Snigger

In the article Gaia Vince ( I mean really ) says

The EU is an inspiring invention with its own stated values: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law and human rights. Each of them relies on compassion; it is the moral currency of the EU, and it is tragic that secular leadership is now so coy about it.

lol

Which EU is she actually talking about here. ?

So does the same apply to European decisions to colonise various other parts of the world? I mean why should the Aztecs care that the Spanish came over from Europe? Obviously there was no indigenous Aztec culture to be destroyed, right?

” the happenstance of your mother’s location at the moment of your birth.”

So a white person who happened to be born in Africa is African then?

I can’t help but sympathise with this possibly apocryphal quote from Lord Redesdale.

“Frogs are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.”

So, allegiance to country & culture is irrational and bigoted, but allegiance to a corrupt and incompetent trade association with delusions of grandeur is noble and beautiful? Right you are, love.

PJF – What could be more thoroughly British than a Hindoo on the make?

The most ethno nationalist by far are the SNP and Plaid Cwmry.
And they are both pro EU, which is utterly incoherent, just like everything else they do.

Some superb points made in the comments above. One of those days when everyone seems on brilliant form. Makes me feel proud to be…erm…human.

Gaia Vince?

Any relation to green ‘entrepeneur’ and subsidy farmer Dale Vince?

“England has existed as a nation for more than a thousand years”

Well, since 12th July 927 at any rate.

Æthelstan, King of the English

“ Many of the arguments against immigration rest on the idea that there is a true and pure national identity, ”

I mistakenly thought nearly all the arguments were about social and economic resources being unable to meet the demands of millions of immigrants arriving over a short period of time, the cultural, safety, criminal threat many of them pose, people being hacked to death in the streets, children being repeatedly raped, and people feeling their Country was no longer their own.

Perhaps I haven’t been paying close enough attention to the real reason.

John B:

I mistakenly thought nearly all the arguments were about social and economic resources being unable to meet the demands of millions of immigrants arriving over a short period of time, the cultural, safety, criminal threat many of them pose, people being hacked to death in the streets, children being repeatedly raped, and people feeling their Country was no longer their own.

Outstanding…

Race is not a social construct. But societies are racial constructs.

“Athelstan was the first King of England who actually ruled all of England. He reigned from 924-939.” All very well but you’re overlooking the subsequent period when it was a Danish kingdom.

Of course you could argue that after 1066 it was merely a dependency of the Duchy of Normandy but I suggest that it was such a distinctive dependency that it’s reasonable to date England from that time.

Her article is pitched as :

“It’s time to resist the right’s narrative of immigration as aberration. Nations thrive on it – and they always have done”

“Thriving” is subjective, I suppose. What happened to the Picts, who along with the Welsh, Cumbrians and Cornish were some of the last Britons standing? Within a few centuries of mass migration, their culture and language was lost to history forever, replaced by a Gaelic (that is, Irish Celtic) culture in much of the highlands and islands, an English or Scots speaking culture in the lowlands, and for a while, here and there, a Norse speaking culture.

Their Britonnic Celtic language died out entirely 1000 years ago – there are trendy Scots Nats sending their lowland urban kids to Gaelic-medium schools, in cities where they’ll never hear a word of it uttered in their lives, so they can immerse themselves in their indigenous Celtic culture free of Sassenach contamination* … but they picked the wrong Celts. There’d been Irish kingdoms crossing over into Scotland since ancient times but the wider Gaelic takeover of Britonnic culture in the north happened around the same time the Anglo-Saxon influence appeared in the south.

We only call them “Picts”, the name the Romans gave them, because we no longer even know what they called themselves. And that’s a nation who’d been kicking around since half a millennium before the Romans got to Britain and maintained an independent polity until deep into the early Middle Ages. There aren’t even enough fragments of their language left for Cornish-style revivalists to attempt to reconstruct it. Maybe those individuals who assimilated to the new ways of life did indeed thrive. But as a people? They have gone into the dark. They will never come back.

I’m not sure what consolation it’s meant to be to the Picts that what replaced them was still “the same species”. She makes a big deal about “genetic similarity” in an effort to give (pseudo-)scientific credibility to her argument, so unlike some she doesn’t refute that it’s a meaningful concept at all. But I’m not sure she’s thought through the consequences of that. She is correct to say people aren’t genetically separable into biological races in the sense commonly understood, but wrong to imply this makes everyone homogeneous – human populations form a tangled tree with interlinkages between the branches, and populations historically spread over large land masses genetically form a continuum rather than having sharp cut-offs as one “race” stops and another starts, but this doesn’t get round the fact there are different branches. Someone whose ancestors have basically all been from Japan for 2000 years is going to be quite distinct from someone descended from Amazonian or Papuan hunter-gatherers.

