The Telegraph: Mass migration is creating a new anti-Western underclass

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 18, 2025 22:08
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6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, September 17, 2025 9:40 PM

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/mass-migration-creating-anti-weste
rn-200803964.html

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The “anti-colonial” Left wants Western societies to atone for their “original sins”. From its historical role in slavery, imperialism and the extirpation of native peoples to class oppression, progressives argue that the West should pay penance today by allowing unrestricted mass immigration from the most wretched parts of the earth.

Yet mass migration has aroused increasingly fierce opposition throughout the West. This is true not only in the United States, but in other countries with a long history of successful migration, including the UK, the Netherlands and France. Moves to reduce migration are already in place in Italy, and seem set to be imposed soon in Germany, whose welfare state is creaking under the burden. Canada, once seen as one of the countries most positive about mass migration, has also announced plans for major reductions.

There are good, rational reasons for this. Voters who oppose mass migration, including illegal migration, are regularly accused of being racist and xenophobic, or of prioritising their own selfish needs at the expense of economic progress. Yet if you actually look at what is occurring on the ground level, it’s not clear how much of the current wave of mass migration has been economically positive.

To be sure, legal immigrants from Europe and Asia enriched Western societies in the past. Guest workers from southern Europe and Turkey, for example, played a critical role in solving a labour shortage that threatened the European economic resurgence during the postwar recovery. And today, both libertarian conservatives and progressives still see essentially unregulated migration – upwards of 10 million since 2021 during Joe Biden’s inept reign – as the only means of addressing the West’s demographic implosion and of reviving its stagnating economies.

But these views increasingly reflect nostalgia rather than reality. Countries that have experienced the greatest infusions of new migrants – particularly people applying for asylum or simply hiding from the law – have not tended to benefit economically.

Take the UK and Canada. Canada’s rate of immigration has been among the world’s highest. In the year to June 2023, the country of 40 million, received more than a million immigrants, accounting for almost all of the country’s population growth. But despite the influx, Canada over the past decade has suffered some of the slowest economic growth rates of the advanced countries, particularly in terms of GDP per head of population. The UK, which has recently taken considerably more immigrants per capita than the US, is also largely economically stagnant.

Rather than an emerging new middle class, many immigrants, even in the US, increasingly struggle. As recently as 1993, immigrants accounted for 14 per cent of the US population living in poverty and, in 1994, only 11 per cent of the poor were non-citizen immigrants; three decades later, immigrants made up almost a quarter of all poor people, and 13.2 per cent of those in poverty were non-citizen immigrants.

A combination of a changing economy – manual labour dropped to 22 per cent of all US jobs in 2025 from 35 per cent 50 years ago, for example – and the extension of the welfare state appears to be creating an ever-growing underclass in countries which are already deeply in debt and struggling economically.

Today, in large parts of Europe, newcomers have been found to be more dependent on non-contributory welfare than natives. In Spain, the proportion of immigrants from outside the continent, mostly Latin America and Africa, deemed at risk of poverty is roughly three times that of native population. In Canada, one study found that one in five recent immigrants now suffers poverty – defined as an inability to afford goods and services consistent with a modest standard of living – compared to only 10 per cent of the whole population.

The massive surge of undocumented migrants, particularly to countries like the United States, h

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