Much is made of the ‘fear of migrants’, this Guardian article being typical, in maligning those who oppose immigration.
I have yet to see commentators refer to any cause for this except for the usual epithets of ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’, as if that says it all. I would suggest that the cause is instinctive and can be tracked through evolutionary behaviour.
One of the most important factors in small societies is a father’s certainty of raising his own child, and efforts to guarantee marital fidelity and paternity result in many of their rules. Such rules are responsible for women’s dress codes, marital rules, widows’ confinement, monitoring of menstruation and FGM. Paternal investment has importance in our own society with a reluctance of men to pay maintenance for children proved not to be their own. Polyandry is very rare in comparison with polygyny, and where it is socially sanctioned, the men in the relationship are often brothers thus sharing a genetic interest in paternity.
This desire for certainty goes deeper than societies’ rules and likely forms the same instinct that lions have for killing a mate’s cubs which aren't its own. In our societies, this takes the form of the danger that stepfathers present to a mate’s child, where there is a much higher likelihood of murder than if the child is his own.
Operating at both animal and human levels, the threat to the protection of paternity takes two forms, internal – from members of one’s tribe, the in-group, and external – from invading tribes, the out-group. The out-group threat often takes the form of kidnapping of females for procreation, slavery and ransom, limiting a tribe’s fecundity and survival. For out-group protection, evolution has provided us with the instinct for homophily, the universal preference for living with people of our own kind, a herd instinct of a sort. Islam takes this to absurd levels, with very high cousin marriage rates leading to genetic faults and high costs of treatment.
This threat aversion also takes the form of distrust of strangers. Identifying out-group members is important to a tribe. In closely-related groups this might take the form of knowing the enemy at a personal level. The films Apocalypto, Tanna and Warriors of the Rainbow - Seediq Bale give realistic accounts of tribal relationships and are worth seeing. For unrelated tribes, cultural factors and race increase in importance as an identifying process, and I think this is the misunderstood cause for much of what passes for racism today. Cultural factors can include dress, language, accent, behaviour, religion, child-raising praxis, etc, while race will include obvious factors that separate Caucasoid, Slavic, Indian, Negroid, and Mongoloid features for example. Deriving from both these factors is an identity which individuals will seek to protect. Where this interferes with assimilation into a host or alien culture is a choice that has to be made. Failure in this regard places the individual into the category of an out-group member, thus threat perception and discrimination will occur. For a host society’s survival as a civilisation, assimilation is essential.
The word ‘racism’ has changed its meaning over recent years, ironically as actual racism has declined dramatically. What was once short for ‘racial prejudice’ has now taken flight as an all-purpose slur emanating from the far Left. Its purpose is more than just to shut down criticism, just or unjust, of those with out-group status. What the far Left is enforcing on Western nations is what I’ve termed ‘mandated heterophily’, that is, enforced multiculturalism, more recently termed ‘diversity’, the purpose of which is to reduce levels of social trust, increase the fragmentation of identity, and contribute to the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions, as the Communist Manifesto wishes. The word has had its meaning extended to include religion, specifically Islam, in a facile and deliberate attempt to render Islam part of Western culture by denying its unquestionable and irreversible out-group identity.
Changes to immigration policy have increased diversity without consideration of consequence. It is a social experiment without a plan. Instead of bringing in groups which in large numbers are known to assimilate, and in smaller numbers those who are known to have difficulty assimilating and to have them distributed broadly across the country, we now have a situation where large numbers of the latter group can aggregate and alienate local populations. The policy of cluster limits, nominally 1:200, is a concern of the United Kingdom government in support of community cohesion, but New Zealand seems to have ignored the concept. Failings in this regard can be seen in Hamtramck, The United States’ first Muslim majority city, and in the many hundreds of ‘sensitive zones’ in Europe.
Given that the natural status of all humans is conservative, and resistant to rapid change which can inhibit child-raising, stable employment and planning, such disruption has negative results which can be seen in the meteoric rise of populism.
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