Immigration - Who Actually Benefits?
The West's open doors policy isn't about altruism - it's about shareholder profit
Can we at least all agree that unbridled immigration is ripping Western nations apart?
As in, the debate itself is causing domestic populations to pick a side and become more right-wing or left-wing, rather than meeting in the middle to have a rational and pragmatic conversation about what’s best for our shared nations?
We’re at the point where there are essentially two dominant positions:
The far-left position: Open borders. Unbridled immigration. “I don’t see color.” Justin Trudeau oxymoronically labels Canada the first post-nation country. The Green Party envisioning a world without nations. John Lennon’s brotherhood of (wo)man.
The far-right position: Nationalism. Zero immigration. Japan is for the Japanese, Saudi Arabia is for the Arabs, Britain is for British.
So who’s right and whose brain has left the building?
Or is there a middle way?
Let’s dive in:
The benefits of unbridled immigration
Nationhood has been the largest unit of collective activity for most of human existence, so we’ll start with the left-wing perspective, since it’s the new kid on the block.
But first, a meta-point:
EVERYTHING has costs and benefits.
People who can’t accept this fact are low IQ, and you will never change their minds. Both the left and right love to exaggerate the benefits of their chosen position and downplay or ignore the costs. These are not good-faith actors; they’re deeply malevolent characters who need to be carefully managed and kept out of public life.
And when I say everything has costs and benefits, I mean everything.
Even Adolf Hitler gave us the Volkswagen and the inspiration for the Interstate system.
The whole point of political conversation is to do the cost-benefit analysis and see if we should a.) stick with what we’ve got or b.) roll the dice and try something new.
Think of it this way:
Let’s say pushing button A gives you $100 every single time you push it.
Let’s say we’re offered a button B — there’s a 50% chance it will pay $200 every single time, but a 50% chance it will pay $0 every single time.
Would you push the button?
It depends on your risk tolerance. (And intelligence.)
But what if button B had a 99% chance of paying out $1,000 every single time… would that change your mind?
How about a 1% chance of paying out $1 billion every single time?
That’s conservative-versus-liberal politics in a nutshell.
The liberal view of life is:
“We should never stop pushing buttons. Life is only improved by pushing more buttons.”
This is true… but it’s high risk.
The conservative view of life is:
“What we currently have is the result of thousands of years of pushing different buttons. We are where we are for a damn good reason, and we shouldn’t change too much too quickly or we risk losing all the gains of centuries of careful button-pushing.”
This is also true… but it risks societal stagnation, stratification, and systemically ossified corruption.
Right now, the far left has a jackhammer on the unbridled immigration button.
Why?
Well, because they think there are lots of benefits to immigration.
(We’ll get to the costs later.)
Here are eight quick ones, from their view:
1. It’s the right thing to do
The far left believes Western countries are the cause of basically all suffering in poorer countries; therefore, we should welcome everyone who is able to make it to our shores. They believe it’s a humanitarian imperative, part of the penance that the West “owes” to everyone else.
Quite ironically, the far left (which overwhelmingly hates God and Christianity) acts suspiciously Christian in their open-arms embrace of the foreign poor.
After all, Yahweh commands the people of God to treat sojourners (refugees) exactly as they would a fellow countryman, even going so far as to give them permanent allotments of land for their survival.
Christians don’t give a rip about immigration. They’re part of the invading Kingdom of God, and they believe it’s infiltrating and taking over all nations, tribes, and tongues. If anything, unbridled immigration and a world of economic and cultural chaos make it easier to spread the good news of Jesus because it’s the only thing that ends up making any real sense to people looking for truth, enduring meaning, true community, and a hope beyond death.
But I digress. The left wanted unlimited immigration because they believe justice and morality dictate it.
2. Job creation
The far left believes immigration creates new jobs, not competition for current ones.
They believe immigrants are more likely to start businesses than natives, which in theory creates more jobs for all.
3. Economic growth
The far left believes immigration boosts GDP…
…which it does…
…but GDP is basically a nonsense number for how much money-spin happens in an economy, and tells you essentially nothing about the material well-being of actual human beings. (For that, you need to look at after-tax take-home median income adjusted for purchasing power parity.)
4. More tax takings
The far left believes immigrants contribute more in taxes than they consume in public services.
5. Improving demographics
The far left believes immigration counteracts an aging population by bringing in younger people…
…to keep the capitalist growth-forever pyramid scheme going.
6. Cultural enrichment
The far left believes immigration makes nations more vibrant, diverse, creative, inclusive, and other buzzwords.
