An immigrant's argument against (mass) immigration

A different way of approaching the topic

When I was growing up the topic everyone was talking about was the Great Financial Crisis. In the part of Europe where I lived the discussion lasted until well into 2014 given the multiple compounding Eurozone crises. But a little after, the dominant topic of discussion became immigration, something always present, humming in the background. So now it’s been somewhat half my life that this topic keeps being brought up regularly, and I’ve noticed something interesting: nobody is asking immigrants what they actually think about the situation.

In Europe you have 2 sides: cosmopolitan progressive elites who never dropped their white man’s burden whereby, they are the only enlightened and civilized humans thus they need to open the borders for all the subhumans (in an earlier iteration of our meta the same argument was used to justify European colonization abroad), and nativists who also see themselves as the last outpost of civilization but a brittle one, treating any amount of immigration as an attack from hordes of barbarians at the gates. Both sides are talking about immigrants constantly, but immigrants themselves remain curiously absent from the conversation, usually reduced to an unagentic blob of electoral capital rather than independent political actors with analyzable interests.

The cosmopolitan progressives, being the smarter group, managed to coopt and train the potential elites from immigrant groups to rally their communities to the progressive cause. You can see this with Mamdani’s muslim intern, or Mélenchon and his racisés, but the phenomenon is rather omnipresent in the West. This never strikes anyone as strange because we’ve been conditioned to think of immigrants as an amorphous reservoir of electoral capital that progressives use to win elections in exchange for gibs. Despite this, a deep irony lies below: most immigrants come from very conservative countries and magic dirt not existing yet, they tend to keep (or even increase) their conservative ideas. So you find yourself with this theater where conservative immigrants keep voting for progressive parties while conservative parties shoot themselves in the foot by maintaining maximalist opposition to all immigration.

Then came Trump and operated a political innovation, he opened a potential coalition with immigrants, which was quickly squandered because the nativist faction wasnt able to tone down their rhetoric and bombastic spectacle in the form of ICE raids, which will have long-term political consequences. Any potential gain from winning over the Hispanic and Black (conservative) voterbase evaporated in performative cruelty.

What I want to explore here is an argument rarely defended this debate: the people most harmed by mass immigration are immigrants themselves. Not in the abstract cultural sense that nativists love to invoke, but through concrete mechanisms that trap successive generations in worsening conditions. The individual immigrants rational decision to move (leave a failing country for a functional one) makes perfect rational sense. But at scale, mass immigration creates a sort of tragedy of the commons where each new arrival degrades the conditions that made immigration attractive in the first place, eventually destroying the very thing everyone came for.

This will also serve as Part II of my article

The Standard Progressive Framing

Before I explain why mass immigration harms immigrants, I need to lay out what cosmopolitan progressives actually argue, because their position dominates the discourse and shapes how were allowed to think about this issue.

The cosmopolitan progressive position holds that immigration represents moral obligation and economic necessity simultaneously. Borders constitute artificial barriers perpetuating global inequality, wealthy nations owe reparations through open immigration to populations their colonial ancestors exploited, immigrant labor fills essential roles natives refuse while enriching cultural life through diversity and restriction signals xenophobic regression toward ethnic nationalism (or worse, Austrian man ideology). This framework has some assumptions it advances as self-evident truths: immigrants universally benefit from movement to wealthy countries, receiving societies possess infinite integration capacity, and any opposition stems from prejudice rather than structural analysis. Integration occurs automatically through exposure and institutional inclusion (magical dirt), with policy focused on combating discrimination rather than managing assimilation.

This framework always treats immigration as a pure win-win situation: immigrants get to escape poverty, receiving countries gain workers and cultural enrichment, everyone benefits. What it never examines is whether this remains true at scale, or how the individual-level benefits aggregate into collective-level catastrophe.

Economic Crisis revealing Immigration Crisis

To understand how this tragedy of the commons emerged, you need to see how immigration transformed from manageable policy question into permanent crisis that nobody can solve.

