Immigration does not cause unemployment

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Roddy Newman. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Fringe racist parties sometimes claim that immigration causes unemployment, and although their claim is untrue, as I will explain, many people who at the moment would not dream of voting for such parties, believe that myth, and may thus vote for them in the future.

For example, this June 2010 Pew Research poll revealed that 50% of Americans agree with the statement: "immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care".

So, if the West ever has to go through the mass unemployment of the 1930's again, fringe racist parties could grow dramatically if the immigration causes unemployment myth is not debunked, as, for example in the US in the 1930's, many Mexicans, some of them US citizens, were rounded up and deported, because of claims that they were taking scarce jobs which white Americans could do.

Of course, if immigration did cause unemployment, countries like the US and Australia, whose populations almost all emigrated to those places in recent centuries, would have over 99% unemployment. The fact that they do not, and the fact that the large numbers of immigrants from all over the world who the US has been taking in every year since 1965, when people from all over the world were for the first time given the opportunity to move the US, do not continually increase the American unemployment rate, prove that racist parties are wrong when they say that immigration causes unemployment. In reality, immigrants spend all, or most of the money they earn in the countries which they move to, which creates jobs for the people who have to grow, or make, or provide, or sell the goods and services which immigrants buy or use.

So immigration simply increases the size of national economies, and people like Texas Republican politician Lamar Smith, who said this year that the USA's 15 million unemployment rate could be cut in half by taking jobs off 8 million illegal immigrants, and French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who used to say that the then 2 million immigrants in France were the reason for France's then 2 million unemployment rate, are wrong.

Of course, far right parties like the French NF are run by the least intelligent politicians in their countries, so it is to be expected that they should make incorrect statements like that. This Edinburgh University study found that BNP voters had a lower average IQ level than big 3 party, Green, SNP, and Plaid Cymru voters, and non-voters.

Because BNP type views appeal most to the least intelligent types of people, it is also thus to be expected that Green Party voters, who were found by the Edinburgh University researchers to have the highest average IQ level, have a more intelligent attitude to immigration than other types of voters, which is why the Green Party want to, for example, build a museum to highlight the contribution which immigrants have made to the UK.

Of course, the immigration causes unemployment myth, is part of a pattern of similar, relatively low intelligence, racist politician claims, by, in particular, BNP politicians, and all of those claims have to be refuted if racist parties are to be comprehensively defeated at the ballot box.

For example, the BNP win votes by moralising about Islamist terrorism when they may well have more terrorist connections than any other fascist party on the planet, as I showed in this article.

The BNP won votes after the expenses scandal by moralising about the corruption of the big 3 parties, but the BNP, and the also racist UKIP, are very corrupt, as I explained in this article.

The BNP wins also votes by moralising about violent Islamists, but both the leaders they have had, admired a now dead American fascist party leader who openly advocated killing all of the world's billions of non-white and Jewish people, as I pointed out in this article. Another way the BNP wins votes, is by moralising about crime, but their fascist ideology helps to create murderers and rapists, as I showed in this article. Moreover, BNP candidates and officials have a remarkable number of convictions for violent crime, as I explained in this article.

Finally, the BNP wins votes by moralising about Islamist extremism, when its founder was an admirer of Arnold Leese, a pre-World War 2 British fascist party leader who advocated gassing Jews long before the Nazis did (in 1928), as I pointed out in this article.

As these kinds of BNP moralising lead to not only an increase in BNP support, but also to racist and religious violence, and other hate crimes, it would be a good idea for anti-racist lawyers to sue the BNP for telling deliberate and malicious lies to incite racist and religious hatred, which
is the parent of racist and religious hate crimes. As I showed in this article, an American civil rights law firm has bankrupted numerous racist organisations and activists by suing them for compensation after hate crimes, but British law is stricter than American law, so it would be
possible to sue the BNP for not just engaging in hate crimes, but also for inciting hatred, which is why BNP leader Nick Griffin was successfully prosecuted for inciting racial hatred after he denied the Holocaust in a magazine.