Combating human trafficking is all the rage in Europe these days, and for good reason — but while Germany, along with the rest of the EU, might be eager to cooperate with external neighbors such as Britain on the issue, internally, the challenge of irregular migration has produced bitter division, a resurgence of hard borders, and localized frontier policies that together threaten the unity of the Schengen Area itself.

Earlier this month, Poland became the latest Schengen state to reintroduce border controls along its frontiers, both in the west with Germany and in the northeast with Lithuania. The reason? Partly to combat people smuggling, but also the involuntary return of individuals across internal EU borders — by member states themselves. Unimaginable in the End of History days when Schengen was first devised, Poland is far from alone in subverting the zone. The Germans themselves, after all, are increasingly conducting their own border checks, with Poland and Czechia, along the way rejecting thousands of migrants trying to enter the country. In one especially surreal incident, vividly underscoring the contrast between how Berlin treats countries like the UK and its eastern neighbors, German police effectively abandoned an Afghan man in Polish territory, under cover of darkness, making their escape before Polish authorities could arrive.

The revival of European borders is nothing new. Several countries have restarted controls since the 2015 migration crisis, and then during the pandemic. What is new, however, is a growing sense that Schengen was always built on a false premise: that the countries of the zone share a common approach to territorial sovereignty, and can therefore function like a uniform state. This has never been true of course, but only in the last few years has it become so clear. And with its cross-border antics into Poland, Germany has demonstrated that even the EU’s prime mover no longer approaches Schengen in the spirit it was intended, and that what happens just beyond its own borders is no longer its concern. It all speaks, with shocking vividness, to how migration continues to haunt Europe, even if ultimate blame lies less with migrants themselves than with the continent’s bickering, bloviating leaders.

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Border security in a structure like Schengen only works if everyone is on the same page — and over the past decades, Europeans have made it abundantly clear that they are not. For years, this core paradox at the heart of how the system works has been written into the so-called Dublin Regulation, the system governing asylum applications in the EU. Under this regime, asylum claims may only be adjudicated by the country in which an asylum seeker is first fingerprinted by authorities, usually the first EU or Schengen country they step foot in. 

But because asylum seekers by definition arrive on the external borders of Schengen, this naturally puts enormous pressure on so-called “frontline” migration states, which by default are burdened with handling all the asylum cases for the entire bloc. For years, this piled pressure on Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. But, starting in 2021, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia found themselves in similar straits, with the start of the migration crisis engineered by Lukashenko’s Belarus.

On the surface, Belarus’s antics were an attempt to weaponize migration, putting pressure on the external borders of the EU. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Minsk’s strategy strained the internal structure of Schengen too. Just as during the 2015 migrant crisis, when Syrian refugees made use of Schengen’s open borders to reach Germany and its generous immigration system, few migrants and refugees crossing into the EU from Belarus wished to stay in Poland — once again making their way to the social democracies of northwest Europe. For them, the fiction of Schengen as a single unified political entity is obvious, even from within its theoretically borderless expanse. The fact remains that certain countries are more attractive as destinations not just for economic reasons, but for policy reasons too.

Here, the Dublin system made it necessary for states to either refuse entry to migrants wishing to cross internal Schengen boundaries, or deport them back to their first country of entry — precisely setting the stage for the crisis underway today. Though Germany’s forcible transfer of that Afghan migrant made news in Poland, eliciting sharp words from officials in Warsaw, many similar returns were undertaken under the auspices of Dublin and thus were entirely legal.

Ultimately, though, Germany came to the same conclusion as Poland did when it came to dealing with asylum applicants on its own soil: if migrants are stopped from even entering its territory, then the whole asylum farrago can neatly be avoided. Poland took this approach to its logical conclusion when it suspended the right to asylum altogether in late 2024, swiftly copied by other EU states. And after Warsaw’s move was approved as legal by the bloc’s officials in April of this year, Germany’s new government decided to formally enshrine its practice of turning migrants back at the Polish border — something that, in an ironic twist, likely led to the very rise in migrant returns that convinced Poland to enact its own border checks.

If, however, Dublin isn’t working, the EU’s solution looks doomed too, albeit for basically the opposite reason. Passed in April 2024, the EU Migration Pact tries to bring order to the continent’s migratory Wild West. It implements a whole host of provisions, from streamlined asylum processing to expedited deportation procedures, but its most controversial element is the burden-sharing mechanism: requiring all EU member states to host migrants entering the bloc, or else to make financial contributions towards them elsewhere.