Before 2008 immigration in Europe existed as background hum in European politics, managed through bilateral agreements and economic cycles. In France the subject was discussed very early on because it was the largest receptor of immigrants and the oldest one to engage in this experiment. From such interactions came the political right wing innovations like Great Replacement theory and the Nouvelle Droite which went to influence the direction of the alt-right in America.

The Great Financial Crisis triggered sovereign debt crises cascading through the Eurozone until 2014, creating sustained economic anxiety. In the PIGS¹ countries this served to destroy the Millenial and Zoomer generation economic prospects. Out of this, immigration discourse colonized this anxiety and metastasized within it. The year 2015 particularly served as an inflection point for both the new wave of terrorism under the Charlie Hebdo/Bataclan attacks in France, and Merkel’s unilateral decision to accept Syrian refugees without coordinating capacity across Schengen. The combination of these events transformed immigration from a policy/economy question into permanent social and political crisis, where omertà is king. Her “Wir schaffen das” is the perfect encapsulation of the progressive position’s detachment from implementation constraints.

After 2015 immigration became the dominant political cleavage in the old continent, subordinating economic policy, foreign relations, and institutional reform to debates about border control and cultural integration. Meanwhile traditional parties maintained theatrical positions, progressives demanding openness, conservatives promising restriction, that bore minimal relationship to actual policy outcomes when governing. This theater has continued for nearly a decade now and is fueling the rise of the populist so called far-right parties, whose whole existence relies on this topic.

The key point here is that around 2015 we reached the tipping point where immigration’s negative sides could not remain undiscussable anymore. There has always been criticism going back to the 70s but everything was ok enough to hide the issues. The tipping point of reaching the 3rd generation in France (without meaningful progress) and the positive acceleration of immigration dynamics in Germany, UK and Nordic Europe made this the main subject on all European societies.

What could have worked at moderate levels, immigrants arriving, integrating over time, becoming part of the fabric, stopped working once numbers exceeded the systems capacity to absorb them. But the debate never adjusted, everyone kept arguing as if we were still in the 1990s.²

Why I’m Writing This

Heres what I want to argue: mass immigration creates conditions that systematically harm immigrant populations across multiple generations. Not through cultural concern, but through three interconnected mechanisms: labor market flooding preventing wage convergence, integration throttling that produces permanent parallel societies, and backlash acceleration that threatens even successfully assimilated immigrants. These three mechanisms work together to create the tragedy of the commons I mentioned: each immigrant’s rational individual decision, when aggregated at scale, destroys the conditions that made immigration beneficial in the first place and pushes all immigration towards possible remigration.

The economic mechanism is rather straightforward. Labor markets clear through price adjustment, if you flood low-skill labor markets, it depresses wages for existing immigrant workers more severely than natives (even tho it affects them too), who possess the language advantage, credential recognition, and network access. The progressive response that “immigrants take jobs natives won’t do” concedes the point, these jobs exist at wage levels natives refuse precisely because immigrant labor supply keeps compensation below reservation wages. Each wave of new arrivals resets wage convergence for previous cohorts, creating a permanent underclass rather than a temporary transition.

A rather explicit example of this can be found in Spain’s agricultural sector, where the classical scenatio is: an immigrant comes, works for less than a native would, get payed more than he would in his land. Then goes on to make a family and need to spend more like the natives (schooling supplies, family stuff). A new single immigrant comes, works for less than the earlier immigrant and thus also takes his job and forces both to work for less, keeping the family of the earlier immigrant trapped in the lumpenproletariat class.

The data seems to verify this: second-generation immigrants in France, Germany, and Sweden show wage convergence rates inversely correlated with continued high immigration rates in their sectors, with Muslim immigrants in Denmark (which restricted immigration) achieving higher median wage parity by second generation while comparable cohorts in Sweden (which maintained high inflow) remain 20-30% below median after three generations.

