Mass Immigration: After Trump, After Brexit… What's Left?

immigration and refugee policy
people have a great deal of difficulty thinking about this with detachment and dispassion when it's the future of their own nation-state that's at stake or when they're looking at photographs of particular refugees who may be sitting on their border or dying in boats trying to cross into their territory and claim refugee status that's why i'm going to start this video talking about thailand on the other side of the world most of you in this audience can imagine why people think thailand is paradise you yourself may be burdened with the delusion that thailand is paradise you yourself may be planning to one day retire to thailand okay as difficult as it may be to relate to people from nicaragua or mexico who get it fixed in their minds they can have a wonderful bright future if only they become illegal immigrants in the united states of america if all of us in this audience can agree that thailand is a somewhat enticing destination imagine how much more enticing it would seem if you had been born and raised in bangladesh if you were born and raised in vietnam if you were born and raised in indonesia if right now your family was struggling suffering and dying in the midst of the revolution civil war protest movement going on in myanmar right next door thailand starts to seem to be a very enticing destination indeed now what percentage of people in myanmar really care about democracy what percentage of them are really willing to fight and die for the future of democracy i doubt it's 50 i just doubt that i just doubt all that many people are all that courageous and if it were 50 frankly i think the revolution would already be over by now the military would be overwhelmed by the volunteers even if they were barely armed right demanding the right to vote and getting rid of the military tissue let's let's just say generously it's 20 percent if this dissatisfied 20 percent of the population of myanmar abandons myanmar and they all move to thailand 20 population of myanmar relocates to thailand as refugees is that better for the future of planet earth as a whole is it better for thailand and is it better for myanmar vietnam it's a horrible depressing communist dictatorship vietnam in many ways vietnam is a much more depressing country politically than cambodia or china two countries the vietnamese have borders with on opposite sides i can completely sympathize with a vietnamese family who decides you know what we can have a better life in thailand in thailand they have some democracy in thailand they have some freedom of speech and yeah there are coconuts and mangoes and it's paradise in various other palpable ways okay what what percentage of the population of vietnam would rather live in thailand rather than what rather than either conforming to the political conditions that exist in vietnam war or rather than struggling against them rather than starting and struggling and suffering and dying through some kind of terrible revolution so that vietnam can frankly catch up with thailand and i'm an optimist about human nature i think vietnam could become a better country than talent they could have a better democracy could have a higher quality of education higher quality of life but you want to give a rough estimate of how many people are going to die before that happens did anyone else in the audience try to estimate the body count for the civil war in syria just when it was getting started so many years any of you did any of you actually estimate higher than what the body count now is no okay for vietnam to make the transition from communist dictatorship to democracy it's not going to be tens of thousands who die it's going to be hundreds of thousands who die right now in myanmar how many people are going to have to die and guess what this idea we have of refugees and migration it's really kind of sort of the coward's way out isn't it and on a face-to-face level i sympathize i understand how hard it is for people to make this kind of detached assessment of the situation i know how hard it is for people in texas to say well look venezuela is a disaster but the solution is not for 20 of the population of venezuela to relocate to texas as refugees that can't possibly be the solution cuba i do not know what percentage of the population that was in cuba around the year 1950 is now in the united states of america or now has their descendants living in the united states america it's a significant percentage a significant percentage of the total population of cuba has relocated the united states the tiny country of laos still a communist dictatorship a very significant percentage of their population over the last 50 years relocated to thailand i've seen attempts to estimate that but yeah millions of people can transfer between locations the tiny island of cyprus how many cypriots now are permanent residents or citizens in london england it's a huge percentage of populations a huge percentage of some of these countries has relocated it can happen and right now frankly if the united states allowed it or encouraged it you could take on 10 20 of pretty much every single one of these countries so the equator but most obviously venezuela and likewise within southeast asia right now most obviously myanmar because that's where you know normal social mores are collapsing right but sometimes normal social mores are intolerable in and of themselves what if you were born in indonesia and you happen to be gay how much more comfortable would you be in thailand as a homosexual than in indonesia right this is kind of the easiest example because what if you're born in indonesia and you're just a free-thinking atheist intellectual what if you're what if you're heterosexual guy kind of like me i actually don't think i'm that special you know what guys i think on the level of values i think there are guys just like me who are born in muslim majority cultures whether that's in saudi arabia malaysia indonesia or anywhere else and you know what i know you can actually google around the internet some of those guys fantasize about starting a new life in japan it's normally japan because they have japanese cartoons on tv in indonesia heavily censored heavily censored japanese cartoons but they very often do fixate on and fantasize about living in some other society which is just not repressive and oppressive in the way that a muslim majority society is okay what is going to happen to thailand if 10 of the population of indonesia and 10 of the population of malaysia and 20 of the population of myanmar and 10 of the population of vietnam if they all run away to live in thailand it will be the end of thailand as we know