7. Reduces global inequality
The far left believes immigration reduces global inequality by allowing workers to move to higher-productivity regions and then send money back home.
8. Lowering crime
The far left believes immigration doesn’t increase crime rates because they believe immigrants have lower incarceration rates than natives.
The costs of unbridled immigration
So those are some of the benefits perceived by the far left.
You won’t hear them talk about the costs, nor should you expect them to downplay the benefits when they can exaggerate them.
This is basic human nature.
Now, let’s look at the far right position and its anti-immigration arguments.
Remember, the conservative position on immigration would be something like:
“Nations have slowly evolved over millennia, and for whatever reasons good and bad, we all ended up where we ended up. It would be downright crazy to toss out 4,000+ years of history and family and genetic ancestry and culture and and values open the borders without looking at the obvious costs and risks, to say nothing of the possible non-obvious and unforeseen negative outcomes.”
The word “culture” comes from the Latin. It’s where we get the word “cultivate.” It means to be rooted. Multiculturalism… of a hundred cultures moving around and mixing… is nonsensical and oxymoronic. Every region of the world has a climax forest, a dominant species, an apex predator, and a majority people group. The idea that a hundred different varieties can all flourish equally in a contained space has no precedent in nature.
While the far left will never talk about the costs of unbridled immigration (only the exaggerated benefits), the far right will downplay/ignore the benefits and exaggerate the costs of immigration.
Here are a few, from their view:
1. Immigrants drive down wages
This is obviously true and basically no one denies it at this point.
The textbook example in Canada is Tim Hortons, which has now been completely colonized by low-paid Indians here on “student” visas.
Don’t you dare ask for two napkins or extra butter on that bagel.
2. Immigrants take the jobs of locals
Remember what the Western experiment is:
It’s a crucible in hyper-individuality that spent thousands of years beating and murdering the clannish, tribalistic, family ties out of people in favor of dog-eat-dog-survival-of-the-fittest meritocracy.
May the best man — and it was usually always a man — win.
Now import millions of people from non-Western nations and what happens?
One of them gets a job on merit, then immediately closes ranks, only hiring and promoting from within their clan, tribe, or family.
They come from an entirely different way of living.
3. Immigrants cost far more than their tax contributions
The far right does not believe that immigrants actually do contribute more in taxes than they cost in taxpayer-funded services.
Sure, maybe if you squint and lie about the math, you could truthfully say, “Every full-time immigrant worker is a net tax benefit,” but most immigrants eventually bring over huge multi-generational families, many of whom never work but cost taxpayers a boatload.
The far right view is that immigrants put outrageous pressure on our already-strained infrastructure… welfare handouts, retirement pensions, hospital beds, doctor spots, dentist spots, places in schools, and of course, housing.
All of this is true. Most Western countries have brought in millions upon millions of people in the past decade, many of whom don’t work and never will, and now locals in many countries can’t find places to buy or rent, can’t find dentists, can’t find doctors, and have to wait years to see specialists.
A few more examples:
In the UK, nearly 700,000 new GP registrations were made by migrants in one year.
In Canada, immigration drives 80% of new housing demand.
In the U.S., 76% of Hepatitis B and 68% of TB cases were among immigrants.
The far right wonders why domestic taxpayers should be forced to shoulder these costs.
4. Immigrants perpetrate more crime
The far right doesn’t believe the far left's talking point that immigrants perpetrate fewer crimes.
They point to the fact that most Western nations don’t actually track race/culture/nation of origin when reporting crime statistics.
They point to the fact that some of the most heinous crimes — particularly those related to the rape of women and the sex trafficking of children — are massively overrepresented amongst certain people groups like Pakistani Muslim men.
5. Immigrants don’t act in the national interest
Far from viewing immigration as a way to decrease global inequality, the far left sees the opposite — a gross increase in inequality.
After all, what is equality-inducing about brain-draining the best and brightest from Africa and Asia?
What is equality-inducing about allowing immigrants to devalue their host nation’s currency — and then robbing the domestic poor of their purchasing power — so they can remit nearly a trillion dollars per year — as handouts back to their home countries?
6. Immigrants make the first world third world
The far right believes their home nations already have a culture.
The far right believes that “cultural enrichment” is actually the degradation of their own culture.
They point to high-immigrant neighborhoods as proof text — more crime, more theft, more graffiti, unbelievable amounts of litter, etc.
I think about Wasaga Beach, the longest freshwater beach in the world. I grew up going there every summer with my grandparents.
