Immigration is no longer untouchable as an area of policy reform

After last Wednesday's deadline for EU citizens to apply for settled status in the UK, and as the US continues to battle a migrant crisis on its southern border, Donald Forbes examines immigration's inescapable issues that even political establishments long wary of being too critical of immigration now cannot ignore.

Even the most ardent open borders activists do not believe the West can take in all of the world's people who might want to come. Theirs is a political project to test the level of saturation at which host populations finally rebel against mass immigration. They want to goad the peoples of the West to say "enough". Immigrants themselves are unwitting pawns in this project; they are simply people changing country in search of a better life. If they were aware of the activists' revolutionary intent to eventually destroy the West as it is, they would oppose it because it would defeat their purpose in leaving home.

Legal immigrants and the countries they move to share a common goal. This is a return to a system of national borders which cannot be overrun by uncontrollable waves of people. For this to happen there needs to be more political will on the part of governments and international bureaucracies.

Although the EU and the UN are both committed to encouraging more legal migration from under-developed countries, there are signs that resistance is growing both to the size of the constant influx and the refusal of some immigrants to integrate. In the US, illegal immigration is one of the sharpest issues dividing Democrats and Republicans despite most Americans being immigrant friendly. In Europe, which does not share America's immigrant history, the story is different. A new Danish law denies entry to illegal immigrants. It allows for their deportation if they are already in Denmark. The central European countries have defied EU immigrant quotas. Immigration as an issue is emerging from official purdah in France and is likely to have a high profile in next year's presidential election.

With mass international transport, people can change country as easily as they move around the countries they were born in. All over the West, capital cities are a melting pot of countless nationalities.

Why is this a bad thing without regulation?

What 'open borders' means is that if immigrant saturation is reached, it will have been so extensive that the West will no longer be the West. Critical race theorists say the white West's inescapable cultural, technological and economic dominance in recent centuries has been bad for everyone else and needs to be reversed, including in the West itself. The question is whether, as CRT claims, a multicultural, egalitarian, mixed-race West would be an example of social harmony while at the same time preserving its standard of living. The problem is that if this were to be the case, the West would continue to be a magnet for illegal migrants, but a resistant rather than compliant one.

If immigrant saturation theory is true, there is historic evidence that the progressive dream of a new West will not come about. Leaving aside the unique racial problems that have dogged the United States since its founding, no empire mixing different ethnic groups and cultures has ever survived. Immigrant saturation point in the West risks being explosive which is what makes the experiment with mass migration so dangerous for the future generations that will have to deal with it. It is why the open borders lobby needs to be checked now rather than eluded by political elites.

Political leaders know this. David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy all admitted a decade ago that multiculturalism had failed. Instead of being the vehicle of co-existence between different cultures, it stoked tensions between them.

The difficulty different peoples have in living together is implicit in CRT. Activists in America demand that the white majority surrender their "privilege" and allow each minority group to share in every aspect of life in proportion to its size. They want the law to enforce what does not take place naturally.

France has become the point nation in Europe in tackling issues with immigration. It has been worst hit by Islamist terrorism; the rise of Marine Le Pen's Front National (now Rassemblement National or RN) has been inexorable over the years; and there will be a presidential election in 2022. With the RN at his heels, President Macron has accused Islamists of seeking political separatism, rooted out extremist imams who preach in Arabic and decreed that all immigrants must become as French as the French themselves.

Former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, a possible challenger to Macron from the liberal right, said that the current immigration system was unworkable and that all immigration should be halted for up to five years. Ex-military officers including generals wrote a controversial public letter denouncing the effects of immigration on France.

It was unthinkable until recently that heavyweight leaders should have spoken so frankly and a sign that part of the "respectable" political class has come to share the concerns of the general public.

The direction France takes on the issue will be of considerable interest to the rest of Europe, and could be a signpost for how the West will deal with the issue of immigration for years to come.