The integration mechanism reveals a deeper structural damage. Integration possesses a maximum throughput, meaning that the rate at which receiving society can absorb culturally distinct populations into civic life, labor markets, and social trust networks is not infinite. This rate varies by region and country, but depends on: institutional capacity (language instruction, credential recognition, housing availability), the native population’s absorption bandwidth (how many culturally distinct neighbors before residential sorting accelerates, how open is the initial population), and the immigrant population’s assimilation incentives (whether ethnic enclaves provide sufficient economic and social goods to make integration optional).

Exceeding this rate creates self-reinforcing parallel societies where immigrants lack both necessity and opportunity for integration. The cosmopolitan progressive sees this, and celebrates it as multiculturalism while failing to observe that parallel societies generate exactly the conditions justifying restrictionist backlash from the nativist side: permanent welfare dependency, educational underperformance concentrating in immigrant-heavy schools, and criminal activity patterns aplifying every groups natural tendencies that natives correctly attribute to failed integration. These parallel societies also harm the natives by trapping them in a microcosm of their original societies, replicating the same Islamic, African or rural idiosyncracies FGM, forced marriages of women, retarded models of masculinity, cousin incest and a myriad of other maladaptive phenomena. The policy framework itself operates in a iatrogenic way: multiculturalist accommodation (native language education, cultural exception, religious institution building) eliminates integration pressure while high immigration rates eliminate integration capacity, producing the worst possible equilibrium.

Then the backlash mechanism completes the trap. Continued mass immigration plus visible integration failure shifts the overton window toward positions that endanger all immigrants including successfully integrated populations. The pattern goes like this: Denmark’s Social Democrats adopted restrictionist positions and implemented them, maintaining a political center while reducing immigration. Sweden’s center-left maintained cosmopolitan position until Sweden Democrats captured 20% vote share, at which point they rushed restrictions came too late to prevent a far-right normalization.

The dynamic operates in a single direction, each integration failure, each ethnic enclave criminality spike, each terrorist incident from second-generation immigrant radicalizes broader swathes of native population, and continued immigration prevents the breathing space required for backlash to subside. This acts also in a recursive vicious cycle btw, creating perversed self-reinforcing radicalizations. The terminal endpoint thus becomes wholesale rejection.

My schizo pet theory holds that European far-right parties deliberately maintain theatrical opposition while avoiding actual restriction when governing (Meloni importing 100,000 workers, Wilders accomplishing nothing, British Conservatives presiding over record immigration) because theyre edging societys momentum toward the point when mass indiscriminate remigration becomes politically viable. They require the crisis to worsen until wholesale deportation (including of integrated, productive immigrants) enters mainstream discourse which we are heading towards.³

Why Immigrant Leaders Dont Represent Immigrant’s Long term interest

So if mass immigration harms immigrants through wage suppression, failed integration, and backlash, why dont immigrant communities oppose it? Part of the answer lies in who gets to speak for immigrants and what their incentives actually are.

The progressive coalition’s relationship with immigrant populations operates more through ventriloquism than representation. As I mentioned earlier, cosmopolitan elites coopt potential leaders from immigrant communities and train them to advocate for their progressive positions that perpetuate the conditions requiring their advocacy.

These captured elites benefit from maintaining immigrant populations in dependent, unintegrated status. Their institutional positions grant funding, and political relevance derive from immigrant dysfunction rather than immigrant success. A successfully integrated community requires no diversity consultants, no cultural mediators, no specialized advocacy organizations. They just integrate into societies as individuals and advocate for their own interests as part of another larger group. The incentive structure rewards perpetual crisis management over actual integration, creating a class of professional immigrants whose material interests align with continued mass immigration regardless of impact on their broader ethnic community. This accelerates the degradation, as the people who could organize a good resistance to harmful policies instead profit from perpetuating them, even when they earnestly think they are advocating against them.

