The Diversity Illusion Quotes

“It is itself totalitarian to dismiss peacefully-expressed views on the grounds that some unhinged mind might interpret them violently.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Arguing against people who control the terms of debate is a hard task, and in a way exponents of diversity have achieved a tremendous success in making opponents have to justify their objections, when the burden of proof should be against those advocating the radical change. Until relatively”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“A western European can show solidarity with Latin American or African guerrillas, knowing that were they to actually take power and bring their nations to abject ruin, it would affect him not one bit. The”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Immigration is a form of social debt, offering small short-term financial benefits with long-term social costs to future generations, and the social effects are considerable. The economic argument is a red herring convenient for both sides, since liberals do not want to raise the clearly unpopular social implications of immigration, and conservatives cannot honestly discuss the issue without being accused of racism.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“All the arguments for multiculturalism — that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity — are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “white Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“An immigration policy that ignored an individual's (potential) group identity would ignore the effects it had on wider society; a colour-blind immigration policy certainly does not lead to a colour-blind society.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Economists, when it comes to immigration, routinely ignore the social costs; would they do the same when measuring, for example, the growth of the alcohol industry or, for that matter, fossil fuels? Open borders — especially while much of the world has high fertility rates — have enormous non-economic effects. So while big business might want an endless supply of foreign labour, since when were the interests of big business put above any potential social cost of their practices? When it involves diversity. And yet the social costs of immigration are a form of market failure, problems created by businesses which enjoyed the benefits but do not have to pay for the migrants' welfare, housing or schools once they are no longer needed.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Globalism has many benefits, but mixed with universalism it can become an ideological dogma that ignores the human consequences. Phillippe Legrain asks: ‘Why can computers be imported from China duty-free but Chinese people not freely come to make computer here? Why is it a good thing for workers to move within a country to where the jobs are, but a bad thing for people to move between countries for the same reason?’ That is because human beings are not computers. Goods can be freely moved about only because they can be discarded when they are no longer useful; humans cannot. Immigration is long-term and has permanent effects for everyone involved.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“A belief in the benefits of a multicultural, multi-racial society is an article of faith in today’s largely atheist society; to not believe is to not be in communion.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“The latest projections suggest that white Britons will become a minority sometime around 2066, in a population of 80 million, which means that within little over a century Britain will have gone from an almost entirely homogenous society to one where the native ethnic group is a minority. That is, historically, an astonishing transformation. No people in history have become a minority of the citizenry in their own country except through conquest, yet the English, always known for their reticence, may actually achieve this through embarrassment.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Immigration is the most thought about and least talked about subject in British history.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Never in modern history has a free population simply suppressed discussion of a major issue. As Kevin Myers noted, the people of Britain and Ireland ‘have taken a secret, Self-Denying Ordinance not to discuss immigration or race in any meaningful way’. In living memory barely a newspaper article, radio or television show has seriously questioned the diversity orthodoxy, and even in the intelligent Right-wing press scepticism has had to be couched in such a cryptic way that the paper’s horoscopes are more candid.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right