Was Nigel Farage right in blaming immigrants?

The fact of the matter is that the establishment (Tory-Lib-Lab) have left Britain in much weaker circumstances since the end of the Thatcherite era,

  • Immigration is not a qualified evil but nor is it a blessing. It’s the idea of who would you like as your neighbours and who would you want in your house. Ideally one would like to live with one’s relatives (or at best close friends) but as we say in Farsi, Doori Doosti (friends from afar).
  • The fact of the matter is that one should be somewhat in favour of one’s closer connections and citizens. However the metropolitan elite is the middle class (from a financial perspective) living the high life (from a social perspective). The metropolitan elite, being inherently middle class, seeks to disadvantage those who are similarly aspirational. Therefore the interests in importing vaste hordes of unqualified immigrants, who won’t pose a threat this generation or the next.
  • Immigrants cannot be parasitical either in seeking welfare or in perpetuating their cross-generational interests. The idea of immigrants is ultimately to integrate into the wider society (or a certain class). In no way does that qualify as assimilation (I don’t drink and don’t plan too, seeing it as a death-instinct made manifest in the Wasps).
  • I was told that as an immigrant I can’t have sympathies for UKIP. I identify as an BritPak Baha’i and I don’t seek to change British society, merely enhance it where I see sub-optimality. For instance I’m planning to host the Lahori festival of Basant in May Bank holiday, Iranian Christmas (Yalda) around my 30th birthday celebrations and Eid-e-Ridvan (the 12th day of the declaration of Baha’u’llah of his Mission to the World). 
  • In no way do I feel offended or underminded by the traditional Season Greetings, in fact I wish everyone I meet a Happy Christmas and New Year (I feel Merry Christmas is a vulgar Americanism but I could be wrong but it does seem rather common).
That’s all for now.

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Brown Pundits Archive

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.

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