Where do you want to find your immigrants?

“Import the Third World, become the Third World”. It was a slogan used by the Trump War Room in the 2024 election, and it has since become a catchphrase for postliberals, national conservatives, and the wider MAGA movement. My own country, Britain, is often held up as the reification of that slogan, a real-world example of a nation sliding into Third World status as a result of demographic change.It is true that second-generation immigrants are over-represented in British terrorist attacks. Of the four men who carried out the 2005 London Tube bombings, in which 52 people died, three were born to Pakistani parents. The man responsible for the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, in which 22 people were killed, was the son of a Libyan jihadist given asylum in Britain. The teenager who murdered three little girls in Southport in 2024 was born to Rwandan parents.I should stress that the homicide rate in Britain is five times lower than in the United States, and London is statistically much safer than almost every American city. Still, it is striking that, within that lower total, there is evidence of a failure of integration beyond anything we see in the U.S. Is this, as is now taken for granted by most American conservatives, because British immigrants come from the wrong places? Not really. It is true that more British immigrants come from Nigeria and Pakistan, and fewer from Mexico or the Philippines. But, just as in the U.S., India and China are among our top three source countries.No, the real difference is what happens after the settlers arrive. Although we fulminate about the 1619 Project and the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, those things were a spasm, barely felt by the average immigrant. A new arrival in the U.S., unless he ends up working in a university or for a federal agency, is surrounded by a patriotic and self-confident culture. Even if he gets a government job, he will pass plenty of flagpoles on his way to work. He will be invited to Fourth of July parties. He will watch uplifting movies.In Britain, the story is a much bleaker one. Our intellectual elites are so self-loathing that flying the national flag feels subversive, almost as if the country were under occupation. Hence the bizarre phenomenon where, in working-class districts, people will fly British or, more often, English flags from lamp-posts, signaling their contempt both for mass immigration and for their governing caste.This culture makes it much harder for the children of settlers to integrate. All the crimes I listed above were carried out, not by immigrants, but by the products of British schools. Their parents might have felt a sense of pride in their new country, but the authorities of that country soon knocked it out of their children.“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” Arnold Toynbee wrote. A century ago, Britain was occupying the ancestral homelands of many of its immigrant communities. Yet, in two world wars, their young men enlisted in huge numbers. The Indian Army formed to fight in World War I was the second-largest volunteer force in the history of the human race. The largest? The Indian Army formed to fight in World War II.Reading those volunteers’ letters home — there was no conscription outside the U.K. itself — you are struck by the sense they had that they were defending something worth fighting for, that the values of the Anglosphere were preferable to those of the European autocracies. Mahatma Gandhi was explicit in urging his countrymen to join up. “India would be nowhere without Englishmen. If the British do not win, to whom shall we go claiming equal partnership? Shall we go to the victorious German or Turk or Afghan for it?”Those words would be greeted with jeering incredulity in any British classroom now, so entrenched is the White Man Bad narrative. The story of India as an enthusiastic British ally might be true, but it offends the Third Worldist narrative that dominates our schools.All this works the other way around, too. Immigration to the U.S. may be falling, but Third Worldism seems to be on the rise. We have become so accustomed to the tinpot strongman vibes from the White House — renaming lakes and oceans, plastering the leader’s name on buildings and institutions, encouraging the enrichment of the presidential family, picking territorial fights with neighbors, accepting grotesque gifts from foreign governments, building monumental arches — that it barely makes the news when President Donald Trump talks of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as his friend and ally. You don’t have to import the Third World to become the Third World.