Immigration Policy Should Not Be Tied to Identity Politics – Lessons from a Coverup

Editorial note: This article contains discussions of sensitive topics related to sexual abuse, which some readers may find upsetting. Please read with discretion.

After spending days defending the H-1B visa recipients he had hired and relied upon in his own businesses, Elon Musk suddenly moved on to a new topic: migrant rape gangs. On January 2, Musk tweeted that the British media had “hid the fact that a quarter million little girls were – still are – being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain.”

While the quarter million figure is highly debatable, the sheer numbers of girls who were victimized in this way is truly shocking. An inquiry in 2014 came up with an estimate of 1,400 girls who had been victims of organized rape rings just in the city of Rotherham from 1997-2013.

According to an article in The Free Press:

“These men targeted the most vulnerable girls—the poor and the fatherless, children in care homes—with candy, food, taxi rides, and drugs. They raped the girls, passed them around family and friendship networks, pimped them into similar networks in other cities, then discarded them as they reached the age of consent.”

Why was this widespread practice largely ignored? Why didn’t law enforcement and politicians do more to help these young girls?

The answers to these two questions overlap, but they also vary. Politicians and media feared the optics of targeting immigrants of color and worried that they would embolden far right white nationalists. Local Labour Party politicians feared losing Muslim votes. Police expressed some concerns about stoking racial tensions between native Brits and foreign-born Pakistani immigrants, but often simply turned these young girls away because they saw them as poor white trash who were complicit in their own abuse. Indeed, this perception may have been why many of these girls were targeted in the first place, and the lack of response from police and politicians no doubt emboldened the abusers.

British institutions are learning a lesson that others have learned over and over again–attempts to cover up sexual abuse to avoid scandal always exacerbate the consequences they seek to avoid. When the abuse inevitably comes to light, the damage done to the reputation of the institutions and those they were trying to protect is far worse. This is of course not limited to Muslims or immigrants. Catholic clergy in France alone abused 216,000 victims (close to the number Musk claimed were abused by Pakistani rape gangs in the U.K.) between 1950 and 2020; but when priests have been found to abuse, church leadership has shifted them around to avoid attention. Evangelical churches like Willow Creek hid sexual misconduct by its celebrity pastor Bill Hybels to protect all of the “good work” the church had been doing. Outside of the sphere of religion, Penn State University covered up serial child sex abuse by its assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky in order to protect the reputation of the college.

One thing that all of these stories have in common is that people with power threw victims under the bus to benefit a protected class and further some perceived noble goal–and ended up doing neither. When double standards creep into institutional policy, we call that identity politics.

Some