This kind of solidarity is all well and good in theory. Yet in the way it mandates a unified set of migration rules and procedures across the EU, while also asking states to take on responsibilities not directly on behalf of their own citizens, the Pact butts up against the precious autonomy that so many EU states have sought to carve out in this, the current age of independence-minded nationalism. While Dublin erred in making migration an exclusively local issue, subject to the whims of national governments, the Migration Pact errs in dramatically misreading the room.

Yet having rejected the Migration Pact, countries such as Poland and Hungary now believe they can engage in a spot of cakeism — preserving their sovereignty, and avoiding hosting migrants from other parts of the EU, while also continuing to bask in the warming sun of Schengen. In a sense, this approach is the essence of the new European Right’s vision of a Europe of sovereign states, where the EU exists as a weaker, purely economic union, while ties between individual members are constantly negotiated and renegotiated according to national interests.

But while the temporary border controls erected by countries across the EU may today seem like a compelling solution for filtering out illegal migration — while letting trade, tourists, and intra-EU labor flow with minimal hassle — such protocols would finally squeeze the ease of movement that has allowed Schengen to revolutionize European life since the end of the Cold War. Over time, it would kill the common visa policy too, and amid the constantly shifting geopolitical relationships of such a Europe, instability would inevitably soar, making border policy ever more fraught and complex.

Poland and Germany’s ongoing spat has already strained their relationship, while Austria, Germany, and Italy have pursued unilateral migration policies that have hurt their relations not just with Brussels — but also with each other. Despite not being a member of the EU, Turkey’s years-long confrontation with Greece over migration, which has at times spilled over into dangerous geopolitical posturing, presents an extreme case study in what may await Europe if states continue to dig in.

Where does all this leave Europeans? As bleak as it may seem, the answer is that there is no good way of bolstering the sovereign liberty of EU states on migration matters without also undermining the foundations of the Schengen Area itself. Conversely, crafting a continent-wide migration policy that actually works is impossible so long as Schengen members behave like fully independent states. Seeing as there is likely to be little appetite for a federal Europe anytime soon, the current border regimes are a shadow of the Europe that lies ahead — a divided, multi-polar continent, where realpolitik rules and where everyone is out for themselves.

While this may not seem like such a bad outcome for European conservatives tired of Brussels overreach, the truth is that countries like Poland and Greece would still need to deal with the same migration problems they face today. Now, though, they’d be going it alone, without recourse to any of the international laws or bodies that have given them support in their current struggles, however limited that may have been in practice.

Socio-cultural concerns about foreigners would also be moot here. With only one minor post-pandemic uptick, in 2021, the continent’s birth rates have continued to fall every year since 2016. With little hope that things will change course anytime soon, legal workers will regardless have to fill gaps in the labor force of this newly splintered Europe, changing the face of the continent with or without illegal migrants. Just this month, Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy announced it would issue 500,000 visas for workers from outside the EU; for years, Poland has led the EU in issuing residence permits for non-EU immigrants.

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Policies like these show that, on some level at least, European politicians understand that the current status quo of border checks and chest-thumping, absent any new ideas, is fundamentally untenable for the continent’s long-term future. And yet, trapped by a continent-wide attitude that favors retreat into a familiar yet narrow view of national interest, they have abdicated any sort of thinking about what European identity, and its place in the world, will look like in this new historical age. However naive the Europe of the Nineties may have been, it was nevertheless ambitious, imaginative, and boundary-pushing in its way. Today, that ambition, to imagine something better, has been replaced by a politics of fear, not just of migrants, but of what might come after the end of post-historical Europe.

While Euroscepticism is at an all-time high, very few actors on the continent actually want to leave the EU — they just want to rebuild it in their own image. The central question that Europeans need to ask themselves, then, is how committed they actually are to the European project, assuming they cannot cooperate enough to solve a problem like migration. Are European national identities really so fragile that they can’t survive collective action? Are they really willing to sacrifice something as groundbreaking as Schengen for short-term gains?

The unfortunate answer European leaders seem to have given is “yes”. Though some Schengen states may sooner or later be forced to band together, clarifying their open-border relationships in the face of threats like Russia, the truth is that there is little evidence that EU states will mature enough to solve their fundamental border problems.

