Immigration Causes and Effects

The tide is swiftly and surely turning in the developed world against mass immigration. That pendulum is swinging hard.

This puts Western governments in a pickle. 

In Canada, the government has so far only taken modest measures to reduce the flow of immigrants. And the population of Canada has already actually declined over the first quarter of this year. Enumerating for the census, I find many of the apartments I have been assigned unoccupied—despite our supposed housing shortage.

Without mass immigration, the population of the developed countries is going to shrink. We knew that—it was one of the arguments for mass immigration all along.

What might that mean? It had governments panicked. No new workers to cover pension obligations; labour shortages; a shrinking economy unable to cover massive government debts. Government borrowing has been a Ponzi scheme that may soon hit the wall.

Despite that, I am delighted to see popular opinion turn against mass immigration. If rioting in Belfast is needed to stop it, I say the rioting is justified. It was never an acceptable solution. You cannot preserve the Canadian nation, the British nation, or any other nation, by flooding in foreigners. A nation is more than a government. A nation is the people and their culture. A new population with a different culture or cultures is no longer the same nation.

Moreover, I do not believe the depopulation panic is justified. Governments tend to panic. We got into the crisis of depopulation through relentless government warnings of overpopulation—at its extreme, the Chinese “one child policy.” Our leaders are blind, and become leaders in large part because they crave power. They will always overreact and want to intervene in the course of events. 

Elon Musk and others with their fingers on the pulse of technology are predicting that medicine is on the cusp of conquering many diseases, and significantly lengthening the human lifespan. If so, no pension funding problem, no labour shortage, perhaps no population decline. No longer any upside to large-scale immigration.

We also have the rapid development of AI and robotics. Less need for human labour, and an exponential increase in productivity. Musk, Yang, et al warn we may have nothing for most people to do. Any population increase will only be a burden on the public purse.

All things considered, the worst choice bet on the future governments could make right now is to let in many new immigrants from very different cultures. 

Which is, of course, exactly what they have been doing.