3

The excuses we told ourselves

Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, European governments pursued policies of mass immigration without public approval. Yet such vast societal change cannot be forced upon a society against its will without a series of arguments being brought along to help ease the case. The arguments that Europeans have been given during this period range across the moral and the technocratic. They also shift according to need and the political winds. So, for instance, it has often been claimed that immigration on this scale is an economic benefit for our countries; that in an ‘ageing society’ increased immigration is necessary; that in any case immigration makes our societies more cultured and interesting; and that even if none of these were the case, globalisation makes mass immigration unstoppable.

Such justifications have a tendency to become intertwined and mutually replaceable, so that if one fails the others are always there to fall back on. They often start with economic arguments, but they can just as well start with moral arguments. If mass immigration doesn’t make you a richer person, then it will make you a better person. And if it doesn’t make your country a better country, then it will at least make it a richer country. Over time each of these arguments has produced sub-industries of people devoted to proving their truth. In each case the rationale comes after the events, so as to give the final impression of justifications being sought for events that would have happened anyway.

ECONOMICS

Over recent years there has been, for instance, a niche search to prove that the societal change Europe has been going through makes the continent significantly richer. In fact the opposite is true, as anybody who lives in a twenty-first-century welfare state can work out for themselves. Having paid into the system for all of their working lives, working Europeans know that the basis of the modern welfare state broadly consists of being able to take services out from the state (when you fall ill, become unemployed or reach retirement age), because you have paid into the system throughout your working life. There will be some people who have rarely paid in, but they will be covered by some who have rarely taken out.

Anybody can see that a family of people who arrive for the first time in their adopted country and who have never paid into the system are at the very least going to take some time before they have paid in as much in taxes as they will have taken out in housing, schooling, welfare, benefits and all the other advantages of the European welfare state. In the same way it is obvious to anybody involved in the labour market – especially at the lower end – that one which is comparatively closed off will operate differently from one in which the workforce can come from almost anywhere in the world. Although from an employer’s viewpoint there is an obvious advantage to the mass import of cheap labour, it is equally obvious that a very open labour market will see people at the lower end of that market edged out of jobs by people from countries where wages and living standards are far lower and who are therefore willing to work for lower pay.