For the moment, of course, Schengen isn’t dead — nor should it necessarily be dismantled merely because national leaders seem unwilling to coordinate. The benefits it offers Europeans continues to dramatically outweigh the costs. But keep stumbling and it might all count for nothing, as Schengen falls and Europe’s walls only continue to rise.

To understand why this isn’t an anti-Trump slam dunk — indeed, why Democrats bound to crash against majority opinion — look no farther than the noir-action classic Dirty Harry, from 1971.

Harry Callaghan — the film’s hard-boiled, hard-hitting protagonist — became Clint Eastwood’s iconic role. A San Francisco police officer, Callaghan becomes increasingly disillusioned with how liberal proceduralism gets in the way of combating his city’s criminal element. In response, he tortures a depraved serial killer to get him to tell him where his kidnapped victim is, and ultimately shoots the man dead when he could arrest him. The movie ends with Callaghan throwing away his badge.

He knows he can’t pursue justice while upholding the law — or at least, the law as Earl Warren-style judges and prosecutors defined it.

At the time, Left-of-center critics railed against the film’s politics, even as many conceded its unquestionable artistry. The late Roger Ebert called its message “fascist”, while the legendary reviewer Pauline Kael called it “deeply immoral”. The New Republic, then as now the organ of mainstream liberalism, called it “disgusting”.

Yet audiences loved it. Eastwood went on to make four sequels, and even his subsequent career as an Oscar-winning director hasn’t overshadowed Harry in public consciousness. President Ronald Reagan even went so far as to use one of Callaghan’s catchphrases (uttered as he’s about to shoot a criminal): “go ahead, make my day”.

It’s easy to see why the character struck a nerve on both sides. Progressives devoted to procedural rights found Callaghan’s legal shortcuts revolting. But for many others, Callaghan was vindicating a deeper moral precept: namely, that when the law prevents justice, justice should triumph, all the same.

Team Trump is relying on this same principle to maintain public support for the rough justice of its immigration policies. People want to obey the law, and they revere the rule of law. But when the law no longer serves justice — when it systematically works to the advantage of scofflaws and criminals — their sympathies shift. They want justice first and foremost, not the rigorous adherence to procedure. The results can be, and often are, troubling. But once public opinion reaches this stage, arguing against it is like arguing against the weather: it is what it is.

The conflict between law and a deeper justice is at the heart of the public debate over Garcia’s fate. It is undisputed that he was wrongly sent to El Salvador in violation of a court order. Nor is it unclear that a unanimous Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump Administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the United States. In other words, it is clear that as a matter of law, Garcia should come back to the United States.

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But Team Trump and their adherents are playing the justice card. They note that a local law-enforcement agency and the Department of Homeland Security determined that Garcia is a member of the infamous MS-13 gang. He has also been credibly accused of being a wife-beater by his own wife, who filed a police complaint in 2021 alleging that his beatings left her bleeding. He is apparently a “bad hombre”, the type of man Trump has consistently said needs to be expelled from the country.

Law versus justice. Democrats argue that the legal violation is more important than the man he apparently is. Team Trump says it’s more important to protect the safety of the many than the procedural rights of the malefactor. The American majority is likely to side with the Trumpians, for the same reason it cheered Eastwood’s Callaghan.

That’s not to say that Trump’s actions aren’t troubling. The law should be followed, and it’s clear that Garcia can be deported if the charges are true. Conservative columnists Ross Douthat and Byron York each contend the right solution is to bring Garcia back, give him his due process, and then deport him to another country. That seems like the reasonable thing to do, and it’s troubling that the administration seems uninterested in pursuing it.

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It’s also disturbing that the administration is seemingly ignoring a unanimous Supreme Court. The court’s conservative majority will be the only block against Democratic power if they return to power. Disregarding a Court order might look good to MAGA now, but the Trumpians will rue the day when the tables are turned on them.

But none of that is getting traction now because of Garcia’s history, which looks worse by the day. Americans, especially on the Right, are distrustful of institutions in record numbers. Trump voters are especially distrustful of judges after watching the system be perverted by the years long lawfare campaign mounted against Trump.

The Biden administration’s blatant refusal to enforce the laws against illegal migration, and its twisting of laws regarding refugee status to enable that refusal, also harden conservative hearts. This disobedience of the law, purportedly to pursue justice, is why we have so many hardened gang members and criminals in the US homeland today.

Trump voters will happily say what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and look the other way as their man gets rid of the bad guys — and, no doubt, some innocents — by whatever means necessary.