Today, it’s overrun by folks from India, there’s garbage everywhere, and the once-clear water is virtually unswimmable, just like the Ganges.
The police have even had to put up signs telling people to stop pooping in the sand.
7. You can’t allow low-trust individuals into a high-trust society
The far right grew up in high-trust societies where you could leave your house and car unlocked, while many immigrants grew up in fight-to-survive poverty, where you took whatever you could to stay alive.
No wonder millions of Amazon boxes are stolen every year.
Imagine if we still had door-to-door milk and egg delivery.
Nations that are still highly homogenous — think: Japan, South Korea, etc — enjoy a totally different situation. If you leave your wallet on a park bench, it will either still be there two days later, or you’ll find it at the nearest police station, where someone has kindly turned it in.
8. Immigrants have different values
Nowhere is this becoming clearer than with religion.
Particularly with the giant elephant in our global room, Islam.
The far right has a serious problem with imams calling for sharia law in Sweden.
The far right has a serious problem with Muslim people purposefully blasting their prayers in front of Catholic cathedrals in France.
The far right has a serious problem with taxpayer dollars being used to fund administrative positions for sharia law courts in the United Kingdom.
But all these things are allowed to happen, “because racism” or “because Islamaphobia.”
The reality is that Western countries are founded on five major values:
Christian ethics (admittedly poorly understood and selectively applied)
Individual human rights (informed by Imago Dei theology and Christian pluralism)
Democratic freedom (from tyranny+oppression+exploitation, based on the Christian koinonia and pluralism)
Rule of law (based on Christian moral justice)
Progress (inspired by the kingdom of God theology)
Islam believes in none of these things.
The far right’s position is that if someone wants to be a guest in their culture, they should act like a guest, not a cultural colonizer.
But literally none of this matters to the powers that be.
Because here’s what everyone on the right and left is missing:
The global economic model has changed.
Somebody is actually profiting from all this unbridled immigration:
Corporate shareholders.
Corporations want dirt-cheap labor and massive demand so they can maximize prices and profits while minimizing quality and quantity and monopolizing resources to rent back to you on a monthly plan forever.
The old model:
Exploit labor in overseas sweatshops and ship in the goods.
The new model:
Now that energy and transport prices are rising and countries are using import tariffs, the name of the game is to import exploitable labor.
The game and its players
So, you can see this whole conflict is actually a high-stakes game with four different players who want four drastically different things:
The conservatives in Western nations who want to preserve their nation-families.
Malevolent foreign powers who are happy to colonize, exploit, undermine, spy on, cripple and/or destroy Western nations (China, the nation of Islam, etc)
Non-Westerners who just want a better life for themselves and their families.
Corporate shareholders who don’t care about nations or outsiders and are willing to collude with #2 to destroy #1 by exploiting #3.
The other thing people aren’t talking about…
Everyone seems to forget that nations are literal families.
I’m British.
DNA-confirmed.
The British family has been living in the British Isles for more than 4,500 years.
When I was born, I shared a common ancestor with 80% of all males living in the U.K. (Most of the rest are from other overseas nation-families.)
With the British family (not UK citizens — actual British people), I share common ancestry, common history, common language, common culture, and a common faith.
But not a common future.
Because the stats show that hostile powers — shareholders and foreign nation-families — are actively working to extinguish the British family.
Despite the fact that the British family was the first in human history to ban slavery.
And created the industrial revolution that lifted the world out of permanent poverty.
And discovered DNA.
And discovered penicillin.
And gave the world English.
And created the common law system.
And invented parliamentary democracy.
And created the World Wide Web on which you are reading this essay.
What should the British family’s response be to the existential threat it faces?
Seven ideas Western nation-families need to consider:
1. Start with language
Of course, as an author, you can expect me to say that the first step is to clarify our language.
Right now, the far left and far right are battling about the legal versus scientific definition of what it means to be a man or a woman, and in the years ahead, expect the world to have a similar battle over what it means to be British, Italian, Somali, etc.
Renaud Camus asks:
“Do words like French or British refer to an administrative stamp on some legal document, or to an ancestry, a long experience, a shared history, blood, race, love, culture, and civilization?”
Many (mostly non-Western) countries have already figured this out:
I knew several Americans living as citizens in Costa Rica.
All were called Gringos, not Ticos.
In Japan, people who are citizens of Japan who are not actually Japanese are called “kikajin” (帰化人), which means “naturalized person” or “naturalized citizen.” It specifically denotes someone who has acquired Japanese citizenship through naturalization, rather than actually being Japanese. Another Japanese term is “gaijin” (外人), meaning “outsider” or “foreigner.”
