When so many polls suggest that restricting mass immigration would be to politicians’ electoral advantage, voters in the West are continually stymied by why the immoderate flow of foreigners into their countries continues apace. Online comments abound with theories.

Biden could lose the coming election because of his lovey-
dovey border policies alone

A global World Economic Forum-led cabal is intent on eliminating the nation state by fracturing polities into mutually hostile subgroups, making them easier to control. (An atomised in-fighting rabble would seem rather harder to control, but maybe that’s just me.) In the US, Democrats are intentionally importing minorities who will supposedly all vote Democratic and usher in a one-party state. (If so, an iffy plan. Minorities are steadily drifting Republican.) In the UK, Britain’s ‘elites’ despise their own country and hope to destroy it from the inside. In both countries, ‘black and brown peoples’ are seen as morally superior, so The Plan is to replace the bedraggled, racist white remnants of native-born populations with the righteous ranks of The Oppressed, and thereby rectify historical wrongs. Western governments are in cahoots with big business to deliver a ceaseless supply of cheap labour and to depress domestic wages.

In previous columns, I’ve mooted two additional theories: 1) fecklessness (governments don’t constrain immigration because they don’t know how to) and 2) pathological niceness.

Remarks earlier this year by the head of Frontex, the EU’s border and coastguard agency, might inform this discussion. ‘To put it bluntly,’ the Dutchman Hans Leijtens told an interviewer from Germany’s Die Welt, ‘nothing can stop people from crossing a border, no wall, no fence, no sea, no river. Sometimes it’s pretended that you can just put a lid on top of the bottle, and then the migration stops. But that’s a misconception.’

To paraphrase, the man since last spring in charge of securing Europe’s borders – the porousness of which has a direct knock-on effect on Britain’s small-boats problem – does not believe in the possibility of securing any border. It’s not hard to infer from that quote that our friend Hans does not believe it is possible to prevent so much as a single gatecrasher from entering the EU, or from entering any country, for that matter. Yet this is his job.

It’s as if you have just hired a fry cook to flip burgers, and though your new employee proves happy to accept a salary, he promptly declares that he will not be flipping any burgers because he does not believe there’s such a thing as a hamburger.

I regard that interview as one vote for fecklessness. Hans cheerfully throws up his hands. There’s nothing to be done. We can’t keep anybody out. We don’t know how. I imagine Hans must greatly enjoy his work, providing as it does so much leisure time.

Yet further on, the festively feeble Frontex exec tips his hand. ‘Who am I to condemn migrants?’ he declares. ‘This talk of “stopping people” and “closing borders” can’t be our narrative all the time. My job is to strike a balance between effective border management and respect for fundamental rights.’ Presumably, fundamental rights such as the inherent prerogative of everyone from everywhere in the world to live in your country because they don’t like theirs. Helpless Hans wants to address the whole European migration debate with ‘increased humanity, less fear of the unknown, less prejudice’.

In other words, the head of Frontex has a vested interest in his absolute incapacity to keep anyone out of Europe because he doesn’t especially want to keep anyone out of Europe. He doesn’t want to do his job because that job is mean and bad. He wants to be soft and warm and cuddly and kind. This is what I mean by ‘pathological niceness’.

At the beginning of his term, Joe Biden lifted all Trump’s policies for controlling America’s southern border because those policies were not nice. They sometimes slammed the door in the faces of perfectly pleasant people who, if they didn’t get their shot at the ‘American dream’, would be disappointed. Now, after three-and-a-half years of all that rampant niceness, large Democratic cities are overwhelmed by those perfectly pleasant people – some of whom are running moped mugging gangs and shoplifting rings – and Biden could lose the coming election because of his lovey-dovey border policies alone.

Again, why is this happening? I simply can’t weigh in on some WEF conspiracy to subjugate the whole world and ensure we’ll all ‘be happy and own nothing’. There may be something to that cheap labour theory, though low-skilled imports cost the public purse so much more than they save selective industries through depressed wages that for government the big picture doesn’t add up. I don’t see why even ‘elites’ would want to destroy a country in which they still live.

Frankly, I’d be relieved if Biden Democrats were ushering millions of unvetted, poorly educated aliens into the US to grow their electoral base, because at least that would indicate a deliberate strategy from which some faction is perceived to benefit. I’d prefer such calculating deviousness to lobotomised naivety. But the right-on activist lawyers who make a tidy taxpayer-funded living from tying immigration proceedings in knots, gormless NGO staffers whose salaries are often funded by the very governments whose meagre efforts to impose limits on inflows these worthies are pledged to thwart, UN cynosures whose agencies unembarrassedly promote the view that all migration is an unqualified good, left-wing bureaucrats and politicians, including Huggable Hans, the UK Home Office and more than half of today’s Tory MPs – the lot of them do not believe in restricting immigration at all, full stop. Pathological niceness wins the day.

Fecklessness plays a part, but the fecklessness is convenient. This is a problem not of conniving but of conviction: that there’s no such thing as too much immigration. We keep searching for a hidden agenda, but imputing a covert ulterior motive to these folks gives them too much credit. They want to flood our countries with foreigners because they want to flood our countries with foreigners. Mystery solved.<//>