it my perspective is that that transformation quite apart from whether or not it would be good for thailand would not be good for malaysia for indonesia for myanmar for vietnam right i don't believe in this kind of mass immigration transformation of any one of these societies or all of them collectively being positive i don't believe in it being a net positive or a net gain for the future of of planet earth okay i don't think that having everyone with a conscience who cares about democracy abandoning venezuela is a good idea and just think i myself have met some of these people i knew colombians i met colombians i'm just being honest i met colombians all over the world i've met so many people who were born and raised in colombia and found some excuse to be living in canada or in thailand or else or wherever i was you know you can meet and they're not rich people who got a few dollars together got enough money together in the bank to migrate and live and work somewhere else and you know what they were doing they were giving up on the future of colombia which is going to be a tremendous struggle right we have this image in our heads that refugees are the poorest of the poor and in terms of what social science research shows us that is absolutely never the case right you're looking at the people who at least have enough money to make this kind of relocation and start a new life very often or shouldn't say very often disproportionately you are often looking at the talented tenth of that society you're looking at people who are medical doctors and architects people who have a higher level of skills in education partly because they may believe that if they could run away to live in england or run away to live in america run away to live in town that they could live as good and a better life once they got there all right you are very often looking at the brain drain phenomenon and even places like jamaica complain of this and jamaica itself has a case to be made that they come closer to paradise than most countries on this planet and they also struggle with the fact that they're most educated most skilled people instead of staying and struggling for a better future in jamaica they run away to live elsewhere in first world decadent democracies okay the concept of mass immigration entered into canadian politics and i think honestly it's only now in 2021 starting to have currency in american politics it entered into canadian politics from england it was really nigel farage the leader of the the brexit movement just to be brief he's led a series of political parties trying to get england to exit from the european union and as you may know he eventually succeeded he started reasoning in this way talking about mass immigration precisely because he does not fall into the stereotype of supporting an isolated monocultural white nationalist ethnostate right there's a very deep assumption that people find difficult to struggle against 21st century that either you support a cosmopolitan multicultural globalized world or you are some redneck retrograde who wants a homogeneous monocultural whites-only ethnostate all right what nigel farage had to argue for and his whole political career he has had problems of being tainted by racists in his own party that his political parties obviously attracted different kinds of neo-nazis and white supremacists he had to make clearing again no no no that's not the agenda he uh he supports he had a clear look the contrast we're talking about is not between cosmopolitanism and isolationism no he wants to contrast the world as it was under the european union in the 2000s with mass immigration to a world that everyone could remember from the 1980s just a few decades before when in england in england specifically in the 1980s they already had a cosmopolitan country they already had a country where every city and every town had indian restaurants every hospital had indian and pakistani doctors the british military had large numbers of nepalese men famously you know but they had military recruits from around the world in the former british empire london was already full of chinese restaurants and thai restaurants london had predominantly jamaican neighborhoods they had african immigrant neighborhoods people did already live in a multicultural cosmopolitan society in england in the 1980s but at that time he's saying they had moderate immigration that's what he wanted to go back to as opposed to mass immigration and mass immigration is the phenomenon where you have so many immigrants coming in that the challenge for the school board is no longer having a classroom of 30 students two of whom may be pakistani immigrants the problem is you have a teacher and now it's 28 out of 30 students our new immigrants 28 out of 30 students don't speak english as their first language and they may bring with them political values that are incredibly challenging for the education system they may bring with them anti-semitic conspiracy theories passed on to them from their grandparents and parents they may have anti-semitic conspiracies about current world events like the september 11th attacks in new york city right they may blame israel for all kinds of things he can't believe anyone would blame israel for but their family has just immigrated from pakistan wherever they're from and they have brought with them a whole set of political religious and cultural values and it's not not merely that these things don't assimilate into british culture so the example they don't want to assimilate and why should they oh again this may surprise me in the audience i'm not pro assimilation and i'll invite you to just think this through if i decide to retire in thailand not impossible i already speak the thai language well enough with a heavy lotion accent really i speak lotion but i can i can make it sound like tai um if i decide to retire to thailand am i going to try to assimilate into thai culture if i have a child and i raise my child in thailand am i going to give my child an education that revolves around ancient athens and ancient rome and our tradition of philosophy and democracy you know centuries and centuries accumulated wisdom and heritage that comes out of what i think of as my background right am i going to teach them that history that politics or am i actually going to try to imitate what thai parents would do and give my child an education that centers around the history of theravada buddhism of how thai culture was in part you know generated from ancient indian influences in part from ancient tibeto burmese and southeast asian influences am i going to give my child actually a world view in terms of politics philosophy history religion that is really authentically thai what