TLDR: Immigrants and refugees in western countries on the whole do not assimilate, do not contribute, and replace native populations. The objective analysis is laid out below. I will try to present the information as unbiased as I can but obviously my view on it is already clear.
My Take
My view on the whole immigration and refugees is pretty much all about money. More workers → more supply → lower wages and pressure on the ruling elites. They just take advantage of public sentiment to get that and throw in some pretty weak justifications. They know that immigrants / refugees are more than happy to come to a great country and will ride any excuse they can get. And they know that white peoples have a heavily taught guilt complex to be taken advantage of. That's why you see people at the top saying we need more workers and will have population collapase meanwhile regular people can hardly find work.
Now as of 2026 there's a bit of shift going on as illustrated at the recent WEF. Sentiment is shifting somewhat among the ruling elites where immigration is not as hot. I think it's probably due to AI and automation because now instead of seeing immigrants as a cheap source of labor they are seeing immigrants entirely as one more welfare mouth to feed since the task is now automated, think Amazon warehouse robots as an example.
Scale - Objective Fact
The speed and scale of modern immigration is unprecedented in many countries. Canada, USA, England, Ireland, and many others have foreign born populations of 15-25%. The actual numbers are messy because it has been going on long enough for a lot of the new arrivals to have been born there, plus all the illegal refugees. Do your own research but overall the numbers are shocking and in many cities and towns the populations have completely changed.
Immigration, as sold to the citizens of the host nation, has been about integration. You take in foreigners and they enrich your country by becoming part of the people and maybe even improving it by putting their own spin on things. This is objectively not possible with the speed and scale of modern immigration and it's not even the fault of the new arrivals, it's just sheer numbers. There are communities of people that can hardly speak the host nation's language because there's a big enough bubble around them such that they don't need to.
Whether or not this is a good or bad thing is a different subject, the core claim here is on how speed and scale change the dynamics
Economy
A common myth is that immigrants are a net positive economically. This is by far the easiest argument to dismantle because it's all recorded, no need for ideological debates. Now numbers are tricky but the key is to do your own research into the base numbers, not political headlines and newspaper articles. There are two key caveats to keep in mind when checking for these numbers. The first is that USA differs from Europe due to Europe's extensive welfare systems, Canada is somewhere in between. The second is that you need to distinguish between new and old immigrants, as I've described in the Sentiment and Welfare section below. That's because for example a brown indian whose parents came to England 70 years ago is very different from one of the Africans arriving by boat today.
Two good starting references are:
- The Long Term Fiscal Impacts of Immigrants in the Netherlands. Differentiated by Motives Source Religion and Generation.[https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf]
- The Fiscal Lifetime Cost of Receiving Refuges [https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/295593/1/cream-dp1902.pdf]
Sentiment and Welfare
Up until the early 1900s, the vast majority of people leaving their home countries did so because they were looking for something better and leaving everything behind. Welfare was basically non-existent so these people arrived knowing they would have to work towards their goal of a better life. More often than not these people worked hard and appreciated their new home, becoming more or less like the natives.
Today, welfare and all the government programs and benefits change the dynamic massively. People can and do go to western countries to take advantage of these government benefits. The world is so interconnected today that their home country, friends, and family are still extremely accessible whether via social media or a cheap flight. Additionally, there's growing resentment among new immigrants to the governments and often to the white native population.
The first two points about welfare vs work and a new life vs travel are more or less objective truth whereas the last point is a bit less solid so I will elaborate. Discrimination against whites is still discrimination, it is still racist. For some reason that point doesn't stick with many people and they think that it's okay to talk about the oppressive white man, use slurs like cracker, make claims about how white people are evil. Is this every immigrant? No. Is it only immigrants? No, many self hating white people as well. Schools have organizations like “black men in STEM” or “women in medicine” but it would be impossible to have one called “white men in engineering”. If you reflexively disagreed and thought “well of course they can't have that, it's nazi kkk” then you won't agree with my 3rd point and I'll save that for a much longer post.
Crime
Many European towns and cities have changed form high trust societies into almost wild west or police states. See the streets of Paris or ask an old timer how they used to pay for things by leaving money places. Or for how common sexual assault and rape has become in places like England and Germany. The subjective experience is clear. Objective analysis is trickier for two main reasons. The first is that people literally lie or manipulate data to avoid “spreading hate”, they don't want to publish headlines of colored immigrants committing crime because they fear the backlash. It comes from an understandable albeit dumb mindset of wanting to protect, if not directly sinister. The second is that police reports rarely include real ethnicity / race data in their reports. For example, they'll lump arab and middle eastern people together with white in police reports. They'll lump a new immigrant from Senegal with a white German in “German” category. Usually a bit of digging reveals the truth, either by name or you seeing the actual criminal's face. Check the latest on your own but make sure to probe into those two points, the purposeful deceptions and the lack of distinction in criminal records.
Europe vs North America
Europe is a mix of countries that have deep historic roots. They do have ethnic white populations that date back thousands of years. Lumping them all together in the term “white” is similar to calling Africa a black country. Try telling an Irishman that he's the same as an Englishman. I know that seems obvious but people often forget that England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Norway and the rest all have rich historic peoples and cultures for thousands of years from way back when immigration was at most between other European nations but otherwise basically zero.
North America has two historic populations; the native Americans (Indians) and the people who colonized the Americas later. Countries like Canada and the USA were indeed built by immigrants but there's a clear divide between the ones that came even 100 years ago and the ones that come today. There was a culture and something to be preserved in the Americas even if it wasn't as deep or strong as Europe.
