A very thoughtful piece from the UK writer David Goodhart, on why he believes mass immigration is unwise and destabilizing. He is responding to Kenan Malik’s review of his recent book. Excerpts:

To imagine how this might work Kenan has to ignore the economics of large scale immigration which even the mainly pro-mass immigration economists regard as negative for people at the bottom end of the labour market. He also has to adopt a sort of methodological individualism – there are only individuals, floating free of culture, tradition, language, ways of life, who can just slot into modern Britain without changing anything. This is the left’s equivalent of  ’there is no such thing as society’.

But Britain is a complex mix of groups and ways of life marked by region, class and ethnicity – with both common and conflicting interests. When immigration happens with large numbers coming in a short space of time, especially if they arrive from very different kinds of societies, it often creates conflict – look at Tower Hamlets in the 1970s. The problems there were not created by the media or by politicians framing the debate in the wrong way.

More:

Like many people who are pro mass immigration Kenan seems oblivious to scale and paints his opponents like me as being hostile to immigration itself; but of course I am not as I repeat endlessly in the book, I am against historically unprecedented annual inflows of 500k or 600k as we have had in recent years. I against partly on social democratic economic grounds because of the extra competition at the bottom end of the labour market – and remember that 20 per cent of low skill jobs in UK are taken by people born outside the country. And partly on communitarian/cultural grounds: too much churn is bad for stability locally (which most people seem to want) and also makes it harder to maintain the idea of a national ‘imagined community’ of people with significant shared interests, which was the great achievement of post-war social democracy.

 Read the whole thing. It is one of the stranger aspects of the immigration debate in our country as well that it is thought to be out-of-bounds, and a sign of bad character, that people in a democracy ought to have a say in who gets to be part of their country and its community, and entitled to its benefits and responsibilities.

UPDATE: Sanludovicensis writes:

There’s a clear need to separate America and Britain when talking about the effects of immigration. America is larger and significantly more populous than the Roman Empire at it’s height, and has a national self-image of diverse origins melding together. Britain is different. It is too small to take in hundreds of thousands without radically changing everyday culture, and the national self-image of Britain is not s story of diverse immigrants coming together. If 5,000 Russians, who speak Russian among themselves and don’t care about 1066, the Magna Carta, or the Battle of Britain, move to an English town of 20,000, the culture of that town becomes very, very different. Even more so when the previous inhabitants are already abandoning their ancestral church, questioning their cultural precepts, and dwindling in numbers.

Maybe the older English villager who can no longer recognize his home of three generations because it more resembles a foreign country than the town of his youth and just wants it to seem English again is in the wrong, and the benefits to others outweigh the costs to himself, but if nothing else he is a figure of sympathy. Disagreement with him is one thing, but I get the impression that taste-makers in Britain refuse even to admit that he deserves sympathy.