Multiculturalism has failed in Western nations. It is obvious why.
The world itself is multicultural. Many competing cultures exist all around the planet. The system that emerged to manage this multicultural world was protective borders. People instinctively keep out strangers to remain safe and maintain their own culture.
Shipping millions of foreigners into a single territory over short timeframes creates competition for resources, not social harmony. The result is usually ethnic enclaves, polarization and a decline in trust, all of which now characterize most Western countries, especially their urban centres.
The rationale now used to justify this novel experiment is that we share values with the newcomers, so they are in fact very similar to us even if they look different.
This doesn’t seem to be working.
Why it doesn’t work
The values argument only works if we believe societies are based on shared values rather than other attributes.
This is not the traditional view.
Nobody believes China is held together with belief systems. The Chinese are a distinct group. We understand their culture emerges from their physical existence which has persisted for thousands of years.
Today’s China is the product of ancient China, ran by their ancestors. Over time the values of the Chinese have ranged widely, from pre-industrial traditionalism to Mao’s attempt to erase the past. It includes today’s affluent middle-class Chinese who probably have quite different values from their grandparents.
Throughout their long history they remained Chinese, despite the changing values they embraced in different eras.
The key weakness of the values argument is the low cost of entry. It is just words and words are cheap.
There is no agreed definition of the values in question. There is no measure or threshold. It seems to mean vague adherence to democracy and occasionally work ethic.
So why do we hear so much about it? How can such a flimsy idea have taken hold?
Silencing critics
The purpose of using values to judge the compatibility of immigrants is a technique designed to make pro-immigration fans look reasonable and critics to look like hateful xenophobes.
It is intended to deflect sincere criticism. If they share our values, if they are just like us, then you must only be objecting to superficial variations like skin colour.
It belittles attempts to act upon persistent differences in people by trivializing issues to make the concerned look petty and therefore easy for the distracted to dismiss.
The emergence of this is a result of blank slate thinking. The belief that all humans are equal and environment dictates outcome, not one’s innate properties as was traditionally believed.
Equality is a central plank of elite philosophy and cannot be challenged. It has saturated almost all aspects of Western culture despite zero evidence for its existence.
The logical consequence of all humans being more or less identical is the values we must inevitably share. We may look different or possess distinct histories, but that can be overlooked as we have something better that makes us compatible with each other.
What drives this absurdity? Much of it is the disgust within elite circles of patriotism or national loyalty which they view with deep suspicion.
The flag waving patriot, once seen as the necessary yeoman stock to keep the country from going under, is now disdained as a backward throwback to a less enlightened time when barbarity ruled. This handily included widespread suspicion of foreigners and laws to exclude them, the reason we have nations at all.
Strenuous efforts are made to paint our past as uniquely racist. Today’s value-argument to favour mass immigration is just one use of that belief, that strong borders are both racist and old fashioned, hardly necessary in a world of shared values.
By necessity this worldview denigrates blood and soil, our biological and genetic heritage. It recasts citizenship as ideas or propositions. This novelty emerged from the USA’s attempts to make non-white immigration work since the 1960s as the country has steadily become more like the world it was once an exception to.
Americans have been subjected to civic nationalist melting pottery for longer than anyone. We now witness the spectacle of people descended from tough, independently minded British settlers forced to defend the behaviour of recently arrived Somalis who have defrauded them precisely because they cannot even conceive of American values like social and financial reciprocity or concern for hard-working people who pay for their dishonest activity.
So much for shared values.
Fake cohesion
The emphasis on common values is a technique to encourage civic nationalism. Anyone can be included if they have a piece of paper saying so. We can issue the certificates just by focusing on stated values.
Real national loyalty emerges through organic bonds we share with others. If you have to be told about the bonds then they are artificial and unlikely to last.
The British share most of their values with the French and Germans, but we have fought both for centuries. Values matter, but we need to have much more to form countries that last.
The fastest way to determine the compatibility of a potential immigrant is to look at their homeland. What kind of world do groups of these people create when left to their own devices?
We are discouraged from doing this. We are told every immigrant from a failed state is an aberration, an unfortunate victim of the dysfunction his own people have created to which he is an exception.
The international corporate system exploits this to sell the idea we are building a winning team with all the talents from across the globe. In practice Western nations have imported low-skilled people from the global south to drive down wages and create a permanent underclass who can be counted on to vote for more government, a ruinous mistake we may not recover from.
But the lie of using values is exposed when we discover those who clearly do not share any values with us. How do the progressive-left act when rules are visibly transgressed?
In Britain we are unable to deport foreign child rapists back to their homelands despite widespread disgust at their behaviour. An army of human rights lawyers and activist judges make sure of this.
America has produced countless examples of illegal immigrants who are serial abusers and criminals with extensive rap sheets who could not be further from the American norm. A well-funded machine kicks into gear when they are lawfully detained and attempts made to deport them.
What values are we supposed to share with some tattooed Aztec gangster who traffics kids and has drug convictions?
Many immigrant groups have rigid value systems that differ substantially from Western norms, especially attitudes towards women and the treatment of children. Whole groups demonstrate open hostility for democratic norms and conventions. Some boast they are here to destroy these systems and usher in alien forms of governance.
The values argument is designed to disarm not create social harmony. Most civic nationalist arguments are sophistry. They are comprehensively rejected in many countries as dangerous nonsense. Try moving to China and insisting your kids are just as Chinese as them. A foreigner with visible gang tattoos who trafficked kids would be executed after a brief trial. Protests against this would not be tolerated, although it would be inconceivable to the Chinese anyone would champion such despicable human beings.
Mass immigration is an elite project to erase national loyalty as a force as it stands in opposition to unpopular globalism.
Minions embrace the blank slate and its emphasis on values, but governing elites know better. The introduction of people who will not assimilate into the larger society weakens the democratic power of the populace, in extreme cases creating a balkanized mess that cannot organize against the powerful.
Much of the push for demographic change is just this. Its destructiveness has to be hidden and the elevation of values is just the latest disguise for a system that is designed to bring perpetual strife the ruling class can exploit.
No one voted to construct nations in this way. The emphasis on shared values is just a final attempt to paint critics as extremists. Confronting this absurdity is the first step in ending it.
Excellent article.
"Nobody believes China is held together with belief systems. The Chinese are a distinct group."
Exactly, and the Chinese border is not open to just anyone.
"In practice Western nations have imported low-skilled people from the global south to drive down wages and create a permanent underclass who can be counted on to vote for more government, a ruinous mistake we may not recover from."
Excellent point.
Those who control the West are against national cohesion, which is the antithesis of their goal.
Rats follow their nose. If one understands that, one also understands how to have migration without problems.
Caveat: no matter how many crows you put in the henhouse, you'll never get good eggs nor any poultry meat.