Population collapse
The idea that countries need an ever expanding population to sustain itself is very wrong. That's basically a ponzi scheme. Increasing the young population is one of the most crude and ineffective levers at managing an increasingly older population with rising economic burdens. The burden due to the elderly are in two main forms, healthcare costs and pensions. Healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and elderly care have been seen large increases in costs over the past few decades, in my opinion this is on purpose since businesses are trying to take advantage of the deep baby boomer pockets and policies. Not to mention lobbying and things like selling insulin for hundreds when it costs dollars. Instead of saying we need infinity Indians, maybe work to lower the costs in the first place? Then for pensions, government spending is atrociously inefficient. If you genuinely cut down waste, forced audits, eliminated fraud, and streamlined operations, we'd likely see over 50% reductions in overall spending (closer to 80% imo). Those numbers are very hard to pin down but anyone who's worked in those industries or has done a bit of research would probably think waste is much more than half overall.
We can actually look to history for a good example on population collapse. In Europe during the black death it's estimated that between 30-60% of the entire population died. The ruling class did not think that the solution was importing foreign workers, although some of that did happen it just wasn't major policy. Even though today if that happened immigration would be the #1 topic for politicians. The second thing that happened is that a lot of power shifted to the peasants. Supply was low and demand was high so the working class had major leverage over the elites.
Welfare: What they actually get
This varies widely from country to country, even among different local areas. But in general it is far more than the average person expects. Most of the time new immigrants and refugees get full access to welfare plus an additional special form of service. For example in england they put refugees up in hotels for free (at the tax payer's expense) to give them somewhere to stay instead of being on the street. In Canada they give them nearly full access to all the benefits like medicare and housing that even some tax payers don't get. In the US they can vote since some states don't require ID. The list goes on and I encourage you to again check source material on these things since they change fairly quickly and people try to hide it or just plain don't know.
Also keep in mind that what's on paper is often the official narrative but it can be heavily bent if you just try. Take the worker visa example, the idea in Canada is that you can only hire foreign workers after you've tried your best locally for a set period of time and still had no applicants. What's the workaround? just put a job posting, reject everyone that applies for 6 months, make a claim that you couldn't find anyone, and then hire your buddy from back home on a worker visa. This is very common since the system is very easy to abuse in that way.
Reparations
A surprisingly large number of people believe reparations are a justification for immigration, and even other welfare services and racist policies. Below are my key reasons why this is not only poor logic but also a mark of evil.
- No living perpetrators: Reparations by definition are for past atrocities. This means the son is being punished for the sins of his father. That is entirely contradictory to western civilization and justice systems as multiple generations of punishment. Present day citizens did not commit colonial harms, and present day immigrants are not direct victims of colonial harm.
- Immigration does not directly repair harm. This should be obvious but in case it's not just try to think about how the Turkish government giving a random armenian guy welfare would un-genocide his grandfather.
- It shifts the focus and consequences away from affected societies. The Congo was brutalized by colonial powers, Belgium mainly, how does allowing Congolese immigrants into belgium fix the Congo?
- History isn't always black and white. There are some cases where it is clearly black and white by basically every historian's account of the issue, like Congo above. Botswana is an example of where British rule could have arguably been a net positive.
- Creates social divide. If you are an immigrant in another country and you keep saying how you are owed this and that and the modern citizen needs to pay for it or allow you to enter then you are breeding resentment in society.
- The last and probably most important is that even if you believe reparations are necessary, there are far better ways to go about it than immigration and welfare. In the form of developmental partnerships, debt relief, investment, and many other classic economic tools that allied nations use to help each other.
Refugees
Refugee status is usually the worst of all in my opinion for three main reasons.
- They are not screened. For example, if someone leaves their country to escape conscription then usually they'd be labeled a criminal in their home country; so it's reasonable to think that the destination country can't really ask their home country for their criminal record since obviously they'd be a criminal. The issue with this is that it's basically a Trojan horse for real criminals. Morally innocent people are in the same boat as horrific criminals.
- They skip countries on their way to the final country. If you are looking for a better life then sure, but that's not what refugee status used to mean (used to, I'll explain why later). You can't skip peaceful countries along your literal walking path from home to host nation and then claim that you're just trying to escape persecution.
- Refugees are usually economic refugees. Canada is a great example of this. People get in on visitor or student visas and then when their time is up instead of going back all they have to do is claim refugee status and the government can't deport them. You'd think that this would only work if their home country was dangerous but often times they still have family back home and it is more or less peaceful. They can easily do this because many places added an economic refugee status which means they just want better economic opportunities, no danger needed.
Moral Obligations
For some reason people seem to think that countries have some sort of obligation to people not from that country. A government's sole duty is to its citizens. It does try to protect minority rights from mob rule but that's as far as it goes on home soil. It is perfectly within reason and the government framework to want a country to remain the way the population wants. If everyone in England wants it to be a fully white English population then why not? No one bats an eye when Japan does it, they actually prefer it to keep it more Japanese.
The Yellow Elephant in the Room
The elephant in the room in this case are East Asians (yellow not brown). The only issue with them in general is that they don't tend to assimilate. Reparations? treated as or more brutally by colonial powers than any other area of the world. Economy? they often match or beat the economic contributions of the local population. Crime? Virtually none. Home nations? Thriving.