This spectacle will go on for a while as both sides seem dug into their current positions. Trump thinks it’s good to be on the side of the popular sense of justice and public safety, while Democrats think it’s good to be on the side of judges and the law. Neither has the incentive to actually solve the problem, either for Garcia’s case or for the many similar cases that will surely arise as Trump’s mass deportation ramps up.

But politically speaking, it’s Democrats who are likely to pay the higher price. Democrats once had public opinion on their side regarding immigration. Before then-President Joe Biden allowed millions of people to stream across the border, Americans opposed Trump’s immigration policies. Today, CNN political analyst Harry Enten points out that a clear majority of Americans supports Trump’s policies and backs the immediate mass deportation of all illegal migrants.

Mistakenly deporting a “bad hombre” is exactly the mistake Americans today will tolerate, if it means undoing four years of Biden’s mess. That conclusion will outrage liberals and Democrats. But they should know better, as this is exactly the course the country took as crime rose between the Sixties and Nineties.

A country that once veered toward protecting the rights of the accused when their streets were basically safe increasingly demanded strict law enforcement and longer jail terms. President Bill Clinton’s shift toward this position, encapsulated in the 1993 crime bill that hired 100,000 more police officers and cracked down against crime, was one reason he was able to win as a “New Democrat”.

Democrats belatedly realized back then that they could not win national elections by catering to their liberal base. They seem light years away from accepting reality today, captured as they are by a base that wants nothing more than to see their representatives fight everything Trump does.

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Trump and Republicans should realize, though, that public forbearance in this case doesn’t extend to all conflicts with judicial orders. Even Trump voters don’t think he should ignore court orders with respect to immigration cases, and an overwhelming majority (78%) of Republicans generally believe he must obey Supreme Court orders.

In other words, when law doesn’t clearly prevent justice, Americans back the rule of law. Politics is always about public opinion. As Abraham Lincoln said, “with it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed”. On the Garcia case, public opinion is and will remain with Trump. On the broader question of the rule of law, however, it is squarely with the court system.

Democrats, and Trump, should take heed.

But they must. In the long run, progressives have no choice but to acknowledge that huge infusions of migrants stress welfare systems and depress wages for low-skill workers, while damaging social cohesion. Only by accepting this, and making the case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking, can the Left reconnect with its blue-collar roots.

And perhaps it isn’t such a heretical thought. Across the world, Left-leaning political parties have fared best when they have adopted restrictive policies on migration. The reigning Social Democratic Party of Denmark has won successive elections over the last decade with no fear from the populist Right, in large part because of its refusal to take in new asylum seekers and in its efforts to reduce any net migration.

For centre-left Danes, this position isn’t so much an aberration, but an extension of the fight against neoliberalism. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” Mette Frederiksen, the SDP leader and Danish Prime Minister wrote in her autobiography.

The same can be said of the United States. It is no coincidence that the era of lowest immigration to this country, between the Thirties and Sixties, coincided with the greatest expansion of labour unions, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Reduced migration meant less infighting and greater focus on the broad public interest among the working and middle class. It was these decades that gave us the federal minimum wage as well as Medicare and Social Security, our most durable and most generous entitlement programmes.

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Contemporary trends also strongly correlate. Democrats this century have won the White House only in years of decreasing migration. In 2008 and 2012, the years Barack Obama won two successive bids, immigration was down sharply. Four years ago, the Covid pandemic led to the closure of the US-Mexico border and the suspension of most visa programmes, measures that led to the fastest decline in migration on record. Of course, these weren’t the only factors, but the absence of a migration crisis sucked the wind out of the sails of Trump’s reelection that year.

More recently, the Democrat Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden, who represent two of the three districts that the Democrats held onto in Trump country, bucked their party by voting for hardline immigration enforcement and never missed an opportunity to remind voters that they disagreed with their party leaders on this issue. That’s not to say they abandoned the Left. Golden is a torchbearer of labour unions and Perez has been outspoken on breaking up corporate monopolies. But they show how the Democrats can once again become a big tent party, bringing back independent voters.

Many progressives disagree, pointing to the racist quota systems behind 20th-century limitations on migration. And it’s true that the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slashed migration by more than 80%, had bigoted justifications in line with the more intolerant views of the day. But racist beliefs of the past should not be weaponised to dishonestly argue against race-neutral immigration laws of the present. Migration levels can be cut across the board and a merit-based system need not have any ethnic component. Border security should not take race or ethnicity into account.

