Make Colonialism Great Again to End the Mass Migration Crisis
Good Governance Is a Good Thing
Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Some feedback I got after the article on felony disenfranchisement is that people like solution-oriented articles rather than just critiques, so today’s article is another one on solutions. Enjoy! And, as always, make sure to “like” this article by tapping the heart so Substack knows to promote it. Listen to the audio version of this post here:
![[AUDIO] Make Imperialism Great Again to End Mass Migration](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CohM!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F187116664%2Fc80b945d-36b1-48d7-839a-b688e3f2c9c8%2Ftranscoded-1770401982.png)
Our lands are inundated with foreigners. Seemingly every American town and city is full to the brim, packed with endless battalions of African nationals, Asian workers, and Latin Americans. While the border is no longer a scene out of The Camp of the Saints, as it was under Biden, many of the problems remain. Apartment buildings packed like cans of sardines, with nary an American in sight. Whole neighborhoods full of Haitians. Towns so mobbed with Somalis that the national GDP of Somalia is stolen from welfare programs. Entire city block-sized construction sites jabbering with the cacophony of rapid-fire Spanish and the wail of mariachi music, or deserted when an ICE SUV appears on the horizon.
Europe is about as badly off. Entire suburbs on the outskirts of cities are brimming with hostile foreigners remarkable mainly for their reliance on welfare, inability to adapt to the harsh European weather, and hatred for the nations that host and feed them. Reports of Grooming Gangs, abductions, beheadings, and terror attacks fill the headlines of France, Germany, and England. Even as national budgets run out and nations fill to the bursting point, more rubber dinghies full of invaders arrive and are welcomed with open arms.
It is as if everyone, everywhere, all at once is experiencing life as a Roman along the frontier during the crisis of the Third Century or decay of the Fifth, yet with groups even more barbarous than the Germans and Huns marching across the frontier of civilization in their endless, ragged legions. Such is life when the telescopic philanthropists desire not just to help those who are continents away instead of those who are their needy neighbors, but bring in the wretched and needy of the earth to replace their neighbors.
Why They’re Here
It is important to remember why these people are here. Some are here to prey on us. The Tren de Aragua gangsters who took over apartment buildings are not here to live the American Dream, nor are the Grooming Gang Pakis blighting Britain out of a desire to be British. Some are simply predators, and ought be treated as such.
However, that is far from universal. The overwhelming majority are here because their countries are, as Trump put it, “shitholes”. Hence why all of Haiti would move here if it could, but few Swiss bankers or watchmakers have any desire to move to Detroit. That’s not to say the migrants don’t abuse welfare programs, overstrain public services, or otherwise behave poorly and cause issues once here.
That is all true. But they are primarily here because it is better, which is the same reason why all who can flee from North Africa to Europe do so and why even South Africa is struggling under the might burden of millions of migrants. Even the remnants of Western governance and the prosperity and opportunity it brings are so much better than what their wretched lands are like that they pour into our lands in their millions.
And so, despite not really wanting to be here, they are. As Erik Prince has noted and Dr. Bennett summarized, “most people would strongly prefer to stay in their own country - they just want Western governance.”1 Indeed. Such can be seen with El Salvadorians flowing back as Bukele brings peace and good governance to their blighted country, and with Venezuelans reportedly heading home now that Maduro is gone.
The solution to that is bringing back colonialism and taking Western governance to where they are, rather than letting them flow to where Western governance currently is.
Such is what used to be done, under the colonial regimes. But then that was destroyed in the name of equality, and now there is looting and devastation where there used to be functional civilization.2 Even if unideal, returning to colonialism is the best option we have when dealing with those who are incapable of ruling themselves.
The Three Available Options to Deal with the Migration Crisis
Such a point tends to get people mad. “Colonialism was too expensive!” “I don’t want to!” “Who cares, just leave them to their own devices and keep our borders closed!” “It’s not our job to civilize the world!” All that, and much more, is the outcry that comes whenever it is suggested that colonialism was a good thing or should be retried.3
However, whether we want to or not, we do need to deal with many of these regions.
Europe will always be interested in the oil and gas fields of Northern Africa, the Middle East, and West Africa. Somalia and Yemen will always matter because of Suez, however barren they might otherwise be. The cobalt and tin of the Congo, platinum group metals of Zimbabwe, copper of Zambia, gold reserves of South Africa, uranium of Niger, and much else besides make all of these countries places with which we must deal. The massive natural resources they possess are not only valuable but, in many cases, difficult to find elsewhere.
Similarly, sharing a land border with Latin America means the stability of those lands will always matter, as chaos begets migrants, and Europe faces a similar situation with its great inland sea and Turkish border, as events in Libya and Syria showed. Whether we want to deal with them or not, stability matters, and thus the nations that might become unstable matter.
Recognizing the reality that these dysfunctional places largely can’t just be left to rot (maybe Haiti can, as nothing is there other than Haitians) leaves a few options.
