Cloward and Piven may have been Americans, but their plan has metastasized across the western world

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chicagoans protest their displacement by illegal aliens

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

DAVID STROM 3:20 PM | May 10, 2024

I once angered a friend by suggesting that one reason that the United States has a housing crisis is that we are importing millions of people and have no place to put them.

They were furious. It was such a xenophobic thing to say. 

Of course, I was merely pointing out that supply and demand are a thing. Even if unlimited immigration were otherwise a good thing, you can't dump millions of people into a constrained market and not expect price increases. 

… Ever since Tony Blair decided to remake Britain into a multicultural utopia, Britain has imported millions of migrants, forever changing its demographics. For instance, in 2022, Britain's net migration was 725,000, with about 2/3rds coming from outside the European Union. 

Aside from the cultural implications--all those videos of London's streets filled with antisemites protesting Israel speak volumes--are the merely practical issues, such as answering the simple question of where you put everyone. 

Building new housing in Britain is pretty difficult--think Portland or San Francisco rather than Texas or Florida and you will get the idea--and not enough is getting built to house everybody. I've written about Brits being kicked out of their homes to house migrants (yes, that is a thing), but there is a more common problem: rents are skyrocketing even faster than baseline inflation, which is a key part of why inflation is so high in Britain. 

So says the Chief Economist for the Bank of England, and he is right. Further, he says about 90% of the shortage is caused by importing more migrants than the country can house. 

…. [T]here has been a belief that immigration is good for the economy. It boosts GDP, or at least it should. 

However, a new study that was just released seems to contradict that assumption. As the percent of Britain's foreign-born population has increased, economic growth has slowed quite considerably. This may seem counterintuitive, but the statistics show it pretty plainly. 

While illegal immigration recently hit record highs in the United States, legal immigration poses a significant issue for the U.K., where legal migration levels are more than 25 times the level of illegal levels, according to a report Wednesday from the Centre for Policy Studies, a U.K. think tank and advocacy group.

The percentage of foreign-born people in the U.K. nearly doubled over two decades, with 9% of the population being foreign-born in 2001 to 17% in 2021, which is even higher than the U.S., where 14% of people are foreign-born. 

We can speculate as to why the inflow of migrants has suppressed economic growth, but the data is there. I suspect that the explanation is pretty simple: non-European migrants are undereducated and have values that are dramatically different from the average Briton's. They don't appear to integrate well, either. 

A Dutch study shows the difference is pretty stark. When measuring the net economic impact of migrants from different regions it's pretty clear that immigrants from the Anglo-Saxon and East Asian countries bring the most benefit, and those from underdeveloped countries the most cost. 

This was not an anti-immigration group that concluded this; it was the University of Amsterdam's School of Economics. 

Related:

POSTED ON MAY 8, 2024 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN IMMIGRATION, SWEDEN

SWEDEN SHAKEN BY CRISIS OF VIOLENCE

The Financial Times headlines: “The violent gang crisis shaking Sweden.” Spoiler alert: it all has to do with immigration.

Sweden has suffered an extraordinary spate of violence in recent months, particularly in Uppsala and its neighbour to the south, capital Stockholm. At its worst in September and October, barely a day went by without a shooting, bombing or hand grenade attack — sometimes several.

The Nordic country has gone from having one of the lowest levels of fatal shootings in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. …

In a televised addressed at the end of September, Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, offered his diagnosis for the unprecedented violence, directly blaming “irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration”.

“I cannot over-emphasise the seriousness of the situation,” added the leader of the centre-right Moderate party. “Sweden has never seen anything like it before. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like it.”

The issue has shaken the full strata of society in the Nordic country. “This is a social earthquake in Sweden,” says Jesper Brodin, chief executive of furniture giant Ikea’s retail arm and one of the country’s most high-profile business leaders.

“If this continues for the next two decades, Sweden is lost. It’s tearing us apart,” says Richard Jomshof, head of the Swedish parliament’s justice committee and an MP from far-right Sweden Democrats.

Hinderaker: "As always, ‘far right’ means ‘not crazy about mass immigration from third-world countries.’ So most people are, in fact, ‘far right,’and the Sweden Democrats are now one of Sweden’s largest parties.

Sweden currently has a rate of homicide committed with a firearm that is nearly twice that of any other EU country. That is a brand-new phenomenon, attributable entirely to Sweden’s welcoming attitude toward “refugees,” of which it has imported two million. The Financial Times article quotes Swedes who attribute the problem to a lack of assimilation of immigrants:

[T]he nearest thing to agreement across the political spectrum is that Sweden itself has not done enough to integrate its immigrant communities.

Almost all Swedish cities have at least one so-called vulnerable area, where immigrants often make up a majority of the population. Crime rates there tend to be high and schools struggle to keep students or maintain discipline.

“I don’t want to say migration is what went wrong; I would rather say integration [went wrong],” says Jens Lapidus, a criminal defence lawyer turned crime author…

Hinderker: “That is almost a tautology. But hasn’t it become obvious that some groups of people are easier to assimilate than others? And wouldn’t a sane immigration policy, such as the U.S. formerly had, prioritize immigration from countries that are culturally compatible? The answer obviously is Yes, and yet posing the question, let alone answering it, is anathema on the American Left, as on the Swedish Left. But at least in Sweden, they are having an intelligent debate.”

And this:

Joe Biden's border crisis and the 'shadow system' that makes it easier for migrants to get into the U.S.

Yet another little-known policy implemented by President Joe Biden last year allows migrants in the U.S. on parole to serve as sponsors for other parolees – and border hawks are not happy with the revelation.

While the number of migrants in the country who are only allowed in because they are being supported by other parolees is unknown, it's thought at least hundreds of thousands could be utilizing this policy.

Any migrants on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or in the U.S. on asylum claims, as well as parolees, refugees and recipients of deferred action, Deferred Enforced Departure or DACA are all able to serve as the support for other migrant parolees, according to policies implemented in January 2023. 

This creates a 'chain parolee' system where parolees are able to bring into the U.S. other parolees by promising to financially support and sponsor them.

House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green told DailyMail.com that the policy 'makes a mockery' of immigration laws as well as national and border security in the U.S. 

The policy is part of a push by the Biden administration to prevent former President Donald Trump from removing illegal immigrants if he gets back in the White House next year, NumbersUSA Director of Research Eric Ruark claimed in an interview with DailyMail.com 

'He's doing it in a very smart way. He knows what he's doing. This isn't incompetence. This is deliberate and willful.'