Poles in Britain

Howard Sutherland writes:

Interesting Telegraph feature about a few of the hundreds of thousands of Poles who have barged into England every year since Poland’s EU membership laid Great Britain wide open to Poles. The piece is a pro-immigration love letter to the Poles: the protagonists are young pretty girls who seem to be law-abiding; not a word about any dislocating effect the Eastern European influx is having on real Britons nor about the Poles’ having no interest whatever in becoming British; the conclusion is that Polish and other Eastern European repopulation of the UK is now a beneficial fact of life and the lazy Brits will just have to get used to it (just as they have accustomed themselves to shrieking imams in their cities demanding their decapitation) .

Even MSM writers sometimes tell us what’s really happening, however, though they don’t mean to:

But if Cracow wages look low to people in Cracow, there are always others willing to accept them. Just as the Poles are moving to Britain and other western European states, so Ukrainians are filling low-paid jobs in Poland.

Aleksandra Motenko is 22 and from Kiev. She is the only waitress in Lena’s restaurant and in three years she will be entitled to a Polish passport. But it is not Poland that interests her. “When I become Polish I will go to London,” she says. (emphasis added)

For one thing, do the Poles really sell their citizenship so cheaply? They must have learned nothing from their own history! And how will Aleksandra “become Polish” just by getting a passport? All she wants out of it is the ability to invade London. For another, isn’t this just what we are saying about the Two-Halves of Our One Party System’s plans for illegal alien amnesties and “guest”-worker programs? It won’t just be Mexicans taking advantage of them. If the SPP becomes a North American EU, then presumably anyone from Central or South America – or even farther afield – who succeeds in establishing himself in Mexico will have the right to travel freely to the United States.

The comments, if at all representative of Britons today, reinforce one’s sense that only divine intervention can still save the United Kingdom. The pro-immigrants are supercilious and obsessed by such things as “that Polish waitress was so lovely and neatly dressed, while the English one was a slob who dropped her aitches.” The anti-immigrants often cannot write a coherent English sentence, so aren’t much help making the argument.

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N. writes:

One of the things that various empires have done over history is move peoples around. The Soviets famously moved large groups of ethnic Russians into the Baltic states, in order to assure control of them, for example. One can find many older examples, where people A are settled in the midst of people B, thereby fragmenting the first group while assuring that the second group will remain totally loyal to the empire, for their own protection.

If one wanted to abolish the nation-state, one way to do this would be via mass immigration, while leaving the putative borders, language and culture intact. Because over time, sufficient numbers of peoples who do not share the language or culture would come to dwell in the country, erasing the border de facto.

The globalization cheerleaders assure us that erasing borders is a good thing in and of itself, because free movement of people is essential to an efficient world market. The fact that many of the legal and cultural structures the markets rely upon are unique to only a handful of nations doesn’t faze them, they are confident that these norms can be put into place anywhere. The fact that this doesn’t seem to be true doesn’t enter in to the debate, unfortunately.

More cynically, if I wished to rule a country, creating a kind of Balkanized spoils system that pitted as many groups of people against other groups of people as possible would certainly enable me to do just that. I very much fear that what we are seeing in the EU, and in the proto-NAU, is exactly the above: a deliberate fragmentation and erasure of culture in order to facilitate control from above in the name of economic efficiency.

Paul W. writes:

Howard Sutherland writes; “The comments, if at all representative of Britons today, reinforce one’s sense that only divine intervention can still save the United Kingdom.”

I recently posted an article on the merits and debits of multiculturalism on a British web site “A Tangled Web.”

The comments, if you have the time to read them suggest to me that it is all over for Britain, bearing in mind that this is supposedly a non-liberal site.

Mark P. writes:

Your reader “N” wrote:

“The globalization cheerleaders assure us that erasing borders is a good thing in and of itself, because free movement of people is essential to an efficient world market. The fact that many of the legal and cultural structures the markets rely upon are unique to only a handful of nations doesn’t faze them, they are confident that these norms can be put into place anywhere. The fact that this doesn’t seem to be true doesn’t enter in to the debate, unfortunately.”

This is actually a very true statement and it’s stuff like this that keeps me coming back to this website.

N, however, doesn’t understand how much worse it really is. The capitalist cheerleaders are not merely undermining the cultural and legal structures that support markets. They are actually making true many of Karl Marx’s own predictions.

Mass immigration basically reproduces all of the conditions of a Marxist reserve labor force. This labor force is an army of unemployed people that capitalists can dip into to keep exisiting wages low (Remember, Marx was a classical economist who understood that businessmen are, among other things, relentless cost cutters.) Marx predicted that the instability and poverty that such a system created would eventually anger the workers who would revolt and then push aside the entire rotten system.

Marx, of course, was wrong. Empirically, the period in which he wrote was marked with rising real wages. Theoretically, his error was assuming that capitalism exploited the proletariat when, in reality, it created the proletariat. In pre-capitalist days, a worker would need to either move to a wealthier household to become a servant or he would need to inherit the land and tools if he was going to survive. If he could not do this, then he either starved to death or he was never born in the first place. Capitalism so improved the productivity of labor that it became possible for an average person to sell nothing but his time. This led to a population explosion unprecedented in history. Marx took for granted that all these new people were just there, when, in reality, they were allowed to live. Thus, Marx’s predictions were wrong.

Today, with global markets, there are billions of unemployed people that capitalists can now dip into to keep real wages low. Thus, the American standard of living is being dissipated.

To paraphrase N, if I were a cynical socialist, then I would engineer this situation so that I could see socialism win. If I were a cynical socialist who understood that he might actually be a loser in such a system, then I would have to go to great lengths to ensure that my position is not dissipated. Just imagine the kind of sociopaths America would end up getting ruled by if both of these conditions are met.

More generally, America needs to go back to its traditional economic history and reject the newfound liberal economic history that has taken hold.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 28, 2007 12:49 PM | Send