Yet as humans go they’d still share a lot of DNA. Getting out of Africa was a tight population bottleneck in relatively recent human genetic history, so Asians, Europeans, Indigenous Australians, Native Americans are all very genetically similar because they’re all splitting off the same thin and recent branch. If you really want to wind the DEI lot up, you could point out that their shared genetic heritage, geographic reach, and large population numbers make this group the true Global Majority. Sub-Saharan African populations tap into much deeper, wider branches of the human family tree and so have far more genetic diversity than the relatively small differences between Italians, Indians, Inuit and Incas. This variation is one reason why the concept of “Black/African” as a distinct biological race doesn’t really make sense, another being that genes from outside Africa have been continuously flowing back to populations there – the continent was never genetically isolated.

Nevertheless, if the author really does want to posit “genetic similarity” as a justification for large-scale immigration, then there’s more genetic similarity between populations in Western Europe and… surprise, surprise… other populations in Western Europe. And then to Eastern Europe, and so on. Personally I’m not in favour of an immigration policy based on genetic similarity (again, what consolation would it be for the Picts to know the DNA makeup of the incomers was so similar to their own?) but ironically for someone who sees herself as an anti-racist, her love for the EU is indeed a love for a system that discriminates between European and non-European migration. Funny she didn’t spend time extolling the joys of Frontex and all its works. It was as silly to drag the EU into the piece as it was to talk about genetic similarity.

What really irks is that, putting value judgments aside, the question of whether current levels of immigration are an “aberration” or whether nations have “always” experienced it is basically an objective one. There’s no point decrying something as a “narrative” concocted by your enemies unless you’re going to show that their claims are false. If she is right, all she needed to do to “own” the far-right and completely demolish the credibility of (what she claimed to be) their narrative, would be to quote the historical statistics proving that it’s been completely normal across history, even across nations, to have, say, the current proportion of the population who were born abroad, or whose parents were. Naturally she does no such thing.

You could have a very reasonable discussion about how unusual current migration levels are, about what periods and places in history similar levels have occurred, about what economic, social and technological trends are driving the phenomenon. Everything from Western and East Asian demographics, to the real terms slashing of the cost of international travel, to the rise of African, Asian and Latin American households with the ability to raise thousands of dollars to fund migration attempts (far harder back when they were making under a dollar per day). You could look at the immigration policies of other states like in the Gulf or Singapore. You could ask questions about whether this really is all inevitable, desirable, or controllable; about what incentives and policies are most effective; about what means are available to improve the cost-benefit ratio, to target things better, to maintain cultural or community cohesion. Instead what we mostly** get is what this opinion piece is full of: an incoherent hectoring blend of “OH LOOK, NOTHING UNUSUAL IS HAPPENING, THIS IS ALL PERFECTLY NORMAL” with “WHAT’S HAPPENING IS GOOD ACTUALLY, AND INEVITABLE, AND WE’RE GONNA RAM EVEN MORE THROUGH”.

* The other bonus of Gaelic medium education, I guess, is so the kids are well placed if the Scottish public sector goes the Welsh route of making some highly paid jobs “bilingual only” so only people from certain regions plus those nationalist-attuned urban-dwellers who have got with The Project can take them.

** Few years ago I read an interesting think-piece by a right-wing American, reasonably socially conservative (enough to pay serious attention to the cultural cohesion issue) but pro-immigration (partly economics, partly to keep America top of the tree over the next century as other countries with larger populations develop economically). He raised the interesting point that most migrants to the US – and the same applies elsewhere – come from a handful of countries and cultures. They tend to form large communities where they settle, producing cultural bubbles – tending to marry each other so the household language persists for generations, big enough to have their own media ecosystems, and able to form powerful political blocs that eat away at national cohesion. Immigrants with a more unusual background tend not to be able to sustain this degree of separation, and he presented statistical evidence that by a whole range of metrics they integrated much faster into the melting pot.

