Immigration

Should Sweden now replace Australia, with its famed points system for immigration control, as the overseas model of choice for the British Right? As Sweden prepares to go to the polls in a desperately close election this Sunday, it is well worth considering what Stockholm has achieved over the past four years – not just on migration, but also in the intimately correlated terrain of gang crime and extremism; in short, what the French call les aspects régaliens, those matters which lie within the exclusive competence of the State. Scandinavia is certainly in vogue.

The Trump administration has proposed a fee of more than $100,000 for most H-1B visas. The usual suspects have come out with the usual reactions. Doug Brand, a senior immigration official in the Biden administration, called the move “catastrophic,” and the libertarian Cato Institute has warned of “devastating” consequences.  In lieu of abolishing the program altogether – my preference, but something only Congress can do – such a fee is long overdue. It’s chump change compared to the added value a truly exceptional foreign worker could generate, and at the same time would make the program less attractive as a means of importing cheap white-collar labor to undercut Americans.

In the Battle of the Acronyms, perhaps no contest is more ferocious than the slugfest between the DSA – that’s “D” for dumb and “S” for commie, I mean “socialist” – and ICE (always excepting TDS vs MAGA). A wacko woman steers her car into an ICE agent. He shoots her. The media calls make up and tries to turn the dead woman into the second coming of Saint George Floyd. There was a warehouse full of outrage just waiting to be paraded at prime time but somehow the entertainment fell flat. Renée Good, the woman in question, didn’t have what it takes to triumph in the victimology sweepstakes. The anti-Trump media wept for a week and then went on to other wheezes. Nevertheless the Democratic Socialists of America have kept an eye on ICE.

I don’t know how familiar readers are with the term ‘accelerationism’. It is generally used to describe a tendency on the left, though is increasingly heard on the right too. The basic idea of accelerationism is that there are certain flaws in the societal structure which if pushed could bring things to their inevitable conclusion more quickly. It is why there are so many people on the left of politics who say that sustainable government spending should be discouraged. It is not just because they are economically illiterate. What they really hope is that a speeded-up financial disaster will expose the ‘underlying contradictions of capitalism’, and we’ll all realise that Karl Marx was right and promptly vote for Zack Polanski or similar at the next election.

In the 2024 American and British national elections, it was no mystery why the incumbents lost. Both the Democratic and Conservative parties had abandoned their core principles. Democrats veered so far left that they fell off the edge of the world. Tories squandered 14 years in power competing with the sopping opposition over who could be more wet, a strategy perfectly designed to alienate the entire electorate. Left-wing voters will not – surprise – vote ‘Conservative’. Conservative voters want – surprise – conservative representatives and instead got sheep in sheep’s clothing. Although I’m seldom keen on purity tests, Kemi Badenoch now heads a party that resembles Britain’s sewage-mucked rivers, and it could use some purifying.

The latest Supreme Court term, which ended on Tuesday, surely must have been a deep disappointment for those who argue the court is in the thrall of political puppet masters. In decision after decision in the term that began October 6, the high court asserted a degree of institutional independence that undercuts the idea its jurists are merely politicians in judicial robes. At bottom, the issues before the court were characterized by Trump’s attempts to vastly expand presidential authority and efforts by states, political opponents and others to rein him in. In the end, the match was a draw.

Who could ever have imagined what was being unleashed on the world when Thomas Gage ordered 700 Redcoats to march out from Boston and seize supplies in the town of Concord? Who could have dreamed, 250 years ago, what would be built by the descendants of those 56 men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence while gathered in the Pennsylvania State House? The United States of America turns 250 having enjoyed a near-uninterrupted run of success unmatched in world history. By her 100th birthday, the US was already master of an entire continent. By her 200th, she had won two world wars, invented the airplane, the atomic bomb and the transistor; created the motion picture and rock ’n’ roll; become the first automobile nation and put a man on the Moon.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tour to tout his new children’s book about the Declaration of Independence should have been uneventful. But then Gorsuch decided to talk about what America is. On Fox News, with the New York Times and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Gorsuch kept staking out his view on what makes America special: America has no religion, no race, no people at all really, but instead a singular majestic idea. “We’re a creedal nation, right,” Gorsuch told the Times. “I mean, we don’t share a religion, we don’t share a race, we share an idea, OK? And that idea has to be passed down generation to generation through history, as we discussed.