what am i going to do what am i going to do if i immigrate to china what am i going to do even if i immigrate to jamaica am i going to make an effort to speak with a jamaican accent if i move to jamaica permanently would you you in the audience okay for any of these so have some compassion that pakistani families who move to england it doesn't matter what the example is it really doesn't or you know a malaysian family that moves to toronto whatever the permeation or permutation or combination would be that the the the huge numbers of chinese immigrants we have right now coming from china to live in vancouver huge numbers of chinese immigrants living in the greater los angeles area california they don't want to assimilate and why should they why would they if your positions were reversed you probably would not want to assimilate either all right we shouldn't expect that from them and when you look at the rewards the costs and the benefits of assimilating you're actually asking people to make tremendous sacrifices to get very very little uh in return and i i won't digress i want to rest further on that but you know having sympathy for all sides if 20 of the population of myanmar now flees from myanmar to thailand even if they do that because they're deeply committed to democracy right that doesn't mean they're deeply committed to learning another language as their first language doesn't mean they want to raise their children speaking another language as their first language doesn't mean they don't have burmese nationalism right they don't have a commitment to the culture the language the heritage you know oh they're like hey they came to thailand because they want democracy they want freedom of speech they may also want the mangoes and the coconuts and holidays at the beach or the other things that come with it right they don't want to assimilate right and why should they and why would they why would you expect them to subordinate themselves to a culturally and politically tie schedule of values as opposed to bringing their own values with them and then perpetuating those in their own lives in their own families and down through successive generations now my own perspective is fundamentally very pro-cosmopolitanism right what i despise is the accumulation of bad ideas written into laws that were created as short-term solutions to short-term problems without anyone really thinking through the implications right now at the end of world war ii in general world leaders were deeply shocked and saddened to see the reality of what the holocaust had been and i asked you again to sympathize these were men and women in power that time almost entirely men let's face it um and even though on paper they might have had some awareness of the brutality of the nazi regime when the war ended they saw film clips of it they saw photographs of it some of them went there in person to actually see death camps concentration camps and so on and they heard back verbally from soldiers who had actually liberated these places the full gravity and horror of what had happened in the nazi holocaust became clear to everyone involved right and this inspired the writing of what are ultimately completely irrational but well-intentioned laws read the text of the united nations conventions on on refugees and then just scale it up and then just think how does this apply to the entire population of venezuela right now how does this apply to the entire population of myanmar it is very obvious that these laws were written in a short term exasperated way that's this exasperated word overwhelmed with emotion and feeling all of this could have been avoided all of these millions of lives could have been saved if only we had accepted jewish refugees instead of refusing them obviously there was a terrible sense of guilt and there's a sense of guilt that in many ways of course overrides common sense right what if the other countries of europe had accepted everyone who disagreed with and opposed the nazi regime would that have stopped the nazi regime or would that have made it stronger right now if you subtract from myanmar to 20 of people who really want democracy who really want positive political change is that going to make the military the military dictatorship in myanmar stronger or weaker how about the ethnic minorities within myanmar some of whom are afraid of genocide some of whom have had more or less genocidal struggles with the burmese majority if you subtract them if you say okay we'll just we'll just remove this whole ethnic group so they can live safely in some other country instead of staying in their country and fighting for racial equality more multicultural harmonious democratic study is that going to make that regime stronger or weaker okay if the other powers in europe had accepted all these people as refugees right they could have accepted not just the jews not just the gypsies they could have basically accepted the whole left of center 40 percent of the population i don't know what percentage it would be let's let's stick with same let's say 20 let's say there were just 20 of germans who were really willing to stand up and fight and die to end adolf hitler's regime what you want them to do is stand up and fight and win you don't want them to subscribe to this mass immigration mass refugee culture of rewarding cowardice what you don't want them to do is to give up and run away i think that the most successful political ideology of my lifetime was neoconservatism which is about 90 the same thing as neoliberalism we could tease out some small differences right neoconservatism and neoliberalism they are very nearly two heads of the same beast it was a tremendously successful political ideology but its success was finite and now it's over in american culture every movie that comes up is either a blockbuster or a flop nobody talks about a movie being a success but finite all right movie you can make 80 million dollars at the box office and it's a flop people people were expecting it to make 200 million dollars 80 million dollars wow that was a flop that movie was a total failure right this is part of american culture everything is thought of as either a huge success or a failure right and we seem to have difficulty thinking through things like you know what this was a success but the success could only go so far and then it ran out of gas it ran out of steam however i want to put it then it was over all right neoconservatism and neoliberalism completely embraced this idea of mass immigration they really are what created the consensus that lasted for decades across the left and the right that we would all have a better society if we embrace this model of mass immigration and the exceptions very few