Germans are “Deutschstämmige,” while naturalized non-German citizens are “eingebürgerte Bürger.” Other options include “Gastarbeiter” (guest workers), “Ausländer” (foreigners), and even “Volksdeutsche” (Germans living outside Germany.)
Non-Koreans with Korean citizenship are called “gwijok” (귀족) or “oe-guk-in” (외국인, foreigner). If they’re citizens who are half-Japanese, they’re called “damunhwa” (다문화), meaning “multicultural.”
Russian citizens are called “rossiyane” (россияне). Actual Russians are called “russkie” (русские).
If a British person moves to Somalia, or is even born and raised in Somalia, are they really “Somalian”?
How about if a Somali moves to Britain?
This is something the U.K. needs to figure out ASAP.
After all, a recent headline said three “British” men gang-raped a child… and two of the men were named Muhammad.
Words matter.
Words should have definitions.
My (British) great-grandfather was born and raised in China because his parents were missionaries… does that make him Chinese? Does that make me part-Chinese?
My wife was born in Kenya and raised in Ethiopia, but she isn’t African. She Finnish. That’s her genetics. Her ancestry. Her history. Her family.
2. True refugee prevention
As of the end of April 2025, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that approximately 122.1 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or events seriously disturbing public order.
We need to stop the push factors that are driving people to leave their home nation-families.
Violence, hot war, danger, threat, rape, genocide, and the like.
And the facts are crystal clear: The vast majority of physical danger in the world is happening in Muslim countries and African countries.
If the shareholders of Western arms manufacturers insist on endlessly lobbying and fomenting for war, we need to focus their demonic energies on wiping out the Sharia dictatorships and tribal warlords who are causing nearly all the refugee crises globally.
2. Economic refugee prevention
By the U.N.’s own admission, tens of millions of people who are currently trying to claim asylum in Western countries aren’t actually refugees — they just want a better financial situation for themselves and their families.
Fair play to them.
Would anyone fault you for doing the same if you grew up as a woman with zero economic freedom in Islamic-ruled Afghanistan or ultra-corrupt, hyper-inflationary Zimbabwe?
The West has created massive, powerful institutions with huge economic sway over the world — the United Nations, the World Bank, the WEF, the BIS, the WTO, and the IMF.
Instead of trying to debt-trap poor nations and force them to cut public services and sell off their assets, the IMF should help the bottom hundred nations to abolish mammonomics — to jubilee all debt, ban interest, ban fractional reserve banking and bring back honest money, give land rights to all citizens, replace income tax and sales tax with a Georgist land value tax, etc.
3. End the corporate threat
The #1 reason Western nation-families are being overrun by foreign nation-families is that corporate shareholders want cheap onshore labor that they can exploit.
The fix is simple:
Corporations can only apply for a work visa for a foreign worker if they pay them 2X the median domestic worker. This removes all financial incentive to bring over an exploited Indian or Bangladeshi instead of just exploiting a local Canadian or Brit.
Work visas should be one year in length, possibly renewable, but with no chance of permanent settlement, citizenship, or bringing over dependents. This would remove a huge amount of pull-factor on the worker side.
4. Immigration must be a cultural fit
Muslim refugees from Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan, etc, should be resettled in safe Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Africans should be resettled in African countries.
If Australia or New Zealand finds itself under attack by China, the U.K. and Canada should open their doors.
It’s that simple.
We should endeavor to keep nation-families together, rather than disrupt thousands of years of shared ancestry, history, culture, belief, and established norms.
5. Proportional acceptance
At present, the expectation is for rich Western nations like the U.S. and the U.K. to accept an unlimited number of people from any given culture or background, just because.
But if you’ve actually ever lived in the U.K., you realize that it is packed.
All genuine refugee acceptance rates forced upon countries by the United Nations must be proportional to their population densities.
This is just basic mathematical fairness.
There are over 165 countries with more space per capita than the U.K.
Why should everyone come to America when there are 110 countries with lower population densities than the U.S.?
It’s also a justice-for-the-poor issue:
If the left-wing argument is true that immigrants create jobs and are net tax contributors and make everything they touch better, then it would be highly immoral not to send them all to the poorest places on earth.
Right?
If immigrants are the best thing since sliced bread, why not let them transform struggling nations like Afghanistan, Burundi, or the Congo?
And if they’re already from the poorest countries on earth, shouldn’t they stay and help boost GDP and lower crime and create jobs?
