Mass Immigration Creating a New Anti-western Underclass
The “anti-colonial” Left wants Western societies to atone for their “original sins”. From its historical role in slavery, imperialism and the extirpation of native peoples to class oppression, progressives argue that the West should pay penance today by allowing unrestricted mass immigration from the most wretched parts of the earth.
Yet mass migration has aroused increasingly fierce opposition throughout the West. This is true not only in the United States, but in other countries with a long history of successful migration, including the UK, the Netherlands and France. Moves to reduce migration are already in place in Italy, and seem set to be imposed soon in Germany, whose welfare state is creaking under the burden. Canada, once seen as one of the countries most positive about mass migration, has also announced plans for major reductions.
There are good, rational reasons for this. Voters who oppose mass migration, including illegal migration, are regularly accused of being racist and xenophobic, or of prioritizing their own selfish needs at the expense of economic progress. Yet if you actually look at what is occurring on the ground level, it’s not clear how much of the current wave of mass migration has been economically positive.
To be sure, legal immigrants from Europe and Asia enriched Western societies in the past. Guest workers from southern Europe and Turkey, for example, played a critical role in solving a labor shortage that threatened the European economic resurgence during the postwar recovery. And today, both libertarian conservatives and progressives still see essentially unregulated migration – upwards of 10 million since 2021 during Joe Biden’s inept reign – as the only means of addressing the West’s demographic implosion and of reviving its stagnating economies.
But these views increasingly reflect nostalgia rather than reality. Countries that have experienced the greatest infusions of new migrants – particularly people applying for asylum or simply hiding from the law – have not tended to benefit economically.
Take the UK and Canada. Canada’s rate of immigration has been among the world’s highest. In the year to June 2023, the country of 40 million, received more than a million immigrants, accounting for almost all of the country’s population growth. But despite the influx, Canada over the past decade has suffered some of the slowest economic growth rates of the advanced countries, particularly in terms of GDP per head of population. The UK, which has recently taken considerably more immigrants per capita than the US, is also largely economically stagnant.
Rather than an emerging new middle class, many immigrants, even in the US, increasingly struggle. As recently as 1993, immigrants accounted for 14 per cent of the US population living in poverty and, in 1994, only 11 per cent of the poor were non-citizen immigrants; three decades later, immigrants made up almost a quarter of all poor people, and 13.2 per cent of those in poverty were non-citizen immigrants.
A combination of a changing economy – manual labour dropped to 22 per cent of all US jobs in 2025 from 35 per cent 50 years ago, for example – and the extension of the welfare state appears to be creating an ever-growing underclass in countries which are already deeply in debt and struggling economically.
Today, in large parts of Europe, newcomers have been found to be more dependent on non-contributory welfare than natives. In Spain, the proportion of immigrants from outside the continent, mostly Latin America and Africa, deemed at risk of poverty is roughly three times that of native population. In Canada, one study found that one in five recent immigrants now suffers poverty – defined as an inability to afford goods and services consistent with a modest standard of living – compared to only 10 per cent of the whole population.
The massive surge of undocumented migrants, particularly to countries like the United States, has also been seen as an assault on the working class, whatever their ethnicity, given competition for housing and jobs.
The prospects for upward mobility – particularly for immigrant groups from poor countries – are further hampered by factors such as dysfunctional schools. Most Western education systems appear to have shifted away from promoting loyalty to the country, towards a focus on indoctrinating students via “decolonised” curricula. Instead of encouraging newcomers to integrate, this is likely to agitate them into despising their host country’s heritage.
None of this bothers the bourgeoisie of brownstone Brooklyn, Georgetown and Silicon Valley, the sorts of places where one is most likely to see “no person is illegal” signs. After all, uncontrolled immigration provides cheap nannies for wealthy people, who often now have more kids than the average American. It also serves as the latest cause célèbre for celebrities and self-promoting influencers, who defend undocumented immigrants in fulfilment of their relentless virtue signalling. Many businesses still embrace mass unvetted immigration – much of it illegal – as a source of cheap labour.
But they are increasingly losing the argument. A working and middle-class backlash against mass migration has sparked the growth of Right-wing political parties in the UK Netherlands and France, as well as buoying support for Donald Trump. This trend has been further exacerbated by concerns that recent migrants have no intention of accepting Western values. People from migrant backgrounds have been well-represented at anti-Israel protests, and supporters of terrorists now harass and intimidate Jews and other citizens in the streets of cities like Amsterdam, Toronto, Los Angeles, London and Paris, all once considered beacons of tolerance.
In addition many recent immigrants to the West come from states in Asia and South America with often high rates of violent crime. According to StatsCan, for example, the violent crime rate in usually placid Canada rose almost 40 per cent between 2014 and 2023, a period of high migration. Gangs have turned Canada into a haven for car theft, shipping both cars and parts to developing countries.
To be sure, Western societies still need immigrants – everything from skilled manufacturing workers and doctors to rocket scientists. But the key question is which immigrants and how many, and whether we should look first at how to re-engage parts of our existing labour force.
What we don’t need are more casual labourers and unvetted, sometimes criminal, young men wandering around our cities. Immigration could well be a critical factor in re-energising Western economies, but only if policies are crafted not as an exercise in global penance but as something that affirms and enhances the allure of our countries.
This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Immigrants lined up at the US-Mexico border. Credit: John Moore.
