Whilst migration is now the number one issue in British politics, not to mention European and American, it is still a very low status one. Tastemakers, let alone policymakers, have struggled to come up with the requisite ways to convey the reasonable attitudes most people inherently feel in a way that is not immediately interpretable in the worst possible light by those who are motivated to keep immigration at its current unsustainable levels.
It is easy to explain with various graphs and dashboards that European economies suffer from immigration from certain countries. For example, a study in the Netherlands has shown that each Somali immigrant to the country costs the taxpayer about $1.2 million over their lifetime.
Each American, meanwhile, generated a net contribution of roughly $500,000. In Britain, only one in ten Somalians works at all. And it is obvious to understand the dangers to our politics of entrenching ethnic and sectarian voting blocs, and the corrosive effect it will have on elections.
We are also starting to see workable policies to help ameliorate these problems, from stripping Indefinite Leave To Remain from those who are on benefits or have criminal records in Britain, to cash payments in Sweden to essentially “buy back” passports and return people to their original countries.
Britain now has a superb advocate for “pantsuit deportations” — the Conservatives’ Katie Lam
Nevertheless, all of this can feel unpleasant and mean, especially if a left-wing journalist or politician starts to accuse people of racism. Rob Jenrick’s gentle claim that he would “probably” follow France and now Portugal in banning full face coverings has elicited just such a response.
Never mind that the best natural experiment we have, Afghanistan, has shown women’s revealed preferences to such garments (whilst optional during the non-Taliban interregnum, their usage declined precipitously in Kabul), Jenrick MUST be racist for stating something that is policy in at least ten Muslim countries.
In his magisterial 1995 work “Private Truths, Public Lies”, Timur Kuran argues that people exhibit “preference falsification” whereby various factors constrain their ability to express their true feelings (in this instance, for fear of a rabid left calling them racist), leading to disastrous social consequences. In order to really achieve what Kuran describes as a “preference cascade” change on these cultural issues, Kuran argued that a shock was necessary. But he never reckoned with the power of the Guardian/DEI blob to enforce these public lies. Whilst small boats, Southport and the grooming gangs have caused a cascade amongst many, the mainstream media still stands as a redoubt for the old order. What is needed, then, is to find ways to argue for these issues in a way that middle class, floating voter types find publicly palatable.
Essentially, those arguing for the restoration of a confident and dominant “British” culture need to make it dinner party acceptable. Donald Trump benefited from a version of this during his second campaign, where respectable names like Joe Lonsdale, Bill Ackman and then Joe Rogan found it culturally permissible to back him.
For the even more squeamish European political arena, something even more dry and unassuming is required. We have the “pantsuit deporters”. Coined, as so often, by cultural soothsayer Drukpa Kunley, these are largely female politicians who talk about robust immigration policies in a dull, technocratic, softly compassionate manner. In trouser suits.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister is a perfect example for this. This centre left leader has been gentle, even lamentatory, about the need for tough borders and robust immigration. As a result, there is no hard right party in Denmark. In her own way, Georgia Meloni has been quite matter of fact about the need to preserve Italy’s cultural heritage and deal with the huge numbers of migrants landing on its shores.
And Britain now has a superb advocate for “pantsuit deportations” — the Conservatives’ Katie Lam. This rising star of the Right has addressed the issues of culture and immigration in an honest, calm, and empathetic way, whilst managing to retain all of the substance and robustness that will be required to actually solve the problem when Britain elected a new government. The phrase that grifters are up in arms at, from Sir Ed Davey to Tony Blair’s political secretary John “I want all the farmers to suffer” McTernan is this:
There are also a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so. It’s not the fault of the individuals who came here, they just shouldn’t have been able to do so. They will also need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people. (emphasis my own).
This is both a completely reasonable desire for a nation, and a perfectly sensible analysis of the absurd post-Covid spike in immigration that means that one in 25 people in Britain have arrived since 2022. Given that this stat, and many other stories, seem too ridiculous to be true, I fear that much of the public will struggle to buy into a politician who doesn’t adopt the soothing but sensible tone that Lam continues to strike on everything from grooming gangs to cultural assimilation.
The hysterical response by the Left to Lam and the new generation of right wingers, many but by no means all women, shows how effective they fear it will be at creating the preference cascade that will be required to help many more Britons to openly express the justified scepticism of mass low-skilled and culturally incompatible migration and the calamitous effects it has had.
For every Rupert Lowe operating as the thin end of the wedge, there is a Lam, a Madeline Grant, Louise Perry, Poppy Coburn, Emma Webb, Lara Brown, or an Emma Schubart bringing cold facts and sympathetic, even sad smiles to thorny debates on immigration, culture, and identity.
With Gen Z men already swinging markedly rightward, this wave of pantsuit deporters will, I hope, push the preference cascade along, as well as giving both voice and language to the sorts of sensible, unimpeachable arguments about cultural compatibility, treatment of women, housing and economics, and more to a debate that can too easily turn off the very voters needed to bring immigration restrictionist policies to life.