Option 1: Do Nothing and Embrace the Disaster
The first is to do nothing, and let the present mixture of anarchy, horrors, and human rights continue in the name of equality. Under this system, various tin-pot dictators can do as they please and cause whatever chaos they want, all while we help subsidize their disastrous looting of the world with “food aid”, allowing migrants from their nations to flow into our borders, treating with them on the international stage, and the like.
This attitude is why the whole Black Hawk Down incident occurred as it did: we were bringing food aid to alleviate the consequences of rule by gangsters, but were unwilling to provide governance or put a real strongman in power, and so the deaths of American servicemen were responded to by importing much of the overall Somali population. We could have just let the Italians and British continue to rule it, or ruled it ourselves; instead, we have Haitians in Dearborn and dead soldiers in Mogadishu, with life for everyone involved as miserable as possible.
Similarly, Britain did this with most of the African “Commonwealth” countries during decolonization, as Lee Kuan Yew notes with disgust in From Third World to First, and it’s what America did with Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela. This is the worst of both worlds, as the migrant hordes pour in while the resources are horribly mismanaged, and capital investments into them are destroyed. It is by such a process that the world comes to look like the Congo in Empire of Dust,4 with all the inevitable consequences.
As this option is a disaster, it should be thrown in the waste bin forever.
Option 2: The Generallissimo Option
The second option is to do the polar opposite of the human rights regime, and encourage strongmen who will at least protect the resources so that they’re accessible, regardless of what goes on inside the country, all while we just keep our borders closed.
This would essentially mean a repeat of the Banana Wars5 or Dulles-led overthrow of Guatemala to protect the United Fruit Company,6 but tailored towards strategic resources like uranium, base metals, rare earth minerals, oil, and the like. The Belgian attempt to keep Katanga in their sphere is probably the closest modern example to this.7 Depending on where it goes, the Trump action in Venezuela could also turn into such a move.
The advantage of such a policy is that it requires little effort, relies mainly on the locals doing the heavy lifting, and avoids the duties of outright colonization. As the focus is just on ensuring the uranium flows, not the quality of life or efficiency of the justice apparatus in Niamey, it’s also much cheaper.
The downside is that it requires a prolonged commitment to not caring about “human rights abuses” in all the states at issue. The Katanga Secession plan failed for this reason8: the UN, CIA, and other powers that were wouldn’t allow it, and justified their intervention on behalf of the abominable Congolese state by pointing to ridiculous ideas like human rights.
The same is true of why “we” let Pinochet be overthrown by the socialists, Brazil fall under the sway of the race communist left, or Gaddafi be overthrown despite agreeing to cut off the pipeline of migrants: what it takes for such strongmen to hold onto power is harsh and inevitably in the public glare, and inevitably our problems with the franchise and penchant for caring about the lives of others leads to the rule of such leaders becoming untenable.
It is the harshness of such rule that makes it untenable over the long term. Forever belittling the cries of the supposedly oppressed, patting supposed tyrants on the back, and moving on would work in theory…but is unlikely to work in practice, as the iron gauntlet is left glaring and glistening in the open, rather than being tactfully clothed in velvet.
Option 3: Neo-Colonialism
The last option is to do what Erik Prince suggests, and once again pick up the mantle of civilization, bringing it to the blighted but valuable regions of the world while shutting off the migrant tap by providing good governance and closed borders.
This could be either implicit or explicit colonialism. For example, Bukele is already doing a good job in El Salvador, and so doesn’t need the full treatment. A few advisors to ensure things are well managed, trade deals to help ensure the state stays prosperous, and investment deals to cement our influence would do the trick. Panama, on the other hand, has shown a willingness to bend to China when we’re not paying attention; it probably needs more explicit oversight to ensure it doesn’t fall into the wrong camp, and to ensure migrants are fully stopped from going across it.
The same sort of calculus can be done everywhere. Does the Congo really need the full colonial treatment, or would an expanded version of what Erik Prince is already doing there—with a larger security force providing more protection for the mines, miners, and support infrastructure being put in place as mining companies restore the road/rail infrastructure and mining facilities themselves—be sufficient, and avoid unpleasant questions? Does Libya need to return to Italian rule, or could a bombing campaign help allied militias recover the parts that matter and cut off the migrants, in exchange for American and European companies being given deals for rebuilding the ports, providing jobs, and making life better for the residents?
It is already true, as Bruce Gilley notes in The Case for Colonialism, that the residents of these places are asking when the Europeans are coming back. The warlords don’t want the Europeans back, nor do the drug cartels or kleptocrats. But the average people do, and providing them with it would make their lives and our world significantly better.
Whatever the specific form in which it plays out in each case, however, the overall trend will likely be and should be that it is handled by primarily private actors, and that it gradually provides improved living conditions that obviate the problem with Option 2.
It would have to involve enough influence to ensure that Western governance is established and maintained, enough security to prevent migrant-driving anarchy, and enough investment to make the resource extraction and service provision eventually remunerative. It would probably end up looking, either formally or informally, like the approach Erik Prince wanted to take to Afghanistan.9 In such a case, government would be privatized but beholden to the home government, much like a better version of the East India Company of old, and involve a Viceroy running the country semi-privately with the twin goals of making a profit and providing good governance.
