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Chapter 1: What causes mass immigration in Britain?
The Great British Delusion As regular viewers will know, for several years now I've been trying to persuade anyone who will listen that if you want to address the widely shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration, Britain's most salient political issue, it might be helpful to understand what's actually causing the problem in the first place.
The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that woke ideologues in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good.
On the fringes of the right, some even murmur of the various theories of the so-called great replacement, which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third world immigration.
Whatever the exact flavor this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons. Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology, hating immigrants or being racist, et cetera. rather than reality.
What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Nether explained, wanted to, quote, rub the right's nose in diversity. Yes, many in Britain as a whole, and in Westminster in particular, think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good.
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Chapter 2: How do political ideologies influence immigration policies?
The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands, continued to ramp it up.
Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000. It's also true that some people don't like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd.
According to that infamous far-right anti-immigrant rag, The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world. Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what's happening, often on purpose. My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities. First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing.
I've only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time.
Chapter 3: What economic factors contribute to public perception of immigration?
Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favor of these changes. But that's partly because most of the people who were concerned have left these cities. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs.
You don't have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived, and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades. In that same time span, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain's GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007 before the Great Financial Crisis.
Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country. We don't evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it.
Chapter 4: Why do politicians prioritize GDP over individual prosperity?
A household income of Ā£100,000 per year is high by British standards at least, but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on 100,000 pounds is in a very different position to a family of five who are effectively getting 20 grand each.
The explanation for why labor and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand the bedroom to your in-laws to top up your prosperity with their pension? When described like this, it sounds frankly insane.
Yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivized to do. They are judged on the country's total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you're busy strangling your economy with net zero high taxes and endless regulation? Bring in more bodies. This really isn't complicated to understand.
Chapter 5: How does public misunderstanding affect views on immigration?
So why do so many people in Britain who clearly feel the economic pain nonetheless refuse to see it. To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivized politicians to deceive them about what's actually happening. Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive but false idea that they are struggling because the rich aren't paying their fair share.
A report last month, however, has opened my eyes to another reason, one I had never considered. It turns out many British people think that the decline in their living standards is personal to them while the rest of Britain is somehow thriving.
A big new poll and focus group studies conducted by Freshwater Strategy with the support of the John Templeton Foundation asked participants where they thought Britain stood economically compared to our main competitors. As David Frost put it in his excellent article, voters are living in a dream world.
Specifically, nearly half of British voters think that we are as rich or richer than Switzerland. Over half think we're as rich or richer than Australia, Singapore, or Germany.
Chapter 6: What are the consequences of ignoring economic realities in Britain?
And incredibly, over half of Brits think that our country is as rich as or richer than the United States. Imagine their shock when they were told the truth. We're 10% poorer than Germany, 20% poorer than Australia, 40% poorer than America and Singapore, and only half as rich as the Swiss.
Not only are the voters unaware that mass immigration is a deceptive tool deployed by politicians to disguise our poverty, they don't even know we're poor in the first place. If you thought that Britain was a rich country instead of one that will soon be overtaken by Poland,
but also experienced a continual fall in your living standards, would it not be logical to think that you're deliberately being screwed by the people who are thriving? The British economy is not stagnant because we've produced too much of our own oil and gas. It's not struggling because taxes are too low. Our economic woes are not the product of insufficient regulation.
But until the public makes the connection, the rapid rise of Zach Polanski and other redistribution enthusiasts is inevitable. even if it means more of the policies that made us poor in the first place. Our poverty is the direct result of net zero lunacy, welfarism, and chasing out anyone who wants to start a business and make it successful.
But it turns out many people don't realize that it's not them that's poor, it's the entire country. And if we don't persuade them otherwise, they'll vote for people who'll make things worse again and again.
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