This explains the empirical puzzle I raised at the start: why do conservative immigrants vote for progressive parties? The conservative Muslim immigrant in France opposes gay marriage, supports traditional family structure, values religious education, and holds views on womens roles that would place him firmly right-wing on the European political spectrum. Yet he continually votes for parties advocating positions he finds abhorrent because those parties promise continued immigration benefiting his extended family and the end of racism⁴, while right-wing parties promise restriction and deportation. This theater operates as a mutual hostage situation: immigrants vote progressive despite values mismatch because conservatives refuse to separate restriction (desirable for integrated immigrants) from revanchism (threatening to all immigrants), while progressives maintain an impossible coalition between secular feminists and religious conservatives united only by immigration policy (and welfare).

Why Immigrants Don’t Openly Oppose Immigration

The social cost of restriction advocacy for immigrants operates at different self-reinforcing levels.

First, the betrayal narrative: opposing immigration while oneself being immigrant (or in you author’s case, child of immigrants) reads as pulling up ladder behind you, which is the ultimate antisocial defection from ethnic solidarity. The response “what about you/your parents” carries enormous rhetorical/emotional force because it exposes the apparent hypocrisy, you benefited from an open system that you now wanna close for others.

Second, elite capture makes immigrant restrictionists effectively voiceless: progressive institutions won’t platform them (contradicts narrative), conservative institutions can’t platform them without exposing own nativist bases contradiction, media treats them as curiosities rather than representatives of analyzable interests.

Third, class dynamics within immigrant communities punish restriction advocacy: successfully integrated immigrants who might most benefit from reduced competition face accusations of abandoning struggling co-ethnics, while struggling immigrants correctly observe that their own situation wouldve been better with an earlier restriction but lack political sophistication to articulate this structurally.

In the United States the dynamic operates differently because ethnic politics allows for intra-group variation (”Latinos for Trump”) and because American assimilation model historically expected integration in exchange for opportunity rather than celebrating permanent multiculturalism. European model produces more rigid ethnic bloc voting because multiculturalist framework discourages assimilation while maintaining ethnic identity as political currency. The second and third-generation European immigrants remain “immigrants” in political discourse (observe Frances “Français de souche” vs everyone else, Germanys “Migrationshintergrund” applied to third-generation citizens) rather than being absorbed into national identity.

The Short-Term Benefits Create Long-Term Trap

Now let’s see how the tragedy of the commons actually works in practice. The individual immigrant’s calculation appears rational, but at scale it produces collective catastrophe.

The individual calculation for migration is straightforwardly positive: moving from country with 300€/month wages, unreliable electricity, and failing institutions to a European welfare state with rule of law and opportunity for economic advancement benefits the immigrant and enables remittances improving conditions for the family remaining behind. This calculation treats the receiving country’s conditions as exogenous, the immigrant assumes European social capital, institutional quality, and economic opportunity will persist because he doesn’t know better or care.

The issue is that the social capital enabling high-trust societies emerged from specific historical circumstances and depends on demographic continuity for maintenance. Mass immigration from low/medium-trust societies doesn’t just add population, it dilutes the trust substrate required for the institutional quality that made immigration attractive initially. The famous Putnam finding that diversity reduces social capital operates even in progressives own analysis (which responds by demanding we eliminate homogeneity rather than question diversity’s impact). Each wave of immigration degrades slightly the conditions that made the previous waves calculation positive, creating the tragedy of commons where individual rational decisions aggregate to collective immiseration. A potential solution to this issue is a sophisticated, self-perpetuating and anti-fragile system that keeps the social capital or increases it by selection effects of potential immigrant capital and systems that punish all defectionist outcomes to set the example.

The remittance economy also creates a perverse equilibrium that accelerates this degradation. Immigrants send wealth back to their origin countries (Moroccan remittances to Morocco exceed French foreign aid, Turkish remittances to Turkey dwarfed German development assistance), preventing origin countries from facing full consequences of their institutional failures while extracting part of the good human capital (the ambitious, risk-tolerant, capable individuals) required for domestic reform. The issue is that from a micro POV you can’t not send remittances, guilt and emotions are used by extended family members to share the wealth and no one human is capable of denying his mother or brother financial ressources so that person goes hungry. You can’t also stay, reform and improve because reform is at best ineffective due to institutions so corrupt and captured you would be better served pouring water on sand, at worst you will get killed for such valiant efforts.

