Signs of Collapse: Blaming It On Immigration

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the first of a series of articles on some of these signposts.

anti-immigration rioters try to storm a UK hotel that houses asylum-seekers; photo by Stringer/Reuters via PBS

The mainstream parties in most western countries have become decidedly more hostile to immigration and immigrants over the past 30 years, and especially over the past decade. But strangely, despite all the fear-mongering, the majority of citizens of these countries are seemingly much less opposed to new immigrants than their elected ‘representatives’.

Distress about immigration levels tends to rise during economic slowdowns, and those levels are not much different today than they were 30 years ago. The rather confused message of the pollsters seems to be:

1. Citizens think immigration has been good for their country, but also think (as they did 30 years ago) that overall immigration levels are significantly too high.
2. Citizens overwhelmingly believe their governments are mismanaging national immigration policy, but often for opposite reasons (eg letting in too many immigrants versus mistreatment of immigrants).
3. Citizens tend to generally like current policies towards ‘legal’ immigration, but think more has to be done to reduce ‘illegal’ immigration. They’re very ambivalent about refugees, claiming to have sympathy for them but wanting their numbers “controlled”.
4. Citizens seem far more concerned about future uncontrolled ‘floods’ of immigration than about historical numbers of immigrants. There is a very clear tone of fear in respondents’ answers that the back-up at borders will very soon become overwhelming and the government will have no mechanism to control the situation, so it will simply explode.
5. Citizens want to “prioritize” (ie cherry-pick) immigrants who are wealthy or who are willing to do menial labour jobs. They are OK with temporary student visas, but don’t want those students to stay after their studies unless they fill jobs where there is a “high unmet demand” for their skills. The pollsters, of course, don’t blatantly ask respondents which countries their governments should allow more vs fewer immigrants in from, but the underlying racism is very clear in their answers when you read between the lines. Ukrainian refugees are welcome; Palestinians not so much.
6. Many citizens seem to have a perception that immigrants are more likely than native-born citizens to be ‘associated’ with problems of crime and unemployment (though often “not their fault”), and with a perceived excessive demand on public services. This despite overwhelming evidence the opposite is the case. (They contribute far more in taxes and other payments to ‘the system’ than they take out of it.)

Historian and ex-senior public servant Aurélien has been hammering on what he considers to the root of the immigration “problem” in his essays: That neoliberal governments have tried to be “good guys” by allowing in large numbers of immigrants, but have utterly failed to provide immigrants with the support services (language, health, housing, security etc) that many immigrants need. So it’s largely governments that have created the “problem”, not the immigrants.

This problem is exacerbated because many of these essential services were already and are increasingly collapsing for native-born citizens in many western countries: Health services are dysfunctional, restricted, increasingly not available at all, and absurdly expensive (due to factors including bad management, unwieldy centralization and bureaucracy, and too many f***ing lawyers, Big Pharma and insurance companies gouging them).

The cowardice of governments to create affordable public housing on a massive scale (which would require sizeable new taxes on the rich), and to rein in the corrupt and price-gouging construction and real estate ‘development’ industry, means that housing affordability has become a “trigger point” for many people across the political spectrum. So now racist politicians exploit these triggers by blaming the problem on immigrants, and especially “illegal” immigrants and desperate refugees.

The education systems in many western countries are also failing for a whole series of reasons, and one of the consequences is that areas with the highest immigrant populations (which also tend to have higher-than-average family sizes) are often overburdened both in the numbers of people they have to serve, and in the needs for language classes to get immigrants who don’t speak the native language up to speed.

I confess that I’m not entirely onside with Aurélien’s preoccupation with the immigration “problem” — his tone suggests that sheer numbers, and the incapacity and/or unwillingness of some immigrants to accept and adapt to the local culture, are contributing to it. But whether this old ‘melting pot’ argument is valid or not, the upshot has been that many progressives and people who would call themselves leftists, seem to me increasingly belligerent towards immigrants, and towards the governments of their own countries and the countries driving the exodus, for somehow not preventing or “fixing” the problem, which has been around in many countries as long as those countries have existed.

So we see Biden/Harris out-trumping Trump in his border wall construction and expulsions, and similar anti-immigration rhetoric and actions among once-‘progressive’ parties in the UK, Canada, Europe and Australia.

I would argue that the immigration “problem” is not a problem of numbers, culture, or integration, but principally an unfixable predicament. Our political, economic, ecological, health, education and other systems were already and inevitably falling apart, even without the impact of an influx of new citizens. These systems are calcified, dysfunctional, overburdened, drowning in bureaucracy, overly centralized, and trying to do too much for too many with too few resources and flat or declining tax revenues due to steadily falling standards of living for 90% of the population (and absurdly low and ever-decreasing tax rates on the remaining 10%). The decline in the quality of our education, health and other systems has been going on, and accelerating, for decades. We are demanding more from civilization’s systems, and from the earth, than they can sustainably provide, and now we are seeing the consequences.

We are soon likely, some climate scientists say, to have to deal with two billion climate refugees. If our border management, transportation, health and social services systems haven’t already completely collapsed before this great migration arrives, then that migration will certainly finish the job.

This is, as many have explained, a predicament, not a problem. It doesn’t have ‘solutions’, it has outcomes, one of which is the acceleration of ongoing system collapse.

It may be that leftists, being more inclined to see government services as a good thing, as a part of the ’solution’, are growing increasingly bitter because government now seems helpless and incompetent to provide these services in a time of ever-growing need. This will come as no surprise to students of collapse and complexity. We’ve seen it coming for a long time. But it might explain why a lot of progressives, and the rapidly right-skewing politicians trying (very incompetently) to appeal to them, have become decidedly hawkish on the whole subject of immigration. Their rightward attitude shift mirrors somewhat their frustrated attitude towards another aspect of the predicament of collapse — the three connected epidemics of homelessness, substance addiction, and mental illness, playing out grotesquely in our streets everywhere.

There is no ‘solution’, but one approach we can take is to accept that massive migration from politically, economically and ecologically desolated areas to the few areas that have so far not seen much collapse, is an inevitability. As Warsan Shire put it: “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”. Our systems — all of them — are slowly falling apart anyway, and the great migration will accelerate collapse, but it didn’t cause it. Once we accept massive migration, and collapse, as inevitable, we can start the work, not of planning for it (since we cannot know how it will play out, and we may be among the migrants ourselves), but of starting to learn the many forgotten skills we will need to acquire to deal with both system collapse and a huge influx of refugees.

And the best source of a lot of those skills will be from the refugees and other migrants themselves — many of whom have already lived through collapse, and learned, as best they could, how to cope with it.