THERE’S long been an obvious difference between populists and everyone else on immigration.
Populists believe that immigration should be at sane (ie low and manageable) levels. Populists believe that borders matter, and that illegally entering a country is wrong. They see defending a border as a natural duty of government, and being defended in this way as a natural right of citizenship. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a citizen?
If your government doesn’t think it owes more to you than it owes to other people, what exactly is the reason for you owing things (like paying your taxes and obeying other laws) to it?
And if your government invites people in who are dangerous, or makes no effort to distinguish between the dangerous and the safe, doesn’t that show that they don’t care about you in the least?
Mainstream conservatives and establishment parties of the right have pretended to share these commonsense views, and then betrayed them. They have signed migrant and asylum deals with each other and with transnational bodies. They have refused to take measures to protect people in their own countries. They have joined classical liberals, centrists, and leftist progressives in pretending that any concern about massive modern immigration levels is evil and racist.
Leftist parties of course have done all this, but a lot more too. They have criminalised any dissent on immigration, and deliberately thrown open borders as wide as possible. In recent years already high levels of immigration went utterly insane, to a level never before witnessed in human history except through the kind of barbarian migrations that toppled empires and eradicated whole cultures in the ancient world.
Never before has any nation or culture engaged peacefully and willingly on such vast scales of accepting new arrivals, with such a determined desire to cast all caution to the wind and engage in a gigantic demographic experiment which never sought to obtain the informed consent of affected populations.
In the Blair years in the UK about 10million people were added from abroad. In the Biden years in the US 15-20million people were added from abroad. The Blair administration later (when it was too late to punish them or harm them) admitted that they had actively looked for high levels of immigration. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s closest ally, said that they had advertised for migrants in every Eastern European nation and elsewhere. Blair’s chief speechwriter admitted even more, stating that increasing migration was a gleefully deliberate policy intended to ‘rub the right’s noses in diversity’.
Biden’s administration of course saw ‘sanctuary cities’, the federal government actively working against border protection measures and tearing down border protections, and a network of government agencies, charities and NGOs all acting as people smugglers deliberately ferrying millions of migrants into the US. There is some real evidence that the Biden administration did deals with South American drug cartels to do the same thing – a bizarre situation in which those protecting the border were undermined and circumvented by a government seemingly determined to destroy its own nation, and in which the federal government and leading supposedly benevolent charities and churches conspired to assist an invasion which included thousands of drug gang members.
All this should be an inconceivable level of betrayal of one’s existing citizens, but actually happened. The government and an entire governing party was more closely aligned with South American drug cartels than with its own citizens. Illegal border crossings exploded. The federal government did all it could to undermine ICE operatives and border agents. Hundreds of thousands of illegal entrants were flown into the country. Hundreds of thousands of children went missing. Many American citizens were harmed by illegal entrants; some murdered, some raped, some run over by drunk, high or reckless drivers. People died because of all this. Child sex trafficking flourished because of all this, inflicting the most horrific, vile and evil experiences on the most innocent proportion of migrants.
The rhetoric was of kindness and compassion. The reality was hundreds of thousands of missing children, many of whom were abused, raped and murdered. The most sickening, cloying displays of progressive ‘empathy’ and ‘compassion’ castigated those who would prevent all this evil, inverting morality to claim that protecting your own citizens or ending an open border that allowed child sex trafficking was evil, while never noting or caring about the horrific consequences resulting from their progressive virtue signalling, both for Americans and for migrants.
And even after Trump won re-election and started to impose sanity once more, we have seen who progressives are really ‘caring’ about – the Democrat Party and its remaining voters have so far championed every known violent cartel drug gang member who has ever illegally entered the country, every foreign student who has harassed, threatened and abused Jews while supporting Jew-murdering terrorist organisations, and every illegal migrant they could identity no matter how insane, violent and evil that person proves to be.
In particularly grotesque highlights for their side of politics, progressive liberals have celebrated a spoilt scumbag assassin who murdered a man he had never met before, and campaigned in every media outlet you can think of on behalf of a migrant who sexually abused a corpse on the subway.
Democrat compassion, apparently, is particularly concerned with the rights of necrophiliac rapists.
