There’s a joke about California. One day someone tilted the Earth to the West, and everybody who couldn’t hang on fell into California. The Americans who don’t live in California think it’s funny.
Except maybe it’s not a joke? Maybe between 1880 and 1920 someone tilted the world to the West, and everyone in Europe who couldn’t hold on fell into America. How did that work? Europe had some hard times at the end of the nineteenth century. Maybe the capable people in small towns and villages got together and asked: which of the men are we going to be carrying next time it gets bad? Which of the women are bitching and moaning instead of being pleasant and useful? Okay guys, pony up for their fares: we’re going to send them to the USA. Really. Pieter in the next village tells me they did it last year, and look how well they’d doing now.
In the same way Castro loaded his boats with criminals and social undesirables, tossed in a few grandmothers and babies as seasoning, and shipped the lot off to Miami. Twice, in two different decades.
In the same way the English for a few decades packed their criminals off to Australia and America before that.
In the same way the NGOs toured round the Middle East and Mid-Africa in the second half of 2015 and for much of 2016, telling the village leaders that a lorry would be coming through in a couple of weeks to take anyone who wanted to go to Europe. No charge. All paid for by some charity. Older people won’t make the journey. The elders did a double-take, and rounded up every man who couldn’t keep his hands off twelve year-olds or other men’s wives, every useless jerk and petty criminal, tossed them into the lorry with the worst of their whining women, and waved them bye-bye. Send money, the elders said, and don’t even think about coming back.
That’s Push Immigration. When the home country puts the people it doesn’t want on the bus to anywhere and waves goodbye. I suspect it happens at rare periods in history. This being one of them.
Pull Immigration is the English bringing over the Irish to build the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, or the Jamaicans to drive the buses and underground trains in the 1950’s, or the Americans bringing in the Chinese to build the railways, or the Germans bringing in Turks as Gastarbieters in the 1950’s. It’s universities and businesses sponsoring people from other countries to work, or employment agencies bringing over EU workers to the UK to work in construction, and it’s immigration campaigns such as the Australians ran in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And there’s a small amount of talented, hard-working people who are attracted by the greater opportunities in another country and move there legally to take their chance.
Then there are illegal immigrants, drawn to a neighbouring economy because they think they can make better money there, but who don’t have sponsors to bring them in legally. Are these Push or Pull? The test is fairly simple: if they bring their families with them, it’s Pull. If the family is back home, either expecting to be remitted cash or to be called when the family member has managed to work themselves into a legal position to bring the rest of their family over, that’s Push.
Pull immigration solves a short-term problem, but nobody asks what the immigrants are going to do once their task is done. When economies are growing, there will be other work for them. When economies are stagnant, or growing without adding employment, Pull immigrants become a problem, however, one that the Pulling country created itself. You’d’ve thought Governments would have learned by now.
Push immigration is almost always a problem from the start. After all, there’s no obvious need for the people, and no obvious jobs for them to take. Except low-paid unskilled jobs. There are no career paths, and little chance of each successive generation doing better than its parents. And their method of arrival is usually illegal, so they are criminals the moment they cross the border.
The only way out for either is economic assimilation. Social, cultural or religious assimilation is irrelevant: nobody cares about how other people worship, or their views on diet or dress, and if they only want to marry within their own. Economic assimilation is what matters. And Western economies - because that’s what we’re talking about here - pose a serious challenge. Western jobs require years of education to get, and a very specific set of behaviours to keep and do well in. Men must be prepared to work with, and even be managed by, women. Women must be prepared to work in the rougher, results-oriented and focussed manner of men. At work the newcomers must think in a thoroughly Western manner about commercial institutions, contracts, agreements, honesty, systems, materials and processes. Those who can’t - European or not - don’t do well and will eventually get the feeling that they are tolerated rather than respected by the productive core of the employees. At that point the sensible ones leave, the cynical ones carry on taking the money until they are eased out, and the insecure and unstable start with the SJW stuff.
In other words, for immigrants to do well in a Western economy, they have to be Westernised from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. Some cultures can work that trick, but those that can’t or won’t do it get more, not less, alienated from their host economy with each succeeding generation. It’s worth noticing that this last point applies as much to people who were born in the country, as to those who enter it. Assimilation is something each native-born child has to do, and while most of them succeed, some do fail.
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