Obviously, I’m being silly to prove a point — that just maybe, just possibly, is there the outside chance that the corporatocracy has perhaps oversold the true net benefit of immigration?
6. Get back to historical averages
For most of human history, immigration rates into nation-families have averaged <1%.
This gave both parties a chance to slowly adjust and integrate over generations.
But in our age of hyper-corporatism and Islamic expansionism, the percentages are off the charts.
Take Ireland, for instance.
Twenty years ago, in 2005, the population was 4.1 million mostly-Irish people.
Since then, over 1.6 million immigrants have arrived.
Can you imagine importing nearly 40% of the domestic population in just two decades?
It’s the only way to explain how a coked-up retired MMA fighter (Conor McGregor) is a contender to run Ireland.
The reality is that Western nations can’t take in all the people who want to come; not without ending the host nation’s cultures.
But most people are bad at math and don’t understand scale:
If just 5% of China moved to the UK, Britain would be majority Chinese.
If just 3% of India moved to Canada, Canada would be majority Indian.
If just 1.4% of Muslims moved to Australia, Australia would be under Sharia law.
Italy, Spain, Greece, France, Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland would ALL be African-majority countries if just 16% of Africans moved to Western Europe.
If immigration trends continue unabated, we will see the extinction of dozens of cultures.
I don’t know about you, but I like Italian Italy, Chinese China, and Mexican Mexico.
7. Radical integration
Start with the principle that the arriving guest doesn’t get to dictate the terms of their welcome.
Countries like Sweden and Switzerland have banned burkahs and halal.
And they have every right to do so.
Because the Swiss nation-family has a culture, and they believe burkahs and halal are cruel and torturous.
Women aren’t allowed to traipse around Saudi or Syrian beaches in string bikinis, because the Muslim nation-family finds such dress whorish. That’s their culture. If you don’t like it, don’t go to the Middle East.
If someone wants to settle in any nation, it is not unreasonable to suggest they should not hate and actively oppose everything their host nation stands for.
Who should be forced to pay for this integration — the home nation-family or the welcomed guest?
Who should pay for their housing?
Who should pay for the doctor and dentist spots they displace?
Who should pay for the spots their kids displace in schools?
And how should they pay for it — by forcing taxation upon locals, charging the new guests, or implementing steep trade tariffs on the refugee-creating nations?
These are questions that home nation-families need to answer democratically.
And there’s another big question we need to ask:
Is diversity really our strength?
Answer: It depends on how you define “diversity” and “our.”
A nation populated with a giant international pool of exploitable labor is absolutely a strength… if you’re a corporate shareholder.
But if your concern as a Spaniard is keeping Spain Spanish, this sort of diversity eventually becomes a hellish reversion to the slavish days of Al Andalus prior to the Reconquista.
Ironically, at present, we are actually witnessing a massive global decline in diversity — preserving nation-families is how we keep Italy Italian, Greece Greek, and India Indian.
Since they’ve already killed off most of the original inhabitants, perhaps North America (Canada and the United States) should be the one grand exception where we run a centuries-long experiment in unbridled immigration and see what happens.
Let’s let Poland remain Polish and Finland remain Finnish and Thailand remain Thai, while CANUSA can be the one place where everyone can bring their good and bad beliefs and clashing cultures and politics and economics and we can all sit back and watch the endless warring until, say, the year 3000.
Will this unbridled diversity really lead to cohesion, peace, and prosperity?
Will it create a new, unified, khaki-colored nation-family?
Or will humans continue to do what humans have continually done for all of our history… try to establish places where their families, clans, tribes, and nation-families — people with the same shared ancestry, history, values, culture, economics, politics, family structures, and vision for the future — can thrive?
Will in-nation “diversity” prove to be “our” strength, or will in-nation family unity and global nation-family diversity be our strength?
Time will tell.
Here’s what we know for certain:
It is in the best interests of the corporate establishment and the enemies of the West to do everything in their power to propagandize and oversell the benefits of immigration and downplay the costs, guaranteeing their advertised cost-benefit analysis produces a false net result.
In the meantime, we need to stop shying away from the immigration conversation for fear of being called racist/bigoted/Islamophobic/etc. These are easy slurs for Achaeans to hurl at the Trojans, but as history has proven, once they’re inside a nation-family’s gates, things are never quite the same again.
Please share this on social media. I’m @jaredbrock on Twitter.
Bravo. Another great summary of a serious human problem. And this problem will not be solved by neither multiculturalism nor corporatism. It will be solved with reference to the human spirit and to timeless values.