If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.
This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.
What has gone on has huge lessons for America. And our politicians here should take note.
The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.
In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.
In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.
But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.
This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.
A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.
In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.
This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.
But the local population was inflamed. Soon a small group of thugs started throwing things at a local mosque. Other towns also took out their anger and rage on the police. Which, of course, is one of the stupidest things imaginable.
Some of the police who had been first responders to the site of the massacre were then pelted by an angry public.
But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.
In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.
The sight of mainly young men paying people-smugglers to bring them across the English Channel illegally is appalling. Why should you pay a parking ticket when people get away with this?
Worse is that — like in America — all the illegal arrivals will stay. The law protects them before it protects locals.
The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.
At the same time, legal migration has gone to a historic high. The Conservative government that came into office in 2010 promising to bring legal net migration down to under 100,000 a year left office earlier this year with legal migration at over 700,000 in one year.
The UK is smaller than the US, of course, but the flood of illegal immigrants into the country is similar.
As is another problem.
If you look at the northern towns of England that have seen the worst of the rioting in recent days, a number of things stand out.
Yes — they are areas that have had far too much immigration forced on them. But they are also areas where joblessness and welfare reliance have increased in the past decade.
Even though the government has created new jobs since the crash of 2008, the vast majority of these jobs (fully three quarters) have gone to foreign-born workers.
In other words, the government has tried to grow the economic pie. But it didn’t even bother to share it with the people actually born and already living in the country.
Of course people say, “Well, maybe these people wouldn’t take the jobs on offer.” Yet why should any government be so lazy as to accept the cultivation of joblessness among the population as some law of nature?
The idea that your own people shouldn’t be helped into work, and should in fact be passed over for anyone else in the world, is a disastrous one.
Yet a similar dynamic is at play here in the US. Not just with the millions of illegal migrants flooding across the southern border and undercutting American workers in the black market. But also in the overall job stats.
As a share of the US workforce, foreign-born workers have grown rapidly in the last four years.
They represented 18.6% of the total US workforce last year. And while that could work, it doesn’t if the number of Americans working actually falls.
And that is precisely what has happened in the last four years. For instance, according to estimates from the Center for Immigration Studies, there were 2.9 million more foreign-born workers (legal and illegal) in the US at the end of last year than at the end of 2019. But there were 183,000 fewer US-born workers at work at the end of 2023 than at the end of 2019.
So job creation in the Biden-Harris era has gone entirely to foreign-born workers while the number of US-born workers has not returned to pre-COVID levels.
As the UK has shown, you can cover over some problems some of the time. You can even cover over the most appalling cases of crime, terrorism and disorder. But at some point, the bubble bursts. And nobody knows what will cause it.
In times of economic boom, you can cover over a whole range of discontents. At times of economic challenge, you cannot.
Mass legal and illegal migration is always a challenge to the social structure of a country.
But combine that change with zero benefit to the people born in the country — whose forebears contributed to the country? Well, that is a recipe for disaster.
Anyone who wants to see where America could head without a course correction can look at Britain and see.
