Introduction

Many people know and understand that stereotypically left wing causes – such as the environment or transgenderism – can be used to promote state control agendas. However, there is much less consideration of how right wing ideas can be used to push the same control matrix. As right wingers claim to be ‘small government’, it is often assumed that right wing ideas cannot be used to push for these sinister agendas. However, there are some ideas on the right that can be used for this purpose. One of the most significant of these is immigration.

It should be noted that the terms left and right are overgeneralisations, just as not all left wingers support transgender ideology, for example, not all right wingers are supportive of the ideas outlined below. For example, this analysis would not apply to many members of the libertarian right. However, I will use right wing in this article as a shorthand.

Definitions

Certain right wing political parties – for example, Reform UK – are extremely concerned with illegal immigration and use this to appeal to voters. I would say that reducing immigration is Reform UK’s main policy. In the UK, there are a large number of small boats that attempt to land on the shore so that people can illegally enter the country. There are some examples of both refugees and economic migrants entering the country via this method. Parties such as Reform argue that this has negative effects on the country, such as crime and the risk of terrorism, as well as reducing the wages paid to British people via illegal immigrants taking jobs. They also point to costs to the stage of hosting individuals they have caught illegally entering the country (the famed ‘migrant hotels’). As such, a more robust response seems attractive to many people on the right, or many working class people who are concerned about their income.

Pragmatism

When looking at this topic, we need to consider it pragmatically. What would effectively policing illegal immigration look like?

Britain has an open coastline.

According to the Ordnance Survey: “The coastline length around mainland Great Britain is 11,072.76 miles [17,819.88 km].”

Policing simply chokeholds or more obvious areas would not be effective, since boats would simply avoid the more obvious routes even if it was riskier. Bear in mind that the boats seen on the news, etc, are only the boats that are known, there may be many that successfully crossed the border, and the people disappeared into the shadow economy. As such, there would need to be a massive increase in border control police.

This is a large amount of territory to have to police effectively. Sure, there may be some areas of this where it would be difficult to land a boat, so that may reduce the volume somewhat. Nevertheless, it is still a large amount.

Businesses employing illegal immigrants would be another significant issue, as there would need to be increased checks on businesses, and raids on businesses if it suspected they are employing illegal immigrants.

There is also the issue of removing the immigrants effectively. This might encourage more rubber stamping in the judiciary to deport people more quickly.

In other words, effectively removing illegal immigrants would require an increase in state authoritarianism. More police officers would need to be employed, and there would need to be an increase in checks, possibly arbitrary ones, to see if people were hosting or employing illegal immigrants.

Agendas

During Covid, and even before that, it became obvious that one of the key state agendas was the introduction of Digital ID. It was argued that digital identity needed to be linked to vaccine passports in order to ‘control the virus’.

However, policing illegal immigration can also be used by the establishment to promote digital IDs. On this argument, these IDs would be required to confirm that people are citizens or legal migrants. In fact, one of Tony Blair’s arguments for the original ID card scheme, which was eventually scrapped, was to crack down on illegal immigration.

Conclusion

Nominally right wing and left wing ideas can both be used to promote a state control matrix. The establishment is not concerned with which of these ideas it uses to get you to support the increased level of control. So long as it can garner enough support to get these ideas through or at least get you to tolerate them, that is the only thing that matters. People should consider whether ideas they support (whether they are right wing or not) can be used to support these agendas and not assume their ideology is immune from being used by the establishment.