Origin countries develop remittance dependency while losing potential reformers, receiving countries experience wage depression and integration failure, and immigrants themselves remain trapped between countries, unable to fully integrate because ethnic enclaves eliminate necessity, unable to return because origin country conditions they’re subsidizing never improve. The system persists because it benefits narrow groups (origin country pipo receiving remittances, receiving country elites obtaining cheap labor and political capital) while distributing costs across populations lacking coordination capacity to resist.

Integration Throttle Theory

This brings us to my core mechanism explaining why mass immigration is bad and moderate immigration could be good: integration/assimilation has maximum throughput, and exceeding it triggers self-reinforcing degradation on multiple levels.

Integration functions as a rate-limited process, not a black/white outcome. A society can only absorb X% foreign born population per decade while maintaining institutional continuity, social cohesion, and labor market function. Exceed that X% and you trigger self-reinforcing dysfunction: residential sorting as natives flee immigrant-heavy areas (Paris banlieues, Swedish “vulnerable areas”, German Problemviertel), school quality collapses as concentration reaches tipping points (when immigrant students exceed roughly 30-40% in European schools, native flight accelerates and educational outcomes crater), and labor market segmentation where ethnic economies operate parallel to mainstream economy with minimal integration.

The throttle’s existence appears self-evident from natural experiments. Denmark restricted immigration and achieved better second-generation wage parity, Sweden (and France, and Italy, and Spain….) maintained high immigration and produced a permanent underclass. A funny example is the japanese second-generation Korean immigrants, who integrated fully under restrictive (and very xenophobic) policies, German Turkish immigrants remain segregated after three generations under initially neutral/generous policies that became restrictive only after critical mass achieved. The policy follows directly: maintaining immigration below integration capacity produces successful integration and immigrant advancement given it is well managed, exceeding it produces permanent failure and backlash no matter how managed, then degradation becomes irreversible.

Bascially European policy operates in the worst possible equilibrium: immigration rates far exceeding integration capacity combined with multiculturalist ideology eliminating integration pressure. The progressive’s solution: more funding for integration programs, more anti-discrimination enforcement, more celebration of diversity that addresses none of the structural or material constraints. You cannot integrate populations faster than institutional capacity allows, and you cannot maintain high-trust institutions while importing infinite low/medium-trust populations at rates preventing assimilation. The maths just don’t work, which is why two decades of lukewarm integration programming produced negligible improvement in outcomes.

Collateral damage, good immigration

Given that our gerontocratic elites want their pensions at any cost, and that neither establishment nor far-right will touch this sacred cow for fear of electoral retribution, some level of immigration remains economically necessary. Every developed nation in the 21st century faces an impossible trilemma: ethnic continuity, economic growth, and relative comfort where you can only pick two. European boomers want economic growth and relative comfort (even the right-wing ones), so immigration becomes the only variable they’re willing to sacrifice, because they still need some immigration to maintain their lifestyle.

The public, responding to visible integration failure and social friction, demands immigration reduction, but what they actually want is reduction of bad immigration (low-skill, culturally incompatible, welfare-dependent). The system actually needs good immigration (high-skill workers from culturally compatible nations, foreign students) to function. There exists a class of immigrants who are low-cost to integrate, possess needed skills, and generate minimal social friction. This is the immigration that could work within the integration throttle I described earlier.

But cowardly politicians, facing public backlash against immigration in general, take the path of least resistance: they strangle the bureaucracy for legal immigration (easy, visible, looks like action) while doing nothing about the negative externalities of illegal and low-skill immigration (hard, politically costly, requires confronting both progressive allies and business interests). Since COVID, the unofficial policy is, legal immigration departments across EU countries are purposefully understaffed, transforming the pathway for compatible immigrants into a bureaucratic hell while mass illegal immigration continues unimpeded.

