Family, Nationhood and Immigration
by Swithun Dobson
on the LA Blog
“We are a nation of immigrants”, is a popular refrain from politicians and activists alike in the immigration debate, however they never actually define who the “we” are. On a trivial level everyone is an immigrant: assuming common descent from the Mesopotamian Adam or the African mitochondrial Eve, the Western peoples are clearly not native to their lands; nor, for that matter, are the Australian Aborigines. Yet the above statement is always in the context of a particular country, for example, Britain. So what the “we” actually means is the physical topography which is Britain but why should physical topography be the dominant factor in the debate? Unless you are going to endow a certain region personhood, making a literal pantheistic mother Britain, this is clearly mostly irrelevant since immigration is about people. Thus, you are left with physical, biological lineage as the primary factor of nationhood: the one subject deliberately barred from public debate.
Any concept of common descent via sexual reproduction requires a beginning with a man and a woman. They then must beget children, and their children more children and so on to reach the present world population. Consequently, mankind must have started with a family: father, mother and child. Historically families have been recognised as separate units by the unique contractual relationship between the father and mother: marriage, which conferred a special status in the eyes of the society. By definition marriage implies both unity and diversity: both are human persons, yet the man is not a woman and the woman is not a man; this is also necessary for the possibility of sexual reproduction. We see this unity and diversity in the wife-hunting and husband-beguiling prior to marriage. When searching for a wife I do not wish to marry myself, to do so would be a sort of narcissistic homosexuality. I crave though, not only physical heterogeneity, upon which the sexual drive feeds, but also emotional and intellectual difference. To be joined to a wife (or a husband) is world enlarging. It introduces new ideas, pursuits and families alien heretofore; before I married I had no contact with Devon, crochet or the art of baking (I did, however, already enjoy the fruits thereof!).
However, marrying someone radically different is unthinkable: Mao marrying Margaret Thatcher would be more bizarre than a kosher black pudding; even where marriages are arranged by the fathers of the bride and groom, none would deliberately unite such a pair unless there were substantial financial benefits to them or their children. If the parties involved were ignorant of the manifest realities prior to marriage, then some serious adaptation of one or both of the parties would be required to prevent divorce.
Family life imparts and creates both rituals and beliefs, from the relatively mundane, such as how to celebrate one’s birthday, to the eternal: religion (defined as a doctrine which explains what the world actually is, what’s wrong with it and how to solve it). Further, ritual is ubiquitous but cloaked by familiarity. Take habitual routine of working Monday to Friday then blowing the wages on abusing one’s liver or alternatively, the football calendar – it proscribes times of worship (3pm on Saturday), feast days (The Euros or World Cup) and marks the passage of time. For better or worse, these rituals have considerable impact to some families’ lives; how much more influence then, does the cultivation of gender roles and fundamental religious belief have?
Now when sons and daughters come of age they will both leave and cleave to a husband or wife to begin a new family unit. Now as a virtue ofbeing the progeny of a marriage they will bear manifest similarities in looks and behaviour to their parents but also significant asymmetries. For example, whilst I physically resemble my mother’s side of family, in particular my Grandfather, none of my parents have my level of interest in Economics or Science Fiction, however I do share some of my mother’s enthusiasm for history. So this new family will be similar, yet different to the one which preceded it. This process will continue until you have a reasonably sized collection of families which one could call a community, thence a town and city, until finally we reach the point at which we could call this community a nation: a collection of families with a shared culture and genetic lineage. Those critical of mass immigration are chided for advocating a stagnant, uniform culture however these critics are wilfully blind: Purcell, Milton, Shakespeare, Locke, Dickens and Elgar, great figures from historic White English culture, hardly represent a turgid culture.
Since communities do not exist in an abstract, eternal realm but in specific times and places, topography becomes hugely important. If we have a small community in the Alps where the terrain is difficult to traverse , it is improbable that someone from a foreign family will marry into it, since it is highly unlikely they would travel there without very significant economic incentives, such as a bona fide gold rush. Yet this rush may well lead to improvements of the tracks and roads which in turn will make inter-national marriage easier. Better transport links lead to a greater diversity of genetic stock and customs in a community; cities tend to be more cosmopolitan since they have superior transport links which tends to be related to the natural topography, particularly rivers.
Having laid the foundations we can now discuss the present immigration debate. In any nation or country each member wants both unity and diversity analogous to marriage. On a societal level unity provides form and diversity freedom. If a society is too homogenous the group bends the individual to their will, such as in Communist societies, but if a society is too heterogeneous there will be little cooperation due to the lack of shared norms and values; each man will choose his preferred mix. So a small amount of immigration within a nation can be readily absorbed, unless the immigrants have radically different beliefs and customs. If they do indeed marry, then they will join an existing native family network in which they will be able to express their own individuality but also synthesise local culture. Even if they don’t marry, the family has an analogous method of integration: adoption. A relatively small amount of foreign families can be taken under the wing of a community and considered members of it.
