The Price of European Immigration
FrontPage Magazine 28 June 2012
In his 2008 book Et Delt Folk ("A Nation Divided”), The Danish historian and writer Morten Uhrskov Jensen carefully went through publicly available sources. He demonstrated that the opening up of his country for mass immigration was arranged by just part of the population, sometimes in the face of considerable popular opposition.
Roughly speaking, those representing the political and media establishment and the upper classes were in favor of open borders, whereas those from the lower classes were often opposed. This divide is viewed by those from the upper segments of society as caused mainly by racism, prejudice, ignorance and xenophobia.
Since the educated classes enjoyed a virtual hegemony over public debate, they were able to define all opposition as hate and intolerance, exemplified by people such as Pia Kjarsgaard of the Danish People’s Party. The well-to-do themselves rarely lived in areas with many immigrants and could afford to move, at least for a while, if that was needed. They focused on the abstract and allegedly humanitarian aspects of mass migration.
Immigrants are simply referred to as "new countrymen,” who as if by magic always seem to enrich the natives with their presence. In Denmark, multiculturalists have successfully managed to establish the neologism nydansker or "new Danes,” a vibrant new breed of people currently displacing the tired and boring "old Danes.”
For poorer people, immigration was a concrete issue, as immigrants moved into their neighborhoods and went to school with their children. To put it bluntly, for those with money, globalization initially meant that they could travel on holidays to exotic lands and treat the world as their playground. For those who were less well off, it meant that the entire world suddenly moved into their street and took over their children’s local playground.
When the Titanic during her maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean struck an iceberg just before midnight on 14 April 1912, the first people who could see the water pouring in were the third-class passengers who happened to be situated closest to the waterline. Meanwhile, the richest passengers at the top were drinking fine cognac long after the ship had started sinking. They didn’t realize what was going on for quite some time, because they were further removed from the physical problem. The poor passengers still unfortunately suffered the highest fatality rates, because the wealthy benefitted from having privileged access to the lifeboats.
We see the same phenomenon on display today, on a much larger scale. Having Islamophobia in Europe today is just as rational as having icebergophobia on board the Titanic in 1912.
Uhrskov Jensen in 2012 published another book, Indvandringens Pris ("The Price of Immigration”) about how much money non-European mass immigration costs his native Denmark. His conclusion is that this cost is great in terms of welfare payments and rising crime combined with declining efficiency and technological innovation.
He shows through carefully researched statistics that only certain Asian immigrants are able to keep up with northern Europeans in the educational system. A few skilled immigrants from India or elsewhere can compete, but mainly those from East Asia: Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and to some extent Vietnamese. All other non-Western immigrants show lower levels of skill and competence than Europeans, many of them a lot lower.
It should be mentioned here that these numbers correlate quite well with average IQ, where a few other Asians can compete with Europeans, but primarily East Asians. Other ethnic groups cannot do so. Although it has become taboo to say this in the modern Western world, it is well-documented fact that IQ correlates well with economic level, for individuals as well as for nations. The scholar Charles Murray has written much about this.
Former professor Helmuth Nyborg at Aarhus University in Denmark has conducted controversial research on the subject of the genetic inheritance of intelligence. His conclusion is that today’s mass immigration of non-Europeans will lead to an overall marked decline in the average intelligence of the population, and by extension a significant decline in social and economic competence, scientific progress, as well as technological innovation.
For decades Westerners have been told that immigration from less developed Third World countries is "good for the economy” and will "pay for future pensions.” Morten Uhrskov Jensen proves conclusively that this claim is fundamentally wrong, not just regarding Denmark or Scandinavia but for other Western countries, too.
Certain private companies may enjoy short-term benefits by having access to cheap labor and borderless export markets. Socialist parties can cynically import a reliable voter base of backward peoples who overwhelmingly vote for left-wing parties so they can receive generous welfare payments from the high tax payments extracted from the majority population, essentially forcing the white natives to fund their own colonization by foreign peoples.
For the country as a whole, however, non-European mass immigration will in the long run turn out to be an unmitigated social and economic disaster. The direct and indirect costs of today’s immigration policies through rising crime, increased corruption and higher welfare costs plus declining competitiveness, innovation and genetic intelligence add escalating costs to countries already in trouble due to rising deficits and mushrooming debt.
A Danish think tank has estimated that the net cost of immigration is as much as 50 billion kroner every year, and those were cautious estimates. A study from Denmark found that every second immigrant from the Third World – especially from Muslim countries – lacked the qualifications for even the most menial jobs on the labor market.
An ever-growing group of non-Western immigrants in Norway is dependent on welfare. This was the conclusion of a study by Tyra Ekhaugen of the Frisch Centre for Economic Research. Ekhaugen’s research contradicted the common assertion that the labor market depends increasingly on immigrants. The study indicated the reverse.
I have previously written about the costs of mass immigration several times, for instance in the essays When Danes Pay Danegeld: The End of the Scandinavian Model or What Does Muslim Immigration Cost Europe?
Yet Erling Lae, an openly gay politician for the Conservative Party and then the head of the Oslo city government, warned that the city desperately needs more immigrants and that there would be “complete chaos” without them. In 2005, Trygve G. Nordby, who has worked for the Socialist Left Party, as the director of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), claimed that the country needed more unskilled immigrants and should actively seek them out. It later emerged that UDI under Nordby’s rule had virtually run its own private immigration policy in violation of national law in order to give Iraqi immigrants the right to settle in Norway.
Journalist Halvor Tjønn from newspaper Aftenposten, one of the few genuinely critical journalists in Norway who later published a fairly realistic biography of Muhammed, in 2006 cited a report from NHO, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise. NHO warned that the current immigration policies constitute a serious threat to the country’s economy. Norway is one of the world’s largest exporters of oil and natural gas due to its offshore resources in the North Sea and elsewhere. Yet according to NHO, there is a risk that much of the profit Norway earns from selling oil could be spent on paying welfare for its rapidly growing immigrant population.
These warnings were left unheeded by political leaders, yet the problem hasn’t gone away. In 2012, the business daily Dagens Næringsliv reported that researcher Erling Holmøy from Statistics Norway together with senior advisor Birger Strøm studied how immigration affects government budgets. They concluded that in the long run it would prove to be very costly, stating that mass immigration bears certain similarities to a pyramid scheme.
Author Morten Uhrskov Jensen states that the basic trends are identical in Sweden, France, Germany and the USA. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this is, in his view, to stop all non-Western mass immigration. Yet the Western political elites continue to promote such mass immigration, in spite of mounting evidence that this is greatly harmful to their own countries. This dangerous stubbornness could be due to ideological blindness, or may be because the political elites see their positions, prestige and personal privileges tied to maintaining the status quo.
In the end, the historian Uhrskov Jensen fears that only a massive traumatic event or a major shock to the system can change the direction the Western world is currently headed and reestablish reasonable and sensible immigration policies that are in line with the long-term interests of the European majority population.