Inter-marriage is particularly important – two generations down the line, who’s going to line up behind some communal sectarian cause because they’ve got 25% ancestry, especially when they’re 25% something else and 50% something entirely different? So his proposal was to make immigration genuinely diverse. Grant loads of visas to tiny countries you never heard of – get them spread out across America and it’s a handful of people per country per town, and they’ll just have to fit in with, and marry into, the existing culture. Severely clamp down on large-scale migration from any one country. Now I’m not sure how workable this all is, since it reduces your ability to recruit by merit (there are going to be far more Indians and Chinese with PhDs than people from Burundi) and there are obvious demographic and economic reasons why demand for visas to America varies massively between countries. But what I really marvelled at was the rarity.

Think pieces by policy wonks almost never touch the “and how do we get all these incomers to integrate?” question. If they do it tends to be pure handwavium about “values” rather than, as here, a concrete policy proposal with detailed statistical backing. Politicians usually talk about integration only to signal they “understand people’s concerns”. If they lay out a concrete policy it’s usually half-baked and ineffective: see the UK citizenship test, or French politicians (who spend even more time on this stuff, and whose efforts seem an even greater failure) arguing over what women should be allowed to wear, as if that’s going to make deeply ingrained cultural values disappear overnight rather than (at best) just making them less publicly visible or more contentious.

Sadly, most of those calling for “zero immigration” are deeply unserious too, just the flip side of those who mention migration and diversity to signal their membership of the virtuous class. “Zero” is not a proposal that would survive contact with reality unless you put some serious thought into skills and training, reversing demographic decline (a tough policy nut to crack unfortunately) and so on, and I’ve seen no sign that any of them have done the hard yards. Where are the people who don’t see immigration as just a rabble-rousing point-scorer, but are willing to have tough conversations about who we decide to take in, what blend of short term visas and long term settlement is appropriate, about how we prevent the formation of ethnic enclaves where all the kids marry back to the Old Country, and what we can do about the ones we’ve already got? Immigration is often called a “talking point” issue, but the truth is almost nobody talks seriously about it at all.

“people aren’t genetically separable into biological races in the sense commonly understood”

I disagree. Only by claiming monopoly rights of defining what “race” ‘really’ means can biologists – for instance – make such a claim. In English (and I guess for its equivalents in French, Spanish, German and so on) the word “race” bears so many interpretations that the claim becomes farcical. Just think: the human race, the European race, the English race, the Cornish race … People use, or used, such expressions unselfconsciously. So what can “in the sense commonly understood” possibly mean?

Anyway it’s my race, is it not, that means that statistically I am more vulnerable to multiple sclerosis than the average African and less vulnerable to sickle cell disease? Heavens, it seems that the geographical origin of the genetic susceptibility to MS has been found.
https://www.nationalmssociety.org/news-and-magazine/news/ms-brought-to-europe-5000-years-ago#:~:text=The%20Results%3A%20The%20analysis%20suggests,the%20populations%20of%20northern%20Europe.

Though they don’t use the word they are obviously referring to the Yamnaya people, the origin of the Indo-Europeans or what were once called the Aryans. In other words for most North Europeans the great majority of our male ancestors were murderous Ukrainian cowboys.

Anon – very good, although I’d like to add a caveat to this:

This variation is one reason why the concept of “Black/African” as a distinct biological race doesn’t really make sense.

The humans who left Sub-Saharan Africa between 70k and 125k years ago encountered, and interbred with, Neanderthals and some Asians interbred with Denisovans too, something that those remaining in SSA didn’t do.

European history is the story of which bunch of murderous Ukrainian cowboys were coming over this century

Western Europeans are all descendants of the Yamnaya, who entered Europe from the Steppes about 5000 years ago. Where you are Tim, in Iberia, the whole male line of the Iberians – except for the Basques – was exterminated within about 200 years of their invasion.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6436108/

@ john77

Fair enough. Apologies if it’s unclear to anyone…

The Left’s attitude to immigration and foreigners was perfectly summed up by SIR (larf? funnier than Baldrick) Tony Robinson. In a series about the Wild West he explained that “of course the noble native Indians killed the white men because they were invading their land, bringing great change and wrecking their ancient customs and traditions and bringing disease”. An hour later at a cocktail party he could be heard opining that “the lunatic Farage is a nasty, evil racist who doesn’t realise the benefits that immigrants bring and wants to stop paying them benefits! The guys a Nazi!”

The only thing about Lefties that you can admire is the capacity to believe 97 different things at once, many of them contradictory and mutually exclusive.