DIVERSITY

One of the most striking things about the arguments for ongoing mass migration into European countries is that they are so readily able to shift. Whenever the economic cases for mass immigration are briefly dislodged, along come moral or cultural arguments. Without making any concession they state a position along these lines: ‘Let us pretend that mass migration does not make us financially richer. It does not matter, because mass migration makes us rich in other ways. In fact even if it makes us financially poorer, what you lose in economic benefits you will pick up in cultural benefits.’

This argument takes it as read that European societies are slightly boring or staid places, a presumption that would not go down as well in many other societies. The suggestion goes that whereas the rest of the world does not need the mass migration from other cultures in order to be improved, the countries of Europe do, and would especially benefit from such movements. It is as though it is agreed that there is a hole at the heart of Europe which needs filling and without which we would otherwise be poorer. New people bring different culture, different attitudes, different languages – and of course the endlessly cited example of new and exciting cuisine.

As with most of the arguments in favour of mass migration there is some truth in this. Despite Europe’s already existing proliferation of languages, cultures and cuisine, who would not want to increase their knowledge of the world and its cultures? And if any other culture does not want to gain from a knowledge of the rest of the world, then it surely is the one that will be the poorer for it? Nevertheless the argument rests on a number of fallacies. The first is that the best way to learn about the world and its cultures is not to travel around the world but to encourage the world to come to you – and then stay. The second is that the value of migrants continues to increase as their numbers increase, so that if one person from a wholly different culture arrives in town then the town benefits from that culture, and that if another person follows then that town doubly benefits and thereafter continues to benefit with each new person. But the knowledge or benefit of a culture does not increase incrementally with the number of people from that culture. Food is one of the benefits that is rather embarrassingly seized upon in this argument. But to take that example, the amount of enjoyment to be got from Turkish food does not increase year on year the more Turks there are in the country. Every 100,000 extra Somalis, Eritreans or Pakistanis who enter Europe do not magnify the resulting cultural enrichment 100,000 times. It may be that Europe has already learned what it needs to learn from cuisine, and accordingly gained all that it needs to gain, and that in order to continue to enjoy Indian food it will not be necessary to keep on importing more Indians into our societies. If it is the case that ‘diversity’ is a good in itself, it does not explain why in each country immigrants overwhelmingly come from a small number of countries. If you actively sought to bring ‘diversity’ to Europe after the first decades of mass migration, it would have been sensible to search for people not just from former colonies but from countries that had never been colonies and countries about which there was a genuine lack of knowledge.