you will. Very often, Google’s a bit like a left-wing prof that tends to give you data that will make the ‘progressive’ case look better.

One other thing that Google told me when I last looked was that only 1 in 4 adult immigrants to the UK are gainfully employed. That’s not a good stat at all (even if we factor in families where there’s one main breadwinner). Some of those are going to be reliant on government support (i.e. the British taxpayer is contributing to feeding and housing them).

The problem I have with immigration in the UK, as it is currently, is not about immigration per se, but about the scale and quality of that immigration. It’s also about affordability and the fact that UK plc is rapidly being flushed down the economic tubes as a result of our idiot governments over the last few decades. We’re in a mess and have decided to commit economic suicide by fanatically pursuing the farce of “Net Zero” which won’t do anything to help the ‘climate’ even if it could be made economically viable (which it can’t⁶).

Denmark is one of the few countries that keeps decent immigration records and publishes breakdowns by country of origin. Their data is well-worth perusing. Have a look at this chart

What this shows is that immigrants from MENAPT countries at no point in their life make a net positive contribution (on average) to Denmark’s economy.

Their crime stats are equally bleak

And these are adjusted figures which gives us some confidence they’re comparing statistically equivalent samples.

So, if you were running a country, where would you prefer your immigrants to originate from?

This is not to say that there are no very high-quality immigrants from MENAPT countries (there are - obviously) but it does indicate that one needs to take extra care when assessing applications from certain regions.

What we wanted, and needed, was to sprinkle the finest pink Himalayan salt on our fries. Instead, we’ve dumped a kilogram of the lowest grade salt everywhere.

1. For very high values of ‘tended’

2. As in “Fuck off you fucking demented fuckwit”

3. Those with the status of ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain), or with ‘settled’ status, or those whose visas do not have an attached NRPF (No Recourse to Public Funds), or refugee status can claim benefits

4. Here I am talking, particularly, about those convicted of serious cases such as assault or sexual assault. Why on earth we have to tolerate their presence on our shores is beyond me. I have zero sympathy for their plight once they’ve transgressed the bounds of decency and seriously hurt someone else

5. And there’ll be a lot of argument and work needed over what constitutes ‘sufficient’, obviously

6. Quite apart from the physics limitations of trying to power a country with high-entropy sources of energy there’s something of a mining bottleneck that most people are unaware of. The rate at which we need all the good stuff (copper, aluminium, lithium, etc) to come out of the ground is not even close to the projected rate we’re going to need it to be employed if we’re going to ‘net zero’ ourselves