Beware pathological niceness

00:00 08:19

Lionel Shriver has narrated this article for you to listen to.

When so many polls suggest that restricting mass immigration would be to politicians’ electoral advantage, voters in the West are continually stymied by why the immoderate flow of foreigners into their countries continues apace. Online comments abound with theories.

A global World Economic Forum-led cabal is intent on eliminating the nation state by fracturing polities into mutually hostile subgroups, making them easier to control. (An atomised in-fighting rabble would seem rather harder to control, but maybe that’s just me.) In the US, Democrats are intentionally importing minorities who will supposedly all vote Democratic and usher in a one-party state. (If so, an iffy plan. Minorities are steadily drifting Republican.) In the UK, Britain’s ‘elites’ despise their own country and hope to destroy it from the inside. In both countries, ‘black and brown peoples’ are seen as morally superior, so The Plan is to replace the bedraggled, racist white remnants of native-born populations with the righteous ranks of The Oppressed, and thereby rectify historical wrongs. Western governments are in cahoots with big business to deliver a ceaseless supply of cheap labour and to depress domestic wages.

In previous columns, I’ve mooted two additional theories: 1) fecklessness (governments don’t constrain immigration because they don’t know how to) and 2) pathological niceness.

Remarks earlier this year by the head of Frontex, the EU’s border and coastguard agency, might inform this discussion. ‘To put it bluntly,’ the Dutchman Hans Leijtens told an interviewer from Germany’s Die Welt, ‘nothing can stop people from crossing a border, no wall, no fence, no sea, no river. Sometimes it’s pretended that you can just put a lid on top of the bottle, and then the migration stops.