The X account of one Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) comments on the ills of immigration. He refers to his homeland of the United Kingdom. (emphasis added)
I look at what uncontrolled mass immigration has done to our country, and I just get so very depressed.
It’s THE root cause of almost every issue.
Put simply, there are far too many low-skilled migrants who take FAR more than they give.
That’s an awkward, but undeniable fact.
Mr. Lowe makes a great point about immigration being problematic. Massive migration changes the character of a place. The things one likes about America are unlikely to exist there if one replaces the people there with let’s say, the people of rural Uganda or the people of downtown Beijing.
Immigration Has Led To Some Vile Things In America
Borderless immigration is not a tool of freedom. It is a weapon the globalist and Marxist alike can use to destroy communities, families, lives, cultures, languages, and countries in ways that make a local population easier to control.
Immigration has come to be used as a tool to bring death and destruction upon a place. All but the most savvy political observers 1.) do not see that, 2.) refuse to see that, 3,) and/or refuse to comment on that detail. I entirely appreciate that Mr. Lowe places a high level of importance on stopping immigration as we are presently seeing it take place.
He also, however, retains the air of a central planner — one who knows the exact right numbers to use, one who thinks there is probably some perfect number that will make societal ills go away. And if we tweak that number just enough, everything will work out.
Who could possibly disagree with his suggestion that there is a moderate path that will lead to wiser immigration policy?
I do.
It is hardly about immigration. It is about artificially created incentives to immigration. It is about getting the right incentive to remove a person (a would-be immigrant) from the place he is needed and wanted and transplanting him to a different place where he is not needed and not wanted and to do so with massive incentives meant to distort reality for all people involved.
Seldom talked about, great ill is created for immigrants in the process of immigration. This detail is often overlooked. Seldom is the first generation anything but a massive loss for the immigrant family. The tremendous downside to leaving one’s homeland and heading west is seldom considered rationally in our era of relatively easy global travel.
Despite all this, there are far more important fundamental concerns that need addressing when speaking about societal ills.
There at two great ills that have most terrorized Western culture and America. When they are ignored you are dealing with cowardice or lack of understanding. Neither are desirable in a trusted figure. I would caution against aligning yourself closely with anyone who does not speak often and openly of these two ills.
Central Banking Impoverishes A Land — Both Spiritually and Materially
Guido Hulsmann in his book The Ethics of Money Production paints a picture of the vast moral harm caused to a society that welcomes a state-sanctioned monopoly on money creation. This includes tyranny, war, the debt burden of a society, moral hazard, business cycles, hyperinflation, regulation, and all manner of other perversion of a individual values and societal standards take place. The family has been replaced with the welfare state.
Do you hate tranny reading time for children? Roman Catholic Jose and Maria and their eight kids coming across the border from the rural hinterlands to the south are not the source of the problem. However, the unlimited funding of the Federal Reserve Bank is, as it provides limitless resources for the most perverse pet projects of politicians and bureaucrats alike. The easy money policy that leave a culture unoccupied and wealthy lends itself to it. The inflationary policy that perverts the idea of time preference does as well. While Jose and Maria and their eight children cannot be blamed for that, a generation from now, America may have led their children down that same perverse path.
On that concept of time preference, Ludwig von Mises writes that the effects of inflation are “especially strong among the youth. They learn to live in the present and scorn those who try to teach them ‘old-fashioned morality and thrift.’ Inflation thereby encourages a mentality of immediate gratification that is plainly at variance with the discipline and eternal perspective required to exercise principles of biblical stewardship — such as long-term investment for the benefit of future generations.”
The US central bank is the greatest pariah institution on American life. This is especially the case with the status of the Federal Reserve Note as world reserve currency, which can seemingly endlessly export inflation. It gives it vast resources to destroy American culture. The great cultural and spiritual harm done through this institution dwarfs the economic harm done by this institution.
Divorce From God Impoverishes A Land
More fundamentally problematic for a land than central banking is a Christian country that has ceased to be Christian. Central banking is not at the heart of all evil in a place. Turning away from God is at the heart of all evil in a place.
