Vance is Right: The West is Stagnating Due to Mass Immigration

Last week US Vice President J.D. Vance pointed out a home truth about the politicians who have run Canada and Britain this last decade or so. They’ve made some terrible calls, especially as regards mass inwards immigration. To start, Vance pointed to my native Canada and noted that it now has the highest foreign-born share of the population of the entire G7. And its living standards have flatlined. Take the start of 2016 as your baseline for GDP per person. Remember, then ignore, that at that time the US was already noticeably wealthier than any other Anglosphere country. So its starting baseline was higher. But ignore that. And then deem 2016 wealth per person to be 100 in each country. Know what? Nine years later you find it is 117 in the US. But in Canada it’s just 103 – virtually no per-person GDP growth in a decade. And, the US Vice President also pointed out that Britain is barely any better. The UK is languishing at about 108. (As Vance didn’t mention Australia I looked up the stats and did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and we seem to be between Britain and Canada, call it 106, and then thank God for Canada or we’d be bottom of the table – and these are the Turnbull, Morrison, Albo years.)

That is basically negligible economic growth per person in the non-US Anglosphere because the Kiwis are woeful too – which is why all of our Keynesian overlords and supposed experts who trot out economic data always, always, insist on trumpeting on solely about overall GDP. Because that measure is biased towards government spending and massive immigration. Live on an island of 100 people and let in 100 more in one year and your GDP can’t help but go up big time while everyone’s personal prosperity tanks. Remember, GDP measures global economic activity. It’s the per person component that tells you how individuals like you have been faring. In the US, wealthier to start with in 2016, the per person GDP growth has been 17% in a decade. A much poorer-to-start Britain’s has been half of that American per capita growth. We in Australia are less again. And Canada, during all the years when the Leftie-luvvie Justin Trudeau was PM, has barely seen any per-person increase.

Anyway, Vance didn’t try to disguise what he thought was a major cause of this stagnation in per-person economic growth. The Vice President put it down to reckless mass immigration overseen by Canada’s governing elites. (For context, Australia has had higher per capita mass immigration, just sayin’.) Vance was brutal and blunt. His view is that the real value of paycheques in Britain and Canada (and I will add Australia to the critique) stagnated because these place’s governing elites tried to grow their economies by importing millions and millions of migrants. It didn’t work, other than to shore up the bogus GDP figures and help say ‘no recession here folks, look away, look away’.

Not content with that bit of biting economic truth, Vice President Vance then finished the critique. He observed that the multicultural ideal had failed (repeating a sentiment that everyone from Tony Blair to David Cameron has mouthed in the last few years). And in part that’s because Canada – the focus of his criticism – had given up on assimilation and had preferred to mouth the mindless slogans around diversity. Vance claimed that, “While I’m sure the causes are complicated, no nation has leaned more into ‘diversity is our strength, we don’t need a melting pot we have a salad bowl’ immigration insanity than Canada.” (Doesn’t Australia give Canada a run for its money in these insanity stakes?) Vance’s implicit point is clear: letting in myriad people who don’t share our values (think of the current embrace of antisemitism or the dislike of free speech) has not made our countries more cohesive. It is splintering us apart. And the elites deal with this massive failure of theirs by trying to suppress our free speech so we can’t point out their failings. It’s like the way they tried to cover up their gargantuan Covid and lockdown failures by banning and suppressing and cancelling and limiting as much speech as they could.

Anyway, Vance went on, “[Canada] has the highest foreign-born share of the population in the entire G7 and its living standards have stagnated. The fault lies with your leadership, elected by you.” And he pointed out that it’s worse in terms of real household disposable income. Living standards are falling in the mass immigration obsessed countries. He even noted that the drop in the UK in the 2022-23 financial year was the biggest fall in living standards since the mid-1950s. Ouch! (He missed the fact Australia’s had the worst decline in living standards in the OECD, worse than Britain.) And Vance pointed out this critique was true of the US under President Biden with the former President’s open borders policies. “The average American worker actually lost about $3,000 in take-home pay… [whereas in the first 10 months under Trump 2 and his low-migration policies] we’ve increased take-home pay by about $1,200, adjusting for inflation.” The Vice President then went on and tied his attacks against wide open immigration to the housing market and young people’s inability to buy houses.

You get the idea. And that’s a core reason why last November Trump won all seven swing States, cleaned up in the Electoral College, became the first Republican in aeons to win the popular vote, and helped the Republicans take the House and extend their majority in the Senate. Because the fix-the-border and get immigration way, way down people were (and are) at the heart of the MAGA coalition – and to the chagrin of the establishment US types, including those at the big end of town who want cheap labour, Trump has delivered on his promises. You know where else this demand to take swingeing cuts to legal and illegal immigration has upended the political calculus? It’s in Britain where Nigel Farage and his Reform Party have risen, phoenix-like, from obscurity to be massively ahead in the polls. (In fact, Reform is ahead of Labour and the Tories combined.)

And yet in Australia the blindingly obvious is beyond the comprehension of what passes for the main Right-of-centre Liberal Party. I’ll say it again. If Dutton had run hard on substantial-to-immense cuts to our immigration intake and combined it with jettisoning Net Zero (and Paris), well, he’d be the Prime Minister. Here’s an aside. How stupid must Dutton feel to reject ditching Net Zero seven months ago, afflicted by cowardice and pusillanimity as he was, only to see it (sort of) happen now?

The Libs need to go hard on the immigration issue. It matters economically (again, in per person terms, not the bogus GDP measure). More importantly it matters culturally and in terms of holding on to the precious values and outlooks we inherited from the Enlightenment. If that requires firing every single political advisor, well, that probably should have happened the day after the last election. So do it Libs or get out of the way and let’s try to Menzies-like form a new political party out of One Nation, most of the National MPs and the actual conservatives in the Liberal Party.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.