The despicable behaviour of opportunistic thugs rioting in Dublin in the aftermath of the knife attack on children leaving primary school is already being dishonesty used to smear anyone who is critical of the Irish government’s excessively liberal immigration system as being ‘far right.’
This is quite perplexing to the very many of us in both Ireland and the UK who are not opposed to all immigration but are merely critical of what we view as our governments’ radical immigration policies. In the UK this month, the yearly net migration figures for 2022 revealed an influx of 745,000. For those Gript readers who are far more nationalistic than myself and are questioning what UK immigration figures have to do with Ireland, please remember that these figures include Northern Ireland and that the UK and Ireland operate what is called the Common Travel Area which means that the medium to long term effect of immigration policies in either jurisdiction has an impact on the other.
Those of us who in reality hold quite centrist views on immigration can only be smeared as ‘far right’ when the term ‘far right’ is redefined to include anyone who doesn’t believe in what are in effect defacto open border policies across these islands. Both the radical left in Ireland represented by People Before Profit and Sinn Fein and the globalist neo-liberals of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail all promote such a narrative. They make no distinction between those of us who support immigration but merely want manageable numbers and prefer immigrants who will integrate over big bearded Islamists (not all Muslims) and the actual far right who oppose all immigration. The radical left and neoliberal globalists distort the views of reasonable people with centrist views on immigration. They do this by employing the very dishonest tactic of framing the immigration debate in strictly binary terms. In their simplistic minds, you are either for an excessively open border immigration policy or you have a closet full of Gestapo outfits like that Nazi priest in Father Ted. No other stances on immigration exist in their smooth brained analysis. That’s why they ignore the arguments of people who don’t adhere to either extreme and it’s why they lie and lump us in with nasty bigots who hate all foreigners and oppose all immigration. This phenomenon is far worse in Ireland than it is in Britain where at least genuinely conservatively centrist views on immigration are given far greater coverage in the mainstream media in comparison.
There’s also nothing ‘far right’ about taking into account resource constraints that come with current levels of unrestrained immigration both legal and illegal. It’s just practical, in the same way that if you prepared a dinner party for ten you would be aghast if twenty people turned up expecting to be fed. No one would think you were the reincarnation of Hitler if you turned the uninvited guests away. Also, noticing that all Islamic terror attacks on Western civilians were carried out by Muslim immigrants or individuals from a Muslim immigrant background doesn’t mean you blame or hate all individual Muslims for those incidents or view all Muslims as Islamists or wish to kick every Muslim out of the country, but merely that you notice that mass immigration from the Islamic world brings the extreme social pathologies from those countries to your country that hitherto didn’t exist. In a democracy, citizens should be allowed to voice their security concerns on who crosses their border in the same way a home owner gets to decide who enters his or her home. A lad I knew in Galway in the 1990s was refused entry to the USA on the grounds that he had a conviction for drug possession. By today’s loose standards does that retrospectively deem the ClintonAdministration to have been far right because they were discriminatory in their immigration policies?
On an individual level, we all discriminate and have preferences about who and how many we will let in to our homes and with who we wish to share our resources. Effective border controls and an immigration system that favours law abiding immigrants who work hard and who we are certain will share the values of liberal democracy over those who don’t and won’t is only ‘far right’ in the same way that choosing who you let through the front door to your home is ‘far right.’
The ‘far right’ has now been redefined by the radical left and globalist neoliberals to include centrists who welcome a degree of immigration and the positive contributions of well integrated immigrants regardless of their race, nationality or religion. For instance, that hardworking Brazilian chap who put his life on the line to save those children in the Dublin knife attack is a true hero.
Those of us on the centre right and even socially conservative centre left dissidents should always adamantly reject being labelled as anti-immigration when we are merely opposed to the excessively radical immigration policies of the radical left and neo-liberal globalists in the same way that we are opposed to the extreme anti-immigration policies of groups like the BNP in Britain.