David Aikman, former Beijing Bureau Chief for Time Magazine starts his book Jesus in Beijing with this insightful quote that hits at the heart of something too few Westerners and too few Americans understand. Aikman refers to it as “an enthusiastic observation of Christianity by a member of China’s academic elite.” (emphasis added)
The eighteen American tourists visiting China weren’t expecting much from the evening’s scheduled lecture. They were already exhausted from a day of touring Beijing. But what the speaker had to say astonished them.
‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,’ he said. ‘We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economics and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focussed on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’
This was not coming from some ultra-conservative at a think tank in Orange County, California or from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The was a scholar from China’s premier academic research institute, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002. Though CASS has had a reputation since its inception for gently pushing the envelope of acceptable areas of research in China, it is hardly a viper’s nest of liberal dissent.
In the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Constantin Gutberlet defines materialism as “a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world, which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter, and which thus denies the existence of God and the soul.”
Some Chinese thinkers recognize Christianity as little more than a materialist shortcut that outperforms any materialist thinker. We could call it Christian materialism, which to rely on Gutberlet’s definition would be the opposite of Christianity. This Chinese professor’s thought process is a predictable thought process from a Marxist-influenced thinker. It is also a predictable thought process from a sober pragmatist of any political stripe.
Unfortunately, many in the West have been blinded to this thought process. The Bible can change a person for the better. Being around a Christian faith community can change a person for the better. Even going through the motions of worship can change a person for the better. I would rather have a Christian who seeks God for materialist reasons do so, rather than ignore the desire that God has to provide.
Christians of one thousand theological views will read this piece as will non-Christians. Please forgive my oversimplification of Christian views. There is power in the serving the Lord, that goes beyond the simple benefit that comes from mimicking the daily practices of Christians. Knowing Jesus is bigger than following some behaviors.
Not only have Americans stopped following those behaviors, but many have resolutely determined that they have no desire to know Jesus. I write this as a former atheist.
The Root Cause Of Everything Is Not Immigration
The root cause of everything is not immigration. Immigration is a symptom of a nation in tremendous moral decline.
Mass migration happens to a people who do not consider themselves made in the likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), who perhaps do not even consider God. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28) mean nothing to them, for they are now having tiny families (if at all) and being convinced of why a million migrants a month are a great thing to support the government social system upheld by theft. The radical Somalis that George Soros, the Lutheran church, and the Catholic church help enter America are a problem, but pointing to them as anything but a symptom misses that fact that they are not the source of any Western country’s problem.
Many social problems seem to accompany immigration: crime, strained safety net, cultural division, malfunctioning educational system, increased unemployment, deceased pay, strained communities. That so many social problems accompany immigration is not because of immigration. There are many interrelated symptoms of social decline that take place all at once.
Overcrowded classrooms and strained budgets are the norm in areas with high immigration rates. That is true. Hardly can such dynamics be considered the cause of a educational system that has been producing illiterates for decades.
Thousands of Amish communities in America educate their children in the Bible and end formal education after eighth grade. If you watch an Amish have a discussion with an “English,” the remaining decade of education that is common among the English is proven ridiculous. One sounds wise (the one with the eighth grade education), while one sounds like a fool (that one with the advanced degree).
America has divorced itself from wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). It has ceased to teach its children wisdom. 18 year olds exist who have less sense than 18 month olds. The sense has been educated out of them. The more time spent in school, the less wise a person becomes.
High immigration rates strain welfare budgets. Where there are high immigration rates, there is less welfare money available for native born hispanic, black, and white families. Hardly can immigration be deemed the key problem for a Great Society program that has been destructive to families since the 1960s, and a New Deal program that’s been destructive to communities since the 1930s.
You were born into a land of plenty, a land largely dedicated to God, a land full of prosperity and wisdom, and precisely because you have been fooled into distraction about so many topics, you are so prone to leave your descendants a far more economically impoverished land and a far more spiritually impoverished land. Immigration is one of those distractions.
The existence of the Federal Reserve Bank is the underlying political and governmental issue afflicting America. It touches all areas of government and culture. But even that requires a deeper dive, for a greater problem underlies it. The parting of ways from God is the all-encompassing, underlying issue afflicting America that is at the root of all societal problems we today face.
