The ringing argument was made by Horace (b. 65 BC) in his Ode: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”.)
Translating this into our prosaic realities, it’s wishful thinking to believe that millions of new arrivals can be successfully assimilated into the ethos of their new country. Recognising this, Britain doesn’t even try to absorb arrivals from exotic lands into British culture.
Hence our mandated commitment to diversity, a fanciful belief that, since all cultures are equally valid and valuable, they can happily co-exist in fraternal proximity. Such is the British approach to the problem.
The French approach is different. They proceed from the assumption that, since French culture is God’s gift to mankind (although God doesn’t exist), there is no need for any other culture and hence for diversity. All new arrivals must be absorbed so deeply into the new ethos that they become French by some osmotic cultural anointment.
Anyone who has ever visited the banlieues around Paris will know that the French way has failed miserably. However, a visit to the comparable areas of London will confirm that the British way has failed just as badly.
And a short trip northwards, to places like Leicester, Leeds or Bradford, will illustrate the price of failure. Demographically, culturally, linguistically and even legally, large swaths of those places have been transformed by large-scale immigration so much that an outside observer may not recognise them as British cities.
Simple arithmetic shows that, if immigration from culturally alien places continues unabated, within a couple of decades all British cities will lose every trait that makes them British. But help is on the way, and it’s going to come from the Labour Party, the most consistently pro-immigration group in the country.
This realisation dawned on me this morning when I read Janet Daley’s article If the West Is Finished, Why Are the Huddled Masses Flooding Here?
Mrs Daley seems to believe that the huddled masses flooding here are living proof that the West isn’t finished. Since so many Westerners are pessimistic naysayers, mass immigration must be welcomed as the reassuring evidence of the West’s rude health.
After all, people from all over the world aren’t falling over themselves trying to get into Russia, Iran or North Korea. They do, however, know that “the combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics [she probably means ‘economies’, but what’s a couple of letters among friends?] is the unbeatable, absolutely irresistible formula for maximising personal fulfilment, mass prosperity, and social justice.”
Put another way, Mrs Daley believes – correctly, I think – that most people come to France, England or Germany not because they want to become culturally French, English or, God forbid, German. They do so in the hope of having a more comfortable life. This can be delivered either by free markets (“mass prosperity”) or state handouts (“social justice”).
More power to their elbow and all that, but when the influx of culturally alien immigration reaches a certain critical mass, it transmogrifies the host culture into something potentially hostile to it. This, to me, far outweighs any economic benefit we may derive from cheap labour, and even any pleasure we get by eating in ethnic restaurants.
It may come as news to our “liberal democratic government”, but most Britons don’t want to live in areas run by Sharia law and wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin singing from a minaret (or is it the other way around?). That’s why the issue of curbing, stopping or even rolling back immigration enjoys a perennial presence in British political discourse.
One government after another undertakes to do something about it, some of them even try, but all of them fail. However, I have an inkling that this Labour government will succeed without even trying.
If Mrs Daley is right, and I think she is, that it’s mostly Britain’s relative prosperity that attracts immigrants and not their affection for Shakespeare, Turner, Vaughan Williams and warm ale, then one may logically conclude that any diminution of that prosperity will reduce the flow of immigration.
Poland illustrates this hypothesis persuasively. When the country had just dropped the shackles of communism but hadn’t yet cured her economy of its fallout, the huddled Polish masses rushed to these shores. Since Britons no longer had either the skills or the desire to work as plumbers, builders, scaffolders and electricians, Poles took over those functions.
However, in the subsequent couple of decades the Polish economy (economics?) has picked up momentum and is rapidly closing the gap with Britain. Poland’s GDP per capita has already reached two-thirds of Britain’s and parity is just round the corner.
Vindicating Mrs Daley’s supposition, thousands of Poles are going back, leaving Britain’s rusty plumbing unattended. Before long we’ll all have to learn DIY, although I don’t quite see that happening in, say, scaffolding.
Since it’s reasonably clear that Labour policies will impoverish Britain in short order, the incentive to come here will gradually disappear – first for Eastern Europeans, then, by incremental steps, even for Jamaicans, Somalians and Syrians. Why expose yourself to the hardships of emigration when you can do just as well at home?
I think that I’ve just outlined the PR strategy for our government, and Mrs Daley must take some of the credit. Rather than denying the obvious truth that Labour’s policies will beggar the country, its spokesmen should turn the negative into a positive.
Within a year or two, they’ll be able to make a verifiable claim that they are succeeding where several Tory governments had failed. Immigration, legal or otherwise, is now under control and in fact some dinghies are even beginning to sail in the opposite direction. Job done.
Jokes aside, the only immigrant group I know intimately and not by hearsay is the Russians who, like me, have left their homeland in the past half-century. While all of them claimed they were attracted by freedom, I’d suggest that some 80 per cent at least were primarily motivated by economic considerations.
Most of them found what they were looking for in the US, and many of them became Americans, or as near as damn. But becoming an American is much easier than evolving into an Englishman, Frenchman or, God forbid, German.
Even Mrs Daley, who has lived in Britain for yonks still reasons like the American she was born to be. Arguing ab oeconomia comes more naturally to American conservatives than to British ones. That’s why she managed to write a whole article without once mentioning the cultural and social traditions of Europe.
I hope I don’t sound like a Tommy Robinson type if I suggest that, notable but hardly numerous exceptions aside, arrivals from what is imprecisely called the Global South can never assimilate in Britain, nor even adapt to it. It’s easier to believe that they can force the country to adapt to them, and in fact one can already see that happening.
Horace was right, as those Romans usually were on such matters. But I doubt the poet knew he was making an anti-immigration statement.