Everyone who has given the matter any serious thought now recognises the need for some degree of remigration. It's not exclusively an ethno-nationalist concept. Smarter civic nationalists (who still cling onto the notion that foreigners can become "culturally British") now recognise that some people simply cannot and will not integrate to the extent that they can meaningfully participate in our society.
Gradually the gatekeepers who still talk about integration will concede this point. Remigration will become a mainstream centre right concept faster than anybody realises. It is abundantly apparent that integration is no longer happening, and the process is going into reverse.
One of the reasons why migrants are slower at integrating is that with things like Facetime and Teams, migrants are able to stay in touch with their family and friends in their home countries on a near permanent basis. It seems every time you get a taxi, the driver is on a long phone call and speaking in a foreign language. Previously there would have been a basic need to make more viable human connections that would have spurred better language skills, but between that, and the fact that migrant cohorts speak their own languages here, they simply do not get to practice English and have no call to.
As such, they are never going to integrate. they will simply form their own urban colonies that will develop ethnic identities of their own. We will see the emergence of quasi-ethnicities where migrants are neither one thing or the other. They can't integrate here, and will never be accepted, but too westernised to want to go back. They then develop their own political identities giving rise to the new sectarianism.
This is the emergent security threat of our time. A lot has been said about immigrants suppressing wages, but we might be entering a new, more dangerous phase, where migrants are so abundant that they are suppressing each others wages, and even crowding out organised crime. That's when they begin to turn on each other, especially as living costs dry up demand for services like uber/deliveroo.
The worse this gets, the more we will see whites moving out of the cities, and into vast estates of Barratt boxes in the boondocks. We can see it now where small rural villages that haven't changed in a hundred years are now seeing rapid housing developments, and mining belt towns are becoming commuter dormitories. This is accelerated with the rise of home working where middle class professionals won't even go into cities anymore.
As such, any talk of integration is for the birds. Nobody wants multiculturalism. They might say they do, but they're voting with their feet. Nobody wants to raise a family where feral Africans are stabbing each other and Pakistanis prey on young girls. Even if they weren't degenerate ferals you still wouldn't live near them if you had a choice.
Consequently, what little integration has occurred will gradually recede, and immigrants will begin to reject whatever tenets of Western culture they've adopted. They're not speaking our language and they're beginning to normalise ethnic attire from their countries of origin. This is not multiculturalism. This is colonisation.
If we are going to repair any of this damage, then remigration is an essential element of any policy prospectus. The bottom line: more must leave than arrive.
Recently Starmer has called for greater English proficiency, and nearly all of the parties agree that overall immigration must come down, but that doesn't even come close to addressing the issue. The bare minimum policy requirement (as a starter for ten) is that the Boriswave must be reversed. If at this point you're still talking about integration strategies then you simply haven't understood the scale and urgency of the problem.
This, ultimately, is why Reform misses the mark. "Net Zero Immigration" is a neoliberal policy. As Nigel Farage says "We don't care where you come from". As such, it is a policy that pays no regard to who is coming in or why, just as long as a nominal statistical threshold is met. It may be preferable to uncontrolled immigration, but it is inherently indifferent to the demographic makeup of the country, where large numbers of immigrants begin to cause emigration of our brightest and best.
On that basis, Reforms' immigration policy (as far as we can call it a policy) is indifferent to ethnic replacement, and the party would still govern Britain as a neoliberal grazing strip.
To overcome this mentality, it’s important to to understand the thinking behind it. Academics have long encouraged low skill immigration from low income countries, seeing remittances as an alternative to foreign aid, not least since it's a transfer of wealth into private hands rather than corrupt governments. Gulf states have adopted this model, but quite ruthlessly enforced a complete separation of rights and entitlements for temporary workers, essentially making them an exploitable slave class.
This is the model largely adopted by Western neoliberals but on an equal rights basis, with the asylum system providing a backdoor so that temporary workers are not forced to return. You then have the care worker visa which is wide open to abuse leading to mass visa overstays. With failing state enforcement and poor immigration control, a temporary visa is not viewed as temporary.
This scam is all decorated with the garb of human rights, equality and diversity, but it is and always was centred on the desire for an exploitable replacement workforce underpinned by a global wealth redistribution ethos.
To a point, they were able to argue that limited migration was culturally and economically beneficial. They still make these arguments today, oblivious to the mass influx of the last decade which has undermined cohesion, destabilised cities and eroded social trust. All of this has externalities (not least crime) which are difficult to quantify but still have a profound economic cost which is not accounted for in any pro-immigration economic analysis. Little is said, also, about the societal harm of pricing young people out of adulthood, and warehousing them in useless universities.
The arguments in favour of this model were always contingent on moderate flows of controlled, selective immigration, which is categorically not what we've had for at least a decade. As such, the neoliberal proponents of immigration are working to an obsolete script. Much the same can be said of integration narratives which do not take into account the realities of diasporas becoming ethnic colonies.
The proponents tend to be the metropolitan middle class who gain the most economically while experiencing few of the externalities. Unsurprisingly, many of them work in the upper echelons of media and news, producing a class of "educated yet idiot", personified by Fraser Nelson et al. They become gatekeepers for the obsolete neoliberal order, ever keen to denounce those with a better command of the facts as "far right".
In that regard, they are worse than the far left in that they actively prevent any kind of organised resistance. Certainly their influence over the core of the Conservative Party has wrecked it as a coherent political force, and will likely do the same to Reform. It already looks like Farage has been got at - assuming he was ever remotely on our side, for which there is scant evidence. I'm increasingly of the view that any party in the image of Reform (that does not explicitly back remigration in the interests of the native population), is not one pitched against the establishment. It is a last ditch effort to save it.
We’re now at a point where immigration is becoming an existential threat to Britain. Politicians must abandon their integration fantasies and recognise that if ever immigration was beneficial to Britain, the economic and social arguments in favour of more are threadbare. If parties do not commit to net-negative migration, they cannot be regarded as serious.
Suggest you think of a new word. That is easier to sell. Re migration while clear turns people off. How about removing subsidies for economically unproductive migrant communities. Okay. That is 7 words. But you get the idea.
Thank you for such a thought-provoking article. Some comments as a former English as a foreign language teacher: English is the language of the world, so learning English doesn't necesarily indicate a liking for British culture just a desire to earn/travel/influence.
I spoke to Arabs in Edgware Rd trying to sell English classes 10 years ago. One man in a shop told me his wife didn't need to speak English. One woman in a hairdresser's dismissively asked me if the classes were for Muslims. I said yes, they're for everybody. No-one came to the classes.
I complained about regularly being stared out by groups of Arab/black men when I used to return home in this area. A woke family member said, well, you have chosen to live in a very multicultural area. We earned little and worked in central London - it wasn't much of a choice.
Driving taxis or running restaurants are industries which lend themselves to only having colleagues of your own group, and people in customer facing jobs frequently complain about customers.