Yesterday several people asked, in the comments of this post, what reason (or excuse) was initially given for the Western Europeans letting in so many third-world immigrants, and whether there had been any explicit reference at the time to the falling birthrates of native Europeans. I don’t know the answer. But I believe the phenomenon of increased immigration was starting to occur before falling birthrates were explicitly an issue. However, as I wrote previously, one of the arguments for immigration advanced at the time was that the immigrants were needed for labor. So there’s at least some implied element involving the local populations’ not being present in great enough numbers.

A week or so ago I had come across an interview with Enoch Powell, he of the famous “rivers of blood” speech given in 1968. I’d heard of Powell quite a while before that, and had read the famous speech for which he became a pariah (although a hero to some) by warning about the growing pace of immigration to Britain from third-world countries that were part of the British Commonwealth. The term “rivers of blood” came from this quote from the speech:

Here [referring to a proposed anti-discrimination law] is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.

Because the speech was made in 1968, the specter he was raising was of the widespread race riots and unrest in the US at the time.

Here’s more from the 1968 speech that stirred so much controversy [emphasis mine]:

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen. …

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine. …

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.

That was followed by a quote about Sikhs not assimilating but rather wanting to be granted “special rights”; that reminds me, on reading it now, of the killing of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa, the knife-carrying Sikh.

Powell’s speech certainly describes with some accuracy trends which have only increased. He seems to have foreseen not only the growth of third-world immigration to Britain, but describes the phenomenon of the reaction of native British people feeling like third-class citizens, the desire of the immigrant groups for power, and the fear of reprisals and censorship native Britishers felt for speaking out against the immigrant influx. These are not recent trends; they were already present over fifty years ago.

A couple of weeks ago I’d come across some interviews with Enoch Powell from the 1960s and 1970s in which he further discussed the reasoning in Britain of those encouraging immigration at the time. But when I tried to find one interview in particular just now I couldn’t locate it, although I’ll continue to look. Instead, I found the following fascinating segment from a 1971 Dick Cavett Show in which Powell and Jonathan Miller debate the two sides of the issue. It is absolutely fascinating how Powell states the nativist side and Miller states the globalist side, the same battle that goes on today. Note also how eloquent they both are, although I think Powell is the more impressive in that regard:

That clip makes me sad. It not only shows how long these problems have been with us and how long the sides have been at loggerheads, but it also shows how public discourse has degenerated over the years.

[NOTE: I’ll post the other Powell video – the one I was originally searching for – if I find it.]