One of the major issues in France’s forthcoming presidential election in April 2017, as well as across Europe and the US, is immigration.
ESC believes that immigration will be increasingly curtailed across the West due to popular opposition and the inability of host countries to find work as the indigenous population from top management to street cleaners loses jobs to AI and robots and people from other cultures refuse to integrate.
An initially good idea has now reached its limit and its much touted advantages are being increasingly outweighed by its negative consequences.
Views on immigration have changed over the years.
At the 1986, Conservative party conference, for example, Philip May, the husband of Britain’s future prime minister Theresa, said in a speech that
Britain’s been a member now of the European Community for some 13 years. During that time we’ve helped to change many things in Europe for the good, and I hope that we’ll continue to do so.
We need to strengthen the economic base of the Community by breaking down the barriers to the free movement of goods and services.
Note the crucial omission here – there is no mention of the free movement of people.
However, free movement and citizen and human rights have been a major element of European policy since the 1950s, but while original idea was positive good and “rational” in economic and humanitarian terms, it has been undermined by migration both within the European Union and from outside.
As a result, national identity and the coherence and integrity of the United States and countries in Western Europe have been shattered.
The countries of so-called “new Europe” in Eastern Europe, which escaped from Soviet occupation and tutelage in 1991, are often far more homogeneous in their ethnic and religious structure than Western European countries. They see no advantage in the kind of fractured society now so clearly evident in the US, UK and France, although they too support the migration of their own people to the richer part of the EU, in particular the UK.
The figures are startling. Under the ruling Labour Party, net annual immigration to the UK from the EU and elsewhere quadrupled, and the UK population increased by over 2.2 million immigrants between 1997 and 2010. Net migration reached an average of 247,000 per annum during Labour’s last term in government from 2005-2010.
Many of those voting for Brexit in 2016 were not poorly educated white racists or bigots, but previous migrants from Britain’s former colonies who now believe the country is “too full.”
A similar phenomenon is observable in the United States. Well-educated Muslims and Hispanics have immigrated to get away from the prevailing conditions in their own countries – and have stated explicitly that they do not want their poor co-religionists and fellow Hispanics to be allowed in.
As we forecast in 2016, a reaction against immigration has set in and become a major political factor, one which is only likely to increase as the pressure on the rich West, especially Europe, increases and AI and robots will increasingly destroy jobs without creating sufficient employment to replace the losses.