It is this dangerous conflation of laissez-faire migration policy and anti-racist activism that has wreaked havoc among the Left. In the reaction to the first Trump Administration, many liberals unthinkingly embraced unlimited migration as a progressive value. Such views only widened the distance between the Left and the working class.

The Left seems to have all but forgotten who is pushing, behind the scenes, for fewer immigration barriers. The fast food giants, industrial agribusiness interests, slaughterhouses, and other business groups lobby to import new workers on a strictly economic basis. Corporate executives leaned on the Biden Administration to increase the flow of migration over the last four years to reduce what they euphemistically called “wage inflation” — business-speak for higher wages won by tight labour markets. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has championed its own immigration lobbying bonanza in a bid to bring lower wage computer programmers to American shores.

Most mainstream Democrats, including Joe Biden, once sang a different tune and recognised the connection between business and mass migration. Back in 2006, Biden previously campaigned on building a new border fence and enacting new laws to “punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when they hire illegals”.

But the shift away from their traditionally tough stance has coincided with the changing demographics of the party base, especially its core of urban, educated professionals — who tend to benefit economically from mass migration. If you’re an educated white-collar worker, it’s unlikely you will face direct economic competition with a migrant hailing from Venezuela or Afghanistan. In most cases, you benefit from the lower wages of immigrant Uber drivers, maids, and kitchen staff in the form of cheaper goods and services. And there’s a small chance that you will be competing with migrants for limited spots at a homeless shelter or in line at the food bank.

This shift was only accelerated by Trump’s arrival. In 2017, Left-leaning politicians reflexively began opposing anything Trump supported, even if these ideas were in line with traditional Democratic policy priorities. For instance, they began dismantling routine immigration enforcement mechanisms, such as the 287(g) local law enforcement program, put into place by previous Democratic presidents, tying the hands of the Biden administration.

In those years, activists and politicians alike embraced slogans like “Abolish ICE” and competed to show deference to illegal aliens. It was in the midst of this dynamic that Kamala Harris took her most unpopular stances, such as her pledge to provide undocumented aliens in detention centres with taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries.

More to the point, the highly educated activist Left created cultural parameters that made open discussion of these issues impossible. Recall the treatment of Bernie Sanders who went viral for retorting: “Open borders? That’s a Koch brothers idea.” Invoking the arch-Republican billionaires, Sanders was expressing concern that mass migration lowers wages to the benefit of corporate interests. But many liberal media outlets decried Sanders as a racist bigot, an “ugly” xenophobic dinosaur of the highest order. An idea that once formed the bedrock of the labour movement has been transformed into an example of Leftist heresy.

But take it from the Cato Institute, the gem of the Koch foundation-backed libertarian research centres. Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president of the institute, previously commented on the benefits of mass immigration from the perspective of the pro-business elite.

“A diverse population,” Nowrasteh observed wryly on a thread debating mass migration, “reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different.”

In other words, waves of immigrants are favoured by this Koch-backed pundit not only for macro-economic reasons. He sees the cultural and political disruption it fuels as an essential benefit. The less societal cohesion, the less likely welfare state policies will advance.

I view the issue from the opposite direction from the Koch foundation world. The need for new social programmes is already fast approaching. Americans are living longer than ever, exacerbating the financial outlook of retirees and care facilities. And the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and other automation technology may soon replace tens of millions of workers. But if society is so consumed with backlash over immigration, how will the Left ever propose a workable solution to any of these challenges?

Borders pose an existential challenge for Democrats, one that forces them to reckon with the drift on class. Will American remain perpetually in conflict over new arrivals, constantly divided and competing with lower wage workers and pondering questions of shifting cultural identity, or will we end this cycle and fix the problems that plague our most struggling citizens. The future of progressive policy depends on solving it.

On one side, there is a growing belief that an open borders policy is a vital moral response to the economic inequality between countries. In these milieus, national citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world is increasingly seen not as a birth right but as just another unfair advantage. As the political theorist Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely”. And just like feudal privileges, they should be cast aside.

On the other side, meanwhile, the vox populi disagrees. Polling consistently shows that most Western citizens want less immigration, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France and Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no.

With die-hards on both sides, it’s no wonder the Senate border bill has become such a point of contention. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally; it’s more that, with an election coming up, news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border doesn’t paint Biden in a good light. For the rest of us, meanwhile, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a moral right to claim asylum in the US.

