Henry George: With our level of migration, what is a nation?

Controlling migration is critical to the conservative mission

Immigration is such a contentious subject because it strikes at the existential question of who we are as a nation. It forces us to reflect on whether there can even be a sense of what Roger Scruton called the “first person plural”. The simple fact is that Britain did not used to be a nation of immigrants. It has become one since the Labour government of 1997 and will increasingly be so thanks to political choices made by Conservative governments since 2010.

Given the changes over the last 70 years in society, morals, and the institutions that arose to embody them, conservatism as a philosophy has looked to the nation as the source and cause for conservation. But with the levels of immigration that we have and will continue to experience, what constitutes a nation is itself called into question.

The numbers coming to Britain are truly staggering. 2022 saw 745,000 net migration, well over a million gross. 2023 saw over 600,000 net migration, also over a million gross. The ONS projects population growth of 6.1million by 2036, with 13.7 million arriving from 2021 and 7.6 million leaving. From 1950 to 2005 the UK population increased from 50 million to 60 million. We will now see it increase from 67 million to almost 74 million in about 15 years, 92% of this growth driven by immigration. Immigration will average 315,000 net, but this is questionably low given recent changes. Our foreign-born population stands at 17%. With this, we are now more a nation of immigrants than America was before its 40-year pause from 1924 to 1965.

The government of Boris Johnson campaigned on lower numbers, but instead liberalised visa laws for various industries, removed requirements for employers to give priority to British citizens when recruiting, and turned our higher education sector into an education-for-work-visas scam system. As the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien has shown, the majority of non-EU migrants from the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia who have come to Britain in the last few years have not come to work. Moreover, as extensive studies from Europe have shown, non-EU migrants are less likely to be net contributors. As a result, given that our unprecedented levels of immigration are now premised on saving our economy from stagnation in the present, and collapse in the future under the weight of an ageing population, the main basis for our society-transforming migration regime is complete bunk.

In light of this, it seems a revolutionary idea that the duty of state should be to those who live here. Those living here are entirely justified in their desire to be selective about who gets to come here. Britain should not be a territorially defined global welfare bazaar. Countries with both political and cultural borders should be able to pick and choose the very best people to grant admittance. Immigration, in other words, should be conducted in the national interest.

This brings us to the less immediately obvious, but no less fundamental, impact of immigration on our culture. This comprises the web of relationships, mores, and norms that reach backwards and forwards in time, undergirded by and expressed through the traditions that develop over the years to give texture, meaning and purpose to our collective life together on earth. This allows our individual existence to expand outwards through the bonds of family, community, and nationality through an enlarged sense of self.

At its most basic, as Yoram Hazony writes, conservatism “refers to a standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.” A conservative is “a traditionalist, a person who works to recover, restore, and build up the traditions of his forefathers and to pass them on to future generations.”

More specifically, conservatism in the British context “has placed an especial emphasis on national independence and on the loyalties that bind the nation’s constitutive factions to one another.” As I said at the beginning, the nation has come to be seen as the ground on which to base conservatism in the present, and national conservatism “seeks to return the national interest, or the common good of the nation, to the centre of political discourse”.

As Hazony shows, conservatism is no mere conservation of the present, but involves the maintenance and restoration of the traditions and institutions that define a people. A people is given form through their shared sentiment of what he calls mutual loyalty to each other in the present, a sense of shared history and connection to the past, and a feeling of duty to the future.

Mass immigration on the scale that we have seen, and will continue to see unless something changes, is inimical to such an embedded intuition of belonging and of peoplehood, of the “we” that Scruton saw as the foundation for democratically legitimate government and peaceable coexistence in a shared home. The fellow-feeling, what Hazony calls the mutual loyalty that binds a people together across space and time is put under huge strain by such huge numbers.

When a population changes at the pace and scale that ours has already, and will into the future, it is almost impossible to maintain the bonds and traditions that bind the mass of a populace that was already atomised and de-moralised before mass immigration into a sense of shared history and destiny. Many who come here engage with our traditions and hold sacred what we hold sacred. But many do not, and the sheer scale makes this vastly more difficult. Paraphrasing Christopher Caldwell, can Britain be the same with different people in it?

We should therefore seek an immigration moratorium not only because the levels we have experienced serve no good economic rationale, but because they render increasingly unlikely our ability to reweave the snapped strands of the first-person plural, which ties together old-timers and newcomers into a nation once again.

Henry George is a freelance writer and researcher based in the UK.