Free Immigration Quotes

You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

We could have free immigration if we did not have a welfare state. In principle I would like to see free immigration.

If you have free immigration, in the way we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited. The people who came benefited. Because nobody would come unless he, or his family, thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And, the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit.

What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?

The E.U.'s tax and regulatory policies, climate-change and welfare spending, and free immigration even in wartime are gradually ruining Europe. That's why I believe Brexit is good for British freedom, political autonomy, and the survival of democratic capitalism.

There is no such thing as free immigration. Every self-governing nation is going to determine what sort of people it will admit through its boundaries.