Uncontrolled Immigration and Welfare State

Towards the end of July a would-be illegal immigrant to the UK, a stowaway who had clung underneath a coach for 200 miles from Calais to Norfolk, was killed when the coach's driver accidentally reversed over him.

One cannot help feeling sorry for the poor chap, illegal or not.

This news emerged in conjunction with that of a group of illegal immigrants first caught by the French border police while they were trying to leave Britain and smuggle themselves into France, and then returned to Dover.

Several Facebook users left comments to the effect that, with all the illegal immigrants coming into the UK, they only catch the illegals who are trying to leave. It's entirely understandable to feel that way: the problem is that, when generosity and altruism become excessive and destructive (you can have too much of a good thing, for every human quality we must find the right balance), when we realise and try to counteract the catastrophic consequences of these excesses, we risk being deprived of our spirit of compassion and humanity. This is another thing that the whole immigration disaster risks taking away from us.

In fact, I feel more anger towards the native benefit scroungers - people who could work and choose not to - for whom it's been extremely easy to exploit a welfare system that exists just to be taken advantage of and who have no moral scruples in living off the backs of the hard workers in their society, than I have towards immigrants like this man, who take huge risks with their lives.

Of course the lives of the British people in welfare-dependent families in which nobody has worked for generations are in the end ruined by alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic physical and sexual abuse, broken families, fatherlessness, and crime within and out of the home walls.

Both the welfare state and the uncontrolled immigration that we have and is more akin to invasion create human tragedies: this something they have in common.

Something else they share is that, ideologically, they both derive from the same doctrine: that we must pay our way out of poverty, also known as wealth redistribution, an idea of the Left since time immemorial. The difference is that the welfare state does for the domestic poor what unrestricted immigration does for the international poor. The end result, in both cases, is the devastation of the country's economy and the inability to achieve the allegedly desired result, namely the alleviation of poverty.

Interestingly, “most sensible economists (including Hayek) agree that, as long as inequality exists between national states, you can have either a Welfare State or free movement of people—not both.”

The great economist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences Milton Friedman also said that you cannot have free immigration and welfare at the same time, as it leads to parasitism. (43.40 - 45.40 in the video)

The colonisation that we keep calling "immigration" is similar to a lifeboat: if too many people get on board, it sinks and nobody will be saved. And, if among those people there is a disproportionate number of criminals and terrorists, the lifeboat will become a "deathboat".