There is a lot of fuss in the media today because of the violent protests in California against President Trump’s efforts to enforce border control and clamp down on illegal migration. In the UK, the issue gets hotter by the day as more and more undocumented migrants arrive illegally in small boats.
So-called “open borders” is an objective pushed more and more by the Progressive Left. In these quarters you will hear people pontificating at length about “International Law” and the alleged violations of it. This will usually involve some ‘outrage’ a western-or-western-aligned country has committed in its own defence or in its efforts to hold on to its territory (which becomes somehow “disputed“). Oddly, however, when it comes to the sovereign borders of democratic countries, “International Law” is either forgotten in these circles or the attempt to enforce it is declared “fascist”.
Laughably, some of the groups involved in these progressive circles are “Queers For Palestine” and “Lesbians & Gays Support The Migrants“. These groups are made up up useful idiots and fellow travellers (the card-carrying variety, not the undocumented kind of traveller, of course).
Here is the only important fact: Gay rights and legal equality only exist because of borders.
Here are the supporting facts:
Of the roughly 200 countries on Earth, less than a quarter have full or substantial legal equality for gay & lesbian people. When you add countries on that trajectory towards comprehensive gay rights, the figure only rises to a third of the world. That means that two-thirds of the worlds countries offer no rights or legal protections for gays and lesbians, and in many of those, there are severe punishments, including long prison terms and even the death penalty. Severe punishments is the norm in most of the Muslim world and half of Africa – ironically the source of most illegal migration.
But it is worse than that, because the populations of the two-thirds of the countries without gay rights are twice as dense. That means, well over 80% of the people of earth are from societies that do not recognise or respect gay rights and are, for the most part, in fact hostile to these rights and to gays and lesbians themselves.
The barely 15% of the planet supporting gay & lesbian equality is found almost entirely in Western Europe, the Americas and Australasia.
Without defended borders separating us from a world hostile to these rights, these rights would disappear.
Changing demographics alone makes life less safe for gay & lesbian people. To cite just three examples, Amie Gray, a lesbian was attacked and killed on a beach in Bournemouth as she sat with a female friend by Nasan Saadi. Three gay friends enjoying a picnic in a park in Reading were stabbed to death by Khairi Saadallah. In Sligo in Ireland, Yousef Palani was convicted of killing a gay couple. The court heard that the motivation “was to carry out murder due to prejudice against homosexuality.”
This is not to say that all homophobic murders are carried out by people of immigrant backgrounds, but attacks on gays and lesbians were on the decline and now appear to be on the up again. It stands to reason that the more people from homophobic cultures that move to the West, the more gay rights will come into conflict with the new arrivals. People don’t simply shed their cultures. If they did, there would not be a call for multiculturalism, and our liberal societies would not have to make compromises. In previous decades it would have been unconscionable to simply accept that a school teacher remained in hiding because a perceived insult to Islam meant he lived in fear of being murdered, or that we would be forced to accept the return of long-scrapped blasphemy laws to appease Muslim sensibilities. This is what rapidly changing demographics without assimilation means, and the forecast for gay and lesbian safety is not good.
And it is not just gays and lesbians. Women’s safety has been compromised by mass migration too. It is hard to find details to inform the discussion on this. When asked via a Freedom of Information request, the Office for National Statistics dismissed the query with a terse “we do not hold information about the ethnicity of the perpetrators of crime” and seemed generally unhelpful in a rambling response to the inquisitor. The West Yorkshire Police were more helpful in responding to a FOI request, and their response makes sobering reading. It reveals sexual offences by foreign nationals roughly in line with other national figures. They accounted for more than a quarter of all sexual offences – three times higher than the national average. This is something we need – as a society – to talk about. Our modern attitudes to gender equality and women’s rights are a product of our cultural evolution and enlightenment values. These are not universal. They are enshrined by our sovereign laws and contained here – and throughout the Western democratic world – by our borders.
Similarly, antisemitism seems to travel on a cultural tandem bike with homophobia and misogyny. Let’s not fool ourselves that the “rape their daughters” scenes that play our in London, or the attacks on Jews in the USA – most recently in Colorado – are not products of the same dynamics. We all see the hatred that plays out in weekly marches in London that have made the city virtually a no-go area for Jews and antisemitic attacks reaching a record high.
In short, if you’re gay or lesbian, a woman, or Jewish, you would be suicidal to support the weakening of the borders of the UK, the US, or any other part if the Western World. Rights are fragile things and largely based on social consensus and the laws that consensus produces. National sovereignty is what contains those ideas in a practical space in which those laws and social norms can have meaning. Take away the borders, and we lose everything.
I don’t mean to be dramatic, but the fight is for the survival of liberal democracy itself. It is our way of life, and – outside our borders – there is a huge global majority that has very different ideas. Riskline produce a map for gay travellers, offering advice of where it is a risk to go to. Logic dictates that it is equally a risk to stay put but have large numbers of people from those countries migrating here in an uncontrolled way. It isn’t the geography that puts us at risk, it is the people there. We are safer because they are there, and not here.
It is time we faced up to that.