Taking the British Isles as an example the only non-overtly violent mass immigration has taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries. Since the successful invasions of the German tribes, especially the Angles, Saxons and Danes, as well as the Norse, it has been relatively racially homogenous, for around 900 years. There were sporadic small immigrations from the Jews and the Huguenots (in the 17th century) who were successfully integrated – no group self identifies as the British Huguenots. London, in this time frame, would have been relatively cosmopolitan since it was a successful port but nothing like it is today where most of the white inhabitants were born in Poland; prior to the First World War the ethnic minority population of the UK was 0.7% compared with over 9% today. During those 900 years (a conservative estimate) then, it is not unreasonable to say that England developed a shared Western Christian culture; it is more difficult to say this of Wales and Scotland because of their relatively disparate populations since the transport links were poor mainly due to Snowdonia and the Highlands. To a large extent the present level of immigration has only become possible with modern transportation systems, particularly roads, rail, planes and shipping; I doubt great hordes would bother walking from Sofia to Slough. As such we could expect a more racially and culturally diverse society today than in the Middle Ages.
A family can only adopt a small number of children at once; a nation, similarly, can only “adopt” a limited number of immigrants. Thus immigration mainly becomes a problem when a nation attempts to “adopt” a large amount of immigrants at once. The balance of homo and heterogeneity is smashed in the direction of the latter. Consequently these immigrants are not “adopted” but form separate communities. Once an immigrant community reaches a critical mass it need no longer integrate with the local native community; this is particular pernicious for the native population when they speak a different language. No longer then, is there the Pakistani family in the village, there’s the self-defined British Pakistani community.
However the adoption analogy assumes that immigration is in fact voluntary in the same way as passing your progeny onto another family is, but this is far from the case. The government claims ownership of swathes of the countryside and transport infrastructure which means that most contemporary immigration is in fact forced integration since the true owners of the land and infrastructure -the producing class rather than parasitic class- did not agree to the movement of the persons (see here for my summary of the argument). Add this to the subsidisation of immigration through the welfare state , one can see, far from being the result of voluntary action, it is really forcible government policy: according to Andrew Neath, a former advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the huge increase in migrants was partly a politically motivated campaign to radically reshape Britain and to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.[1] Further, the “anti-discrimination” laws prevent free association and disassociation which would partially ameliorate the situation – apparently having a sign which says “No Eastern Europeans” is a racially motivated hate crime. Even remarks about Pakistani children lacking a good work ethic are investigated by the police!
Even this, though, isn’t the real root as to why immigration is generally unpopular with the native population, it is because immigrants are different: in appearance, clothing, religion and custom. Large scale immigration is like marrying a radically different marriage partner: crazy! It leads society to be too heterogeneous and hence fractious. So what some of the ruling class chide as small mindedness, bigotry or even racism is in fact perfectly reasonable: preferring white women to black, Bach to the Blues and hats to hijabs.
Obviously though, foreign does not always equal bad. Certain individuals will enjoy more aspects of alien cultures than others, maybe even to the extent of marrying into it. I, for example, greatly enjoy Indian food and the films by Andrei Tarkovsky. In fact, appropriating the best from other cultures enriches our own. Small scale, truly voluntary immigration would be a cultural boon; it would more resemble the adoption model rather than the present fractious model. In fact, I would expect a voluntarist society to achieve this since there would be no welfare state and the relative costs of transport would be higher; much of the transport infrastructure is heavily subsidised.
In conclusion, a nation, rather than being a bunch of deified rocks is actually family writ large. Being a collection of families, it thrives on appropriate unity and diversity; traditional White English culture is greatly varied whilst definitely being shared. Consequently, preference for your own kind and culture is both natural and reasonable. Small scale immigration is beneficial as the nation can “adopt” the migrants and synthesise the differences into a vibrant, evolving culture whilst mass immigration smashes unity, heralding societal breakdown. Thus the root problem of mass immigration is that the numbers of aliens are too great for society to “adopt”.
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Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance (Carbon Positive since 1979)
sean@libertarian.co.uk Tel: 07956 472 199 Skype: seangabb
Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance (Carbon Positive since 1979)
sean@libertarian.co.uk Tel: 07956 472 199 Skype: seangabb
Postal Address: Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, London W1J 6HL, England
Donate to the Libertarian Alliance
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What would England and the world have been like in 1959 if there had been no Second World War? For one possible answer, read Sean Gabb's novel The Churchill Memorandum. If you like Bulldog Drummond and Biggles and the early James Bond, this will be right up your street. Or look here to see other books by Sean Gabb, or here to see books by Richard Blak
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