American and British voters are being failed by the same big immigration lie

Some political issues stand on their own, hardly overlapping with other areas of government. Then there are those which affect almost everything else. Immigration is one such issue. Because immigration is not just a matter of people coming into the country. It affects the NHS, education, crime, housing, law, foreign policy and national identity. To name just a few.

That is why all developed countries are struggling with it. In America, millions of people are now flooding annually across the southern border. Donald Trump never did finish building his wall, and certainly never got Mexico to pay for it. But President Biden has both allowed an increase in the flow and pretended that he is trying to stop it. It is not dissimilar to what is happening in Britain. The Conservative Government has said that it is going to cut both legal and illegal migration at the same time as overseeing a historic surge in both. The public in both countries can see this and its consequences.

In the US migrants are being bussed north by the southern states. Cities like New York and Chicago are being overwhelmed when the equivalent of just one day’s flow of people across the border into Texas is sent their way. Last week, service personnel were reported to have been turfed out of their accommodation in New York to make way for the latest migrants. In the UK, illegal immigrants are dispersed around the country and put into hotels that the average taxpayer pays for, but could not afford for themselves.

In the US some cable news networks carry drone footage of the huge lines of people wading across the Eagle Pass to make it from Central and South America into the United States. In the UK, broadcasters occasionally care to note boatloads of people breaking into our country. Though some – the BBC in particular – seem queasy about showing how these customers of the smuggling gangs are carefully ferried by our own border authorities.

Why is it happening? The overriding factor fuelling illegal migration is the vast technological changes of the past few decades. Never has there been such ease of movement or communication. People who make it into America, Britain or Europe can send texts and pictures back to their friends and family in their countries of origin. Those who have been trafficked from the developing world into the developed can pass on tips to others about how to game the system. They can send news on how to get in and how to get on once here.

But the other reason it is happening is because governments like those in Britain and America have simply lost control not only of their own borders but of their own arguments. When it comes to the legal variety of immigration, the UK Government has consistently said that it wants to bring the figure down. The latest net migration statistics, released next week, are expected to show that the total could be triple what it was just a few years ago.

Some people see all this as evidence that you cannot restrict immigration. That the situation simply is what it is. It is the nature of the modern world. Nothing you can do about it.

Of course, the people making that presumption have to contend with a number of counter-examples. One is that in the Covid period, our country (and other developed countries) effectively closed its borders for months. Although liberal politicians had spent years saying that immigration was just a fact of life, people like Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern turned out to be able to enforce borders very sharply indeed when a global pandemic was around. So they can do it. Why not in “normal” times?

Ask members of the British Government and they will explain it away with one-off examples. This week, when questioned about immigration levels, Rishi Sunak once again threw in the case of the Ukrainian refugees who have been given sanctuary in Britain since the Russian invasion began.

But if net migration is – as is rumoured – now as high as one million, the Ukrainians may account for perhaps a seventh of that total at most. Ministers also like to mention Hong Kong nationals. But at this point we get to a very important basic question. Is the answer to every problem in the world the relocation of people to the UK? Sadly these “once-in-a-generation” challenges seem to happen several times a year now. So will the answer always be “come to Britain”?

What ministers don’t want to mention is that the historic numbers we are talking about are the consequence of students coming into the UK legally, workers coming into the UK legally, the unwillingness of more than five million people in our country to work, and the Government losing the ability to police both legal and illegal immigration.

It is the same in the US, where politicians simultaneously pretend that migrants bring huge economic benefits and that they are the only people who are willing to take up low-paying jobs. Their arguments make absolutely no sense, especially in combination with their other favoured policies. Left-wing states have been pushing minimum-wage requirements for years only to then import millions of people willing to work off the books, in the black market, for far below the minimum wage. Take those who speed around New York delivering take-aways on bicycles. They are recent recipients of a minimum wage fight. Or at least they were until they were all replaced by cash-in-hand illegals. Where is the sense here?

The real problem is that on neither side of the Atlantic and on neither political side is there a willingness to face an obvious question: who do we not need? Advocates for high levels of migration always pretend that arrivals are either doing jobs nobody here will do, or that all arrivals are brain surgeons. So who do we want? High achieving migrants, or low-level workers? Are middle-class professionals the only people who we do not want? In that case let us say so. And say at the same time why we think that minimum-wage jobs are now beneath anybody already living in this country.

But too many politicians do not want to address such questions because every time they restrict immigration – especially illegal immigration – they are accused of heartlessness by the vocal critics to their Left. They perceive a reputational price for restricting immigration, but none whatsoever for allowing it to run away from them.

Well, here is a brutal but necessary truth. Neither America – and certainly not Britain – can save the rest of the world by taking in even a modest percentage of the global population. In the UK alone we have nowhere near enough houses, nowhere near enough money and nowhere near enough social capacity to absorb millions of people like this. You can have open borders or a welfare state – but you cannot have both. The public knows this and, although there is no political way to express it yet, in time there will be. There is only so much time you can keep being lied to.

In the meantime, the political classes continue to hold a debate on the issue that is not only detached from reality but also from what most voters want. The Labour Party has even started to say that migration might go up under them. Or at least that is what Anneliese Dodds conceded yesterday. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, has said she is “hugely proud” that at least 600,000 foreign students are coming to the UK every year. A target she was not expecting to hit until 2030. Good luck saying that on the campaign trail.

Caught between the incompetent and the stone-deaf, who knows where an increasingly disenchanted public might wander?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/american-and-british-voters-are-being-failed-by-the-same-big-immigration-lie/ar-AA1bqbkP

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
    
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
 
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