It has of course been obvious for a long time that woke and progressive attitudes are extremely accommodating and protective towards people most of us rightly regard as disgusting, just as they are particularly cruel, dismissive and murderous towards the people most of the rest of us consider especially deserving of protection and compassion. But for anyone who wasn’t paying attention the obviousness of how purely evil progressive woke attitudes are must surely have become unavoidably obvious when these people are genuinely capable of defending corpse rapists while refusing to support, say, the families of murdered Americans or a little boy with a terminal illness.
And it is now clear too that the leftist progressive love of migrants and asylum seekers is not universal. It ends as soon as those migrants and asylum seekers are actually much more likely to be real victims:
And it ends too, of course, if the asylum seekers in question happen to be white, or children, or innocent of crimes themselves. The first category is of a hated group, a group the progressive has been taught to despise. They are as likely to welcome white asylum seekers as a Nazi would be to welcome Jewish ones. And what thrill is there in protecting actual children, when you can be so much more daring and protect grown men who rape corpses?
For the progressive, there is nothing in these kind of refugees worth saving. Why, they look integrated on arrival, and not by skin colour. They wave US flags, they are grateful for their salvation . . . they are not the kind of allied assistants in destroying the West that the leftist is looking for.
Going back to populist attitudes, no populist has ever said that all migrants are evil or dangerous. But they have noted which migrants are likely to be so. They have, perfectly legitimately and in line with rational and truthful evidence, noticed that immigrants from countries and cultures that have Iron Age views are going to integrate less successfully than people who have more modern standards. They have seen, again accurately, that some backgrounds result in that migrant being 20, 30 or even 60 times more likely to be a sex offender or violent attacker than a migrant from less primitive cultures.
They can see the difference between someone arriving with a sneer and someone arriving with a smile, regardless of race. But for the progressive, who they should sneer at and who they should smile at is already fixed by race, and not by behaviour.
There is nothing controversial, or should not be, in understanding that people raised thinking it is OK to rape kids are not going to be great additions to your country. Populists ask that people invited or allowed to join the country be people of sane and decent behaviour and culture, people you can expect to be law-abiding, people with a genuine and real asylum case based on true and obvious threat of harm elsewhere, people who are not themselves drug gang members, slavers, murderers and rapists. One would think this level of precaution would be entirely non-controversial, entirely expected, and entirely agreed upon by everyone outside of a mental institution.
But it wasn’t. Instead, millions of citizens supported the invasion of their own nation, regardless of numbers, and regardless of dangers. In fact, they and their leaders soon signalled that they were particularly keen to welcome and defend the very worst people trying to enter the country, that they would publicly and without embarrassment advocate for gang members and criminally insane psychopaths.
Supporting migrants, asylum seekers and immigrants had become much more than a weirdly self-destructive policy. It had become an actively pursued fetish, a thing which gave pleasure to its supporters and which, as the language of pleasure always speaks to the least moral among us, a thing which must be indulged regardless of consequence. Democrat and progressive judges and politicians, and church leaders, displayed the same intensely creepy fetish aspect in all this – it’s difficult to discern much difference between the judge who fights to keep known violent scum in their country and the kind of women who send marriage proposals to serial killers on death row.
Where the populist or simply the sane person might reserve the greatest protection to the most innocent, the progressive fetishist gets neither validation nor consummation from saving those who actually deserve saving. Sane judgement would tell him that he is expected to care for the most vulnerable of all, for babies and babies in the womb. But that’s so prosaic, so automatic. Since it transgresses nothing, it offers nothing. Far better to reserve compassion for the woman who kills her baby in the womb. That’s much more thrilling.
Similarly a sane or populist idea of asylum would be 1. Offer it first to those who actually need it and 2. Offer it exclusively to those who won’t harm you. Some investigation of whether a claim should be accepted answers the first of these, and that requires that unjust claims be rejected. Some judgement of the comparability of the culture, background, beliefs and behaviour of the asylum seeker answers the second of these, but that requires that the familiar is prioritised above the exotic, and the safe above the dangerous.
None of these rational approaches offers the irrational thrill the progressive fetishist is looking for. How can one revel in being unusually kind, if it is a kindness everyone agrees with?
This article appeared in Jupplandia on May 13, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