This is not to say that immigration should be stopped entirely; but rather that unlimited immigration is incompatible with the right of a bounded community to durable political self-determination. This, in turn, is a far weightier moral consideration than the self-interest of any given economic immigrant. As the political philosopher Christopher Heath Wellman put it: “[n]o collective can be fully self-determining without enjoying freedom of association because, when the members of a group can change, an essential part of group self-determination is exercising control over what the ‘self’ is.”

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But how can a community control its “self” in a world of open borders? Inevitably, a subsection of immigrants will acquire the right to vote in their new home. Over time, their presence will change the composition of the electorate, or, in other words, the “self” part of “self-determination”. And eventually this will alter the outcome of political decisions taken by the demos — for immigrants typically don’t share the same preferences or identity as the existing citizenry. Give a large group of outsiders the vote, and you may find that voting patterns start to change. To prevent this, claims Heath Wellman, the demos must have a right to say “no” to radical, unwanted alterations to the citizen body.

The open border advocates would naturally dispute this, insisting that no self-determining group of citizens has the right to protect itself from such change. After all, who’s to say that the next generation of voters won’t also revolutionise politics? Radical change doesn’t just come from abroad. We wouldn’t choose to disenfranchise our rebellious children, even if they threaten to overturn our political decisions. By the same token, we cannot deny the vote to immigrants with conflicting values or interests.

This analogy, however, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Generational changes in the electorate arise from citizens voluntarily exercising their basic human rights: in this case, the right to form a family and the right to freedom of conscience. By contrast, the replacement of the electorate through unwanted mass immigration occurs wholly involuntarily and is facilitated by governments acting entirely morally ultra vires.

What’s more, education and upbringing tend to ensure a large amount of continuity between the preferences, interests and identity of one generation and the next. A parent and child have far more in common than a person born in the US and a newly arrived immigrant. This is especially true under conditions of mass migration across great civilisational distances, and even more so when the state insists on multiculturalism, rather than integration. While new arrivals will be subject to some cultural pressure to adopt the norms of their host society, contemporary liberal democracies encourage immigrants to celebrate their ethnic identities and, increasingly, their grievances. These groups then ask for policy shifts to accommodate their cultural preferences.

We have seen this play out in America, the UK and Europe, where — contrary to those who talk of the natural conservatism of immigrants — new arrivals tend to vote well to the Left of non-immigrants. Over time, this can start to distort the political system. As former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once observed, “in multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion”. This can eventually lead to an aggressive style of ethnopolitics evident in many countries around the world from South Africa to Malaysia.

Even if this doesn’t happen, mass migration can warp democracy in other ways. As Robert Putnam argued, “ethnic diversity” can reduce both “horizontal” interpersonal trust and “vertical” trust in political institutions, leading residents of all races to “hunker down”. We can see this in the way social trust had steadily declined since mass non-Western immigration began in the mid-Sixties, while political polarisation has conversely increased. Some have blamed this on the rise of cable news or social media — and indeed, both probably play a part. But the timeline of America’s deteriorating social trust and the geographical distribution of that trust — highest in homogenous places such as New England and the Midwest, lowest in the Southwest and in New York — are consistent with the diversity-trust hypothesis.

While declining trust probably won’t result in societal collapse, it will certainly weaken our political institutions. A high-trust society can afford the sort of deliberative democracy that offers fair consideration of all affected parties. This system presupposes that political parties play fair, keep their promises and work together for the common public good. But it is easily distorted, and can swiftly morph into a low-trust society with a Lebanon-style “consociational democracy” and a system of zero-sum tribal bargaining. In such a scenario, political outcomes are determined by the balance of power between representatives of different ethnic and religious communities. This makes redistributive economic policies difficult to pass, as warring factions care little about each other’s welfare.

As a result, it’s hard to see how open border advocates would enjoy living in the world they propose. They would be poorer, unhappier and exposed to conflict. What could be more immoral than that?

***

A version of this article was first published on Restoration.

These “vulnerable” areas are comprised largely of the nation’s neglected post-industrial and coastal communities, as well as some of our grittier provincial districts with sizeable working-class populations. Think Rochdale, Great Yarmouth, Thurrock… According to the report, these sorts of places could soon become hotspots of far-Right activity resulting in “the election of far-Right politicians, spikes in hate crime or one-off flash points spiralling out of control”.