you know japan is one of the few you know democracies that completely rejected the mass immigration model of economic and social progress okay now what did it promise mass immigration did promise a more cosmopolitan society that we wouldn't be such rednecks living in isolation that we would have chinese restaurants and indian restaurants in every city and in every small town we would have in this surface level a more multicultural society that when you go to the bank machine it asks you do you want to withdraw money in six different languages wow cosmopolitan huh it also promised us lower wages right this is the dark side of neoliberalism okay it promised us a society where new immigrants and refugees would not come to rule over us as our masters no it was very much an explicit overt part of the neoliberal plan that they would come into our society and they would take up the lowest paid jobs that allegedly right white people in the united states of america didn't want to do white people in england didn't want to do right so it was unequal in a hierarchical and frankly oppressive way now there are some exceptions to this there were people who came from india and became surgeons at hospitals there are people who came from all of the women did take up elite positions in the economy right when i lived in thailand all of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs were done by burmese people and this was an accepted fact society seen universally right you had a racially stratified society and there were some strata in the middle too in bangkok i already mentioned this i spoke lotion you know who else spoke lotion all the taxi drivers i was obviously not 100 but there was this weird pattern where like oh in this province of thailand all the construction workers are burmese all the taxi drivers are the ocean like sector by sector there are these strange quiet humble people who got there very often as refugees sometimes as economic migrants resembling refugees very often as illegal immigrants or people who just never had any paperwork in their life they may have never they've never had a passport i remember going into a bicycle shop to get repairs done to my bike it was quite an expensive bicycle shop in bangkok thailand and all of the low humble workers who were doing the heavy lifting they all spoke lahotian and it was the strange things i walked in i was speaking loud and they were so delighted to hear their own language instead of speaking thai or instead of speaking english you know they responded to me so warmly but i could see that they were really afraid to speak lotion back to me that they were under some orders from their boss no no when there were customers in the store don't speak that foreign language like either pretend you speak thai or don't speak anything it's this really strange situation and the owner of the of the store as i recall i think was actually ethnically chinese a sino-thai person it was you know wearing a sharp business suit in contrast to these people and and it was just strange i was talking to them and no my ability in lotion was limited but i knew everything to say about repairing a bicycle some of the first vocabulary i memorized how to fix the gears and fix the tire and this kind of stuff um air pressure i mean it's weird vocabulary was some of my best so my best vocabulary the language was talking to these guys about the repair and you know they they gave me a discount the workers because they they were just so delighted to have a white man who spoke spoke their language but i remember just the really strange saddening feudal sense of oppression between social classes and how they related to their boss how they looked at her and looked at me and were were afraid to speak their own language in the workplace and obviously you know i don't know occam's razor maybe that they were there either as illegal immigrants or refugees and some in some uncertain pattern all right you know i think the saddest and sickest part of the old neoconservative neoliberal model of globalization of all is just that it had no point it had no goal it had no future it had no model of what the future society was supposed to be right do you want to live in a province like ontario where white people own the farms and don't work on the farms i just saw footage from michigan the farms are owned by white people and mysteriously all the workers are either mexican nicaraguan or otherwise from further south of the border and don't speak english in that case they were saying they came on these special work visas they weren't illegal immigrants so you have a society where white people are the owning and exploiting class they're the ones making money out of the cherries being harvested or the broccoli or whatever it might be right but it's not that the white people who go to university are working on the farm during their summer holiday as a part-time job it's not that you have citizens who have all the rights to complain to government and unionize and vote and everything else coming to work on your farm no you have this separate stigmatized frankly oppressed social class doing the low-wage labor within your society all right now whether or not this was envisaged by the neoliberal and neoconservative generation right that is that is the model of a society that we're living in right now um and it was set up in an asymmetrical way where we never expected other countries to do for us in return what we were doing for them right canada wants to attract chinese university students we don't ask whether or not canadians can go to university in china canada wants to attract laborers from mexico we don't ask about the rights of canadians to go and get a job in mexico in return on and on and on right and above all else none of the western first world countries are asking the question of whether or not 10 of their own population could run away and find refuge and start a new life in some other country if and when the time came or if for some of us as dissidents who are disaffected or feel oppressed in our own countries if we feel that that time is right now um so the concept of mass immigration which is now ineluctably tainted with its association with right-wing and racist groups it's going to inevitably have to be defined and deployed again because we have to create a middle ground we have to create a way forward for politics that is neither based on a stereotyped notion of a globalized cosmopolitan society a borderless world where there's unlimited immigration in all directions at all times nor based on the stereotype of rednecks who want to live in a mono culture where everyone speaks the same language where nobody sees a foreign face or eats at a foreign restaurant at all