For the last few years, the one thing we have consistently heard from western leaders is that they are going to stop the flood of immigrants pouring into the West. While they do not say that these migrants are non-whites coming from Asia and Africa these are the migrants they are talking about. This becomes very clear when they talk of the need to preserve their societies which is threatened by the hordes pouring in from outside Europe.
The first problem here is that migration is presented as all about illegal migrants with much being made in Britain of the boat people arriving at the white cliffs of Dover. Yet the tremendous rise of migration in the last two decades is not because of illegal migrants but because of legal migration, migrants Britain and other European countries need to run their economy. Their numbers are far higher than that of the asylum seekers braving the seas to come to this country.
The measures Britain has proposed to tackle illegal migration have been ludicrous. They range from Rishi Sunak arranging with Rwanda to take them but Keir Starmer vetoing it and saying the solution was to smash the criminal gangs putting the asylum seekers on boats. In the year his government has been in power this has failed. Recently when the boats came in record numbers the Home Office said this was because of Red Days which means there was bright weather, calm seas and the best conditions for the boats to put to sea. The minister did not suggest how you control the sun. As Chris Philip, the shadow home secretary, quipped blaming the weather was “a dog-ate-my-homework excuse”. Of course, when the dog does not eat the Home Office home-work there is always the French police to blame for not stopping migrants getting on the boats at Calais.
What makes all this more complicated that even as they say that migration will be reduced, western leaders keep saying that in the past Europe has welcomed migration but cannot cope with such numbers of uninvited guests. But this masks the truth about Europe and migration. European countries have coped with internal migration from other European countries such as took place due to the devastation caused by the second world war. Europe has never had to cope with migrants flooding to Europe from distant continents for the simple reason that historically people have not tried to flood into Europe. Europe has not been a people importing continent but a people exporting continent.
The historian Alfred Crosby in his book Ecological imperialism, The biological Expansion of Europe, 900-to 1900 puts it succinctly, “European migrants and their descendants are all over the place”. In sharp contrast, “All but a relatively few of the members of the many varieties of Asians live in Asia. Black Africans live on three continents, but most of them are concentrated in their original latitudes, the tropics, facing each other across one ocean. Amerindinians, with few exceptions, live in the Americas, and nearly every last Australian aborigine dwells in Australia. Eskimos live in the circumpolar lands and, Melanesians, Polynesians, and Micronesians are scattered through the lands of only one ocean…Europeans, in contrast, seem to have leapfrogged around the globe.”
Between 1820 and 1930over 50 million Europeans leapfrogged so successfully from their continent that they created what Crossby calls Neo-Europes, “lands thousands of kilometres from Europe and from each other”. At the beginning of the 19th century these lands were almost wholly non-white but by the end the great majority of people were Europeans. In 1800 North America had fewer than 5 million whites, Southern South America fewer than half a million, Australia had 10,000 and New Zealand was still a Māori country. The wave of European migration in the next century changed all that with the result that now, “Australia’s population is almost all European in origin, that of New Zealand is about nine-tenths European.” Three out of “every four Americans in the southern temperature zone are entirely of European ancestry.” Today 85 to 95 per cent of the Deep South of Brazil are Europeans, Brazil’s neighbour Uruguay is nine-tenths white and Argentina close to100 per cent white.
In other words, Europeans did to other continents what many fear will now happen to their continent. In Europe this is called the white replacement theory whose thesis is that migration will see non-whites becoming a majority in Europe. Of course, those who believe in this theory never talk of how Europeans displaced non-Europeans round the world.
What they also do not talk about is that until the 1960s many countries of Neo Europe, United, States, Canada, Australia and South Africa, had racist immigration laws that barred Asians from migrating there. They also encouraged white migration with Australia having what is called the £10 pom policy under which white Britons could migrate to Australia for £10.
Yet, politicians, who talk about how dreadful migration is, glory in their own white ancestors displacing the native population. Trump is the classic example of that. Even as he trumpets his loathing of migrants and the need to expel them, he will wax about his affinity to Scotland as his mother was born in the Western Isles of Scotland. What Trump and his followers are saying is that these white migrants were good people who brought huge benefits to these lands while what is happening now is that non-white criminals are flooding into America from the Badlands of South America. Some of them even eat birds.
What is also significant is that these Asian and African migrants are following another European model. In the middle of the 19th century Europe had a potato famine during which a million Irish died of starvation and disease. Yet the Irish who were on the pampa in South America earned 10 or 12 shillings per day along with all the meat they could eat. Anthony Trollope, one of Britain’s greatest writers, was in Australia in the 1870s , just as European migration was making Australia white, and said, “The labouring man, let his labour be what it may, eats meat three times a day in the colonies, and very generally goes without it altogether at home.”
The immigrants from Asia and Africa flooding into Europe are also seeking the same benefits. So, why are they blamed for following the well-established and successful European model of immigration. All the more so as Europe and Neo-Europe has always said its models of government and society is the best and gone to many of these countries seeking to provide them democracy and the rule of law. That they have only succeeded in creating chaos and nurtured the growth of fundamental Islamic terrorists is not something much talked about.
So, to solve the European migration crisis Europeans must look at their own history and then work to improve the countries these migrants are coming from. They will also need to convince the migrants that following the European model of migration cannot work for them or for Europeans. However, I see no European politician willing to do that for fear of how Europeans will react. Unless they do the migration, crisis will not be solved.
(Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie, Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British.)