The Ukraine war gives a perfect example. It presented a golden opportunity to attract Russia’s elite, the high-skill upper-middle class, exactly the demographic that integrates easily and contributes immediately. Instead, indiscriminate Russophobia (hello Kaja Kallas) targeted even liberal Russians who opposed Putin. We then get the worst possible outcome: politicians botch the immigration that could work while refusing to address the immigration that’s destroying social cohesion, because the former requires only bureaucratic strangulation while the latter requires political courage.

The Dishonest Deployment of “Economic Necessity”

So if mass immigration creates this tragedy of the commons (degrading conditions for immigrants, natives, and the institutional fabric itself) why do cosmopolitan elites keep pushing it? It’s ideology baby.

The progressive defense retreats to economic necessity when its moral arguments fail: wealthy countries need immigrants to fill labor shortages, support aging popuations, and maintain economic dynamism, which requires believing that:

1. Labor markets cannot clear through wage adjustment, that the only solution to unfilled positions is importing workers rather than raising compensation to reservation wage.

2. Pension systems demographic problems are solved by immigration despite immigrants themselves aging and requiring pensions, creating perpetual Ponzi scheme requiring exponential population growth.

3. Economic dynamism emerges from raw population growth diminishing human capital, institutional quality, and technological advancement

The arguments true function in my opinion is laundering elite preferences (cheap labor suppressing wages, political capital from diversity coalition, status signaling through cosmopolitan openness) as an economic necessity binding the entire society.

It becomes funny when you look at the most ardent advocates for mass immigration:

• employers benefiting from wage suppression

• NGOs funded by immigration-processing

• academics whose status derives from diversity ideology

• politicians assembling electoral coalitions from immigrant voting blocs

Ok now let’s look out at who pays for these policies: working-class natives competing for jobs and housing, existing immigrants facing wage depression, women in areas with harassment culture, ideologically heterodox people in immigrant communities, which by coincidence seem to lack a comparable institutional voice.

But but…

Because I already see the big huge counterargument always levied against me, let’s deal with it before it happens in the comments

But you benefited from immigration, how can you argue against it?

This objection always carries emotional force seemingly wrapped by a rational answer but also contains the error of conflating individual benefit with systemic analysis. Yes, I benefitted from immigration that brought my family to Europe, this observation establishes my material interest, it doesn’t invalidate the structural analysis.

The restriction advocate born to immigrants occupies a similar position to social mobility advocate (through free markets) who themselves rose from poverty, the fact that I personally benefited from a previous policy doesn’t obligate me to support that policy’s indefinite continuation once scale effects change the underlying dynamics.

The deeper issue reveals the objections dishonesty: it treats all immigration as fungible, erasing the distinction between controlled immigration selecting for integration potential versus mass immigration exceeding absorption capacity. The immigration policy that brought semi-educated, French-speaking Africans to France in 1970s differs fundamentally from policy bringing illiterate rural Afghans to Sweden in 2015. You can defend the former, while decrying the latter. It’s actually allowed to have nuance.

More fundamentally, the objection assumes immigrants owe perpetual allegiance to the maximalist immigration position (and by extension progressive ideas) because it is on the ethnic tribe best interest. On the contrary, ethnic tribalism is what leads to the exact opposite position. I’d like immigrants to be able to prosper, integrate and live happy lives far from ethnic enclaves and as full members of society. I have had this opportunity and I would love everyone to have it, and this can only come by a moratorium on mass immigration and integrating (and remigrating bad apples) the people that are already here.

This shows the cosmopolitan progressive’s own prejudice: they cannot conceive of immigrants as independent political actors capable of analyzing a policy’s impact on their interests rather than as tribal populations voting ethnic bloc. The immigrant restrictionist threatens this framework by demonstrating that ethnicity doesn’t determine policy preference when individuals actually analyze outcomes. Defending restriction while immigrant displays higher political sophistication than mindlessly supporting policies benefiting ethnic coalition.