It would be a difficult balancing act, to be sure, but would nevertheless be workable. The resources—uranium, oil, base metals, etc.—are valuable, and generally inexpensive to extract in many of these places. What is required to extract them is security, infrastructure investment, and good governance that eliminates the present state of anarchy. Fixing those things by providing security, good governance (namely Western justice norms), and investment would solve both the resource extraction conundrum and the migration problem. Venezuelan migrants to America weren’t an issue before Chavez, after all.
Colonialism Has to Come Back
Colonialism will have to come back, as something needs to be done for reasons of security. The migration crisis cannot continue or it will destroy us, and our polities lack the steel spines necessary to indefinitely hold off invading hordes who just want a better life. We can fix that by providing them with a better life…in their home countries. Providing economic opportunities and good governance, the main ingredients necessary to stop most migrants from coming here, is what a return to colonialism can provide.
Yes, it will be difficult, expensive, and the egalitarian hurdle remains. But, of the options we have—allowing chaos, encouraging ruthless dictators, or colonialism—it’s probably the most workable. Also, in being company-based rather than government-centric, it’s less likely to raise continual complaints about its expense, as the imperialism of old did. Meanwhile, in providing effective governance, establishing a workable security regime, and building out the economies of these places through investments in resource extraction and infrastructure, thus providing jobs, it’s likely to significantly reduce the flow of migrants. Nothing is perfect, and it would perhaps be ideal to be uninvolved entirely…but that’s unlikely to end well, as we’ve seen.
Fortunately, the Cold War is over. The Jimmy Carter-style reasons given in yesteryear for why we had to avoid colonialism and instead play nice with the worst dictators imaginable while crushing every successful land under the boot heel of equality no longer apply. Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow is no longer operative, and the communist apparatus dedicated to using the supposed sins of colonialism to push dysfunction is gone. China cares about resources, as does Russia, but both are ruthless and focused on the resources…not rambling about the white devil.
In short, the ideological resistance to such a program of renewed imperial rule, likely under a private rather than public aegis, is entirely internal, and can thus be more easily overcome. There are no ideas of grand strategy that justify dysfunction, no buffoonish geopolitical reason to once again justify the destruction of Rhodesia, and with the right incentives and legal protections, men like Prince could and would act.
Their doing so would be immensely salutary, and have the added advantage of appearing legitimate to neutral observers and the natives themselves, as Gilley notes happened the first time around in his The Case for Colonialism. He notes:
European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes-all relatively voluntary acts. Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and geographies concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives.
Nothing is perfect, and the wailing cries of those most committed to equality will always sound when the white man rules in black Africa, even if he does so for the best. But they can be ignored because, as we have seen with opinions on nuclear energy changing on a dime thanks to the energy needs of AI, those whose opinion matters are still ultimately cognizant of needs and reality.
The reality now is that more of these resources, whether Nigerian uranium or Zambian copper, are needed in prodigious quantities, and the migrant crisis has caused such issues that it’s threatening the stability of the Occident. So many already want to, and most inevitably will, want to fix that. This is the right path for doing so, and the one most likely to appear legitimate and thus last for the long term.
Featured image credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Thanks for reading! If colonialism and good governance interests you, check out my new video series on Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak:
As Curtis Yarvin notes in his Open Letter:
In the second half of the 20th century, the Third World passed from its old colonial masters, the British, French and Portuguese, who were certainly no angels but who were perhaps at least a little less brazen, to a new set of ruthless and cynical overlords, the Cold War powers, whose propaganda skills were matched only by the devastation that their trained thugs unleashed. Under the mendacious pretext of “liberation” and “independence,” most remnants of non-European governing traditions were destroyed. Major continents such as Africa were reduced to desolate slums ruled by corrupt, well-connected fat cats, much of whose loot went straight from Western taxpayers to Swiss banks.
Zoomer Historian and I talked about this here:
This is covered some in The Road to Kalamata by Mike Hoare, and ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare: The Legend by Chris Hoare. I also wrote about it some here:
Every word here is the truth. Why should American Citizens especially those born here be silent about what is happening to our country? We should not. Why should Citizens not oppose and propose solutions to this problem as we the people ARE the governments of this nation? We should.
It says "we the people of the United States" not we the Republicans or Democrats or more accurately Demopublicans of the United States or any other political faction, lobby or special interest group. It especially does not say we the Oligarchs.
Great thoughts, suggestions and post.
Great article, came to the same conclusion myself. The reason 3rd world countries suck is due to the populace. They cannot run themselves so you will need westerners directly overseeing the civil service including tax office, military, infrastructure, police, courts etc. The natives are naturally corrupt, incompetent, clannish, unhygienic and dysfunctional.
Also the young men of western countries need grand tasks, responsibilty, lucrative opportunites and adventure. The British ruled the whole subcontinent with 20,000 officials and soldiers. With modern technology providing excellent ability to leverage ones time similar numbers should be achievable today. Less than 300-500k westerners can run most of the dysfunctional 3rd world.