People care about money.
Well, they care about being able to live a comfortable life and that requires money.
With any policy that we rave or rant about, asking why questions will always eventually lead us to the root point where we reveal our belief that it will either make us richer or poorer. We may get there immediately or it may take many steps, but we will get there. Money is always at the root of everything.
And that applies to immigration just the same as any other political viewpoint.
It’s an easy one to test for yourself. The next time you hear someone complaining about immigration, ask them to join you in a little role-playing exercise.
You’re a crap genie.
You can only grant one wish and you only ever learned two wishes at Genie School: how to stop immigration and how to grant someone a million spondoolix while making them feel neutral about immigration forevermore.
Ask anyone who’s complaining about immigration to roleplay with you and I guarantee they’ll take the million spondoolix.
Okay, perhaps the most ardent of racists will take one for the team, but 99 point-something high per cent of people will take the money.
I bet we’d even see figures in the high 90s if we roleplayed anonymously at Ku Klux Klan conventions.
People complain about immigrants because they think immigrants make them poorer.
It’s the same mechanism that saw the British people vote for Brexit. Most of the media was promoting the leave message that the European Union was making the UK poorer than it would be on its own. If the same media had given prominent coverage to the Ipsos poll of economists that saw just 4% of experts say they thought the UK would be richer out of the EU while 88% thought the UK would be poorer, do you think the result would have been the same?1
Turkeys may not be the brightest sparks of the avian world, but if they were given a vote on Christmas and Thanksgiving, even they’d be smart enough to vote against it.
The debate and arguments over immigration are simply another exercise by politicians to make us overlook the real reasons for so many members of our societies struggling to earn enough to live a comfortable life. Some more extreme politicians may make plainly racist statements, but most rely on pointing out how citizens’ tax money is being given to immigrants who have done nothing to earn it.
Yet our societies are topped by small subsets of people who are hoarding vast amounts of wealth that they struggle to make any practical use of while allowing the huge numbers of people at the bottom of society to struggle to afford to pay for just the basics of everyday life.
That won’t change if all immigration stops tomorrow. They’ll continue to hold all that wealth and use it to capture even more wealth, making the poorest even poorer at the same time.
It’s a stupid mess, but unfortunately we’ve only got a crap genie so if we want to sort this, we’re going to have to do something about it ourselves.
And the first step is getting clear about where the blame really lies.
- You can read more about that poll in The Gun To Head Question Simulator ↩︎