Given this theory, predictions

Lets bring this full circle. I started by arguing that mass immigration creates a tragedy of the commons where individual rational decisions aggregate into collective catastrophe for immigrants themselves. I’ve shown you the mechanisms: wage suppression, integration failure, elite capture, institutional degradation, and accelerating backlash. Now let me show you where this ends.

Given what we talked about, here are some testable predictions left to the reader as an exercice:

1. Countries restricting immigration will show better immigrant outcomes than those maintaining high inflow

2. Within countries, integration success correlates inversely with immigrant concentration

3. Political backlash correlates with visible integration failure, not raw immigration numbers

4. Far-right parties will fail to restrict immigration when given power

5. Continued mass immigration will produce one of two terminal states, both catastrophic for immigrants. Either their new countries become like their home countries they ran away from, either they are all exiled/ethnically cleansed.

As the integration failure becomes even more visible, more concentrated, more undeniable, the political solutions will grow increasingly unhinged and dangerous. Native populations will radicalize incrementally as each promised integration success fails to materialize, each ethnic enclave will expand, each second-generation terrorist attack will contradict the automatic assimilation theory.

The progressive response to this natural failure: more funding for integration programs, more anti-discrimination enforcement, more celebration of diversity, just accelerates the spiral because it addresses none of the underlying constraints. More integration funding flows to captured immigrant elites who benefit from perpetual crisis. More multiculturalist celebration of difference eliminates remaining integration pressure. More immigration compounds the problem while the commons degrades further.

The immigrant restrictionist understands something that both progressives and nativists refuse to acknowledge: the individual immigrant’s calculation to leave a failing country for a functional one made rational sense when immigration operated at levels permitting integration. At current scale it represents extracting value from commons while accelerating the commons collapse. The European social capital (and economic one), institutional quality, and opportunity that made immigration attractive are being consumed faster than they can regenerate. Eventually (and were watching this happen in real time) neither origin nor receiving country remains functional.

The first-generation immigrant who came in the 1970s found a society capable (but unwilling) of absorbing him, opportunities for advancement, and systems that worked. His children could have achieved integration and upward mobility. The immigrant arriving in 2015 finds ethnic enclaves eliminating integration necessity, labor markets flooded keeping wages depressed, and native populations hostile because visible integration failure from previous waves made them so. He can work for Uber Eats, or being paid in black 500€ to work in a field picking peaches for 12h a day. His children will probably (and sadly) face worse, permanent underclass status in the best case, violent removal in the worst one. The commons have been depleted.

The cosmopolitan progressive cannot accept this analysis because it requires admitting that their civilizing mission produces uncivilized outcomes. The true nativist cannot accept this analysis because it comes from an immigrant voice rather than validating their barbarian narrative. Both prefer theater to diagnosis, leaving immigrants and natives alike to experience consequences neither side acknowledges while both compete to speak on their behalf or against them.

I was incredibly lucky to benefit from the ideal type of immigration, rural area capable of digesting a X% of immigrants and people open and nice enough to make a degree of assimilation attractive. This all allowed me and my family to succeed, and thus makes me someone who refuses to participate in the collective suicide that both sides demand. I would just like other people to have the opportunities I was offered, and I am smart enough to know that this is not an impossible path.

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POST PUBLICATION EDITS: A great point Irena raised is that EU includes Eastern Europe too. This is correct, and this analysis centers more on Western Europe, given it would be a bit to heavy to rewrite all adding the adjective I won’t do it here but will from now on mention it somewhere.

If you are interested in Eastern European dynamics they are better covered by friend of the stack Kaiser Bauch in his videos like this one

1. Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain

2. Native Western Europeans overall still operate like this is the 90s in many ways

3. After EDIT: I recommend looking at Salmon’s comment as he provides a nice answer to this point

4. After EDIT: And welfare gibs as a comment pointed out