Immigration propaganda:
There is a glowing, fairly oozing, article (Better than Billed ECONOMIST December 22, 2012 page 94) about how well immigrants are doing in the UK. And they certainly are … at least if you compare them with immigrants to other rich countries. For instance only a fifth of immigrant families are among the poorest ten percent in the country.
Really. Isn’t that just ducky. But they do point out that immigrants tend to work at jobs far below what their capability should be given that so many of them have advanced degrees. And there is the often denied but seldom made point that those nifty jobs immigrants have would probably have been filled anyway; there’s lots of unemployment everywhere in the rich world.
Then there is the matter of their children. The children try hard. They really try. The do better in school than their native born peers in any head to head comparison. The trouble is that they do quite poorly at finding work.
Of course it’s possible to suppose that immigrants in the UK are doing better than they would have had they stayed home. I don’t know how you figure in the fact that their children are underappreciated, but it has to be a negative.
My own take is that migration is bad for everybody. The old home nation loses somebody from their top tier, at least somebody willing to make great sacrifice to better their chances. The migrant is lucky to stay out of the poorest decile. Somebody probably loses a job in the new home nation. The children of the migrant do worse. Ethnic diversity regularly causes civil unrest even in the most tolerant and socially progressive countries.
And of course the children of immigrants have a fall in fertility; they have abandoned their own gene pool. Maybe not in the first generation, but the pressure will be forever on to move somewhere else for a job. And if the melting pot project succeeds so that migrants marry into the nations where they arrive, it may be no worse for fertility than the way the local born marry those with whom they share no recent ancestors, but it can’t really help.
And everywhere you look the majority are flatly opposed to the migrations their governments impose on them.
So why in the world should a respectable magazine that is supposed to make money stretch the truth so far in such an unpopular direction. Perhaps they are saying what their readers want to read, which is probably quite different from what most of society wants.
But that only puts the question one step farther back. Why should the elite – and I would say from the name alone that the magazine is intended for the elite – have such different opinions? Of course there are those who make money at it, but it’s quite hard to imagine hypocrisy on such a scale. They are probably sincere, as indeed most likely the writers and editors of the magazine.
I don’t do that badly; at least I can afford a subscription. I should long ago been recruited.
There was a movie “Conspiracy Theories” in which the hero at one point asks, “Why doesn’t anybody else see what I see?”
But in this case I can’t even come up with a conspiracy to suspect. Maybe tomorrow.
There have been 78 visitors in the past month I guess.