A dramatic warning indeed. So, what exactly prompted the group to draw these conclusions? Had a hidden network of neo-Nazi cells been uncovered? Was a clutch of modern-day Lord Haw-Haws transmitting fascist propaganda to impressionable listeners via community radio stations? Was there a sudden surge in support for far-Right political parties?

Well, no. Nothing of the sort. Hope Not Hate appears to base its conclusions on two prevailing factors. First, and not inaccurately, the identified areas have taken the hardest hit, economically and otherwise, from the covid pandemic. Second, those residing in these districts have — heaven forbid! — “less liberal than average” attitudes to multiculturalism and migration.

So there we are. Any place that displays “less liberal than average” — for which read “less liberal than our own” — views on multiculturalism and migration is, so far as these oh-so-enlightened progressives are concerned, effectively worthy of being placed in special measures.

It is an attitude dripping with contempt and illiberalism. It is a tactic designed to marginalise anyone who voices opposition to, say, open borders or contends that state-sponsored multiculturalism has, all things considered, not been entirely to the good.

Of course, these opinions are common currency outside of our nation’s fashionable cities and university towns. But these are places where our high-minded political and cultural elites — including those who run our leading think-tanks, charities and advocacy groups — seemingly rarely venture. If they did, they would find communities which are, in fact, overwhelmingly fair-minded and decent. Most are populated by residents who are decidedly not opposed to immigration per se; they merely expect the system to be managed properly (as it plainly has not been in recent times) so that their neighbourhoods and local economies are not subjected to rapid and profound change.

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Similarly, they will respect the right of their fellow citizens to live the life they wish within the law, but question whether the particular model of multiculturalism foisted on society by their rulers hasn’t served to fragment communities and push people apart rather than bring them together. (They also wonder how it can be right that they are constantly chivvied to celebrate the culture of others when their own is looked upon with such disdain by those doing the chivvying.)

To our liberal establishment and its outriders, these opinions are so beyond the pale that those who hold them must be considered outside the boundaries of mainstream politics and, in some cases, deserving of high surveillance. It is a mindset that sees anyone holding patriotic, communitarian, small ‘c’ conservative views as being motivated by an inherent xenophobia and narrow provincialism — and thereby some kind of threat. And if that means perpetuating a false narrative that portrays such opinions and those who hold them as being driven by “hatred”, so be it. Anything deemed to be out of step with modern progressive thought must be crushed under foot in the crusade for “tolerance”. Diversity, as ever, in everything but thought.

One thing this shows us is that many among our liberal class still haven’t learned the lessons of Brexit. Millions — including significant numbers living in exactly the types of places identified in the Hope Not Hate report — voted Leave in large part because they felt demonised and misrepresented by the type of people now painting them as incipient fascist foot soldiers. Their votes were not a demonstration of innate racism and bigotry; they were instead a demonstration of anger at constantly being denounced as racist and bigoted. See the difference?

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My fight for free speech

By Paul Embery

The attitude of contempt towards our working-class Brexit-voting communities still prevails among our elites. It is as though they inhabit a different country altogether. They show no recognition of the great strides Britain has made in the fight to eradicate discrimination and prejudice, nor of the fact that our record in that regard is far superior to that of most other nations.

Indeed, it could be argued that Britain is an exemplar when it comes to tolerance and understanding. For example, a 2019 study by US academics found that prejudice against migrants and minority ethnic or religious groups was lower in Britain than in most other European countries, with 85% saying they would be happy to have a foreign worker as a neighbour and 95% someone from a different religion. “There are many ways in which Britain is known to be ‘exceptional’ in the European context,” said the study’s co-author Dr Jonathan Kelley, “but prejudice against immigrants is clearly not one of them.”

Of course, none of this fits the caricature propagated by those insistent that our country is a sewer of despicable racism and must engage in regular bouts of self-flagellation for its wickedness. We witnessed this attitude in the aftermath of this year’s European football championships, when a handful of vile social media messages directed towards England’s black players were presented as evidence that our nation was caught in a rising tide of prejudice and bigotry — no matter that most of the messages were sent from abroad.

That the far-Right has never been a serious force across our land, even during periods when circumstances were arguably more conducive to it, doesn’t prevent our liberal class from routinely trotting out hysterical predictions of a new dark age just around the corner. Their prophecies are hocus-pocus, an insult to fundamentally decent and tolerant working-class communities. They should be seen as such.