Election time is coming up and immigration is one of the hot-button issues. I’ve commented on this before but I’d just like to highlight an aspect of the controversy that seems to get left out: it hasn’t always been the sole preserve of governments to make decisions about who could live in their countries.
I’m going sound an ignoramus if I try to get too specific about all the details, but hundreds of years ago there were only a few countries that kept themselves closed off from the outside world. Travelling to other parts of the world was much harder than it is today but the obstacles were things like oceans and mountain ranges, not application forms.
Today’s world of border controls and immigration policies may seem necessary given the ease of modern travel. But the real problem is that communities have lost the right to police themselves. Self-government by individuals is the primary form of government, followed by self-government of the household and then self-government of the local community. Only when self-government has broken down should it be necessary for the civil government to step in.
When a community is self-governing, people make their own decisions about who they want as neighbours. If people move there from another region or country and don’t fit in or don’t make themselves acceptable to the local community, then no one has to give them a job, sell or rent them a house or otherwise make it possible for them to live. Newcomers who fail to assimilate to the culture and meet its expectations are generally obliged to change their ways or else go back to where they came from.
I don’t wish to idealise the past and I don’t mean to imply that local self-government has always been free from prejudice, hatred cruelty or other ills. But it was different. What has changed is that we now have governments enforcing anti-discrimination laws, which may seem necessary or kind for one reason or another, but which have taken away the power of self-government.
I can actually remember a government pamphlet that came out in the early 1990s explaining that it would now be illegal to discriminate against potential tenants or board members on the basis of religion or marital status. A cartoon-style picture showed a nice young couple looking for a house to rent and a tight-lipped landlady remarking “I was looking for a married couple…” The other picture, similarly, showed a sweet-looking man in a turban attending a board meeting and another tight-lipped woman archly asking, “You’re not a Christian, Mr Singh?” At the time, as a young Christian, I saw it as just another attack on Christianity and traditional values. Now I realise that it was also an attack on the right of communities to enforce their shared values.
If the legalised Muslim invasion of the West doesn’t stop, I fear that communities will rediscover the power of self-government and it won’t be pretty. But things will never return to the way they were, because communities today either don’t have shared values or don’t know what they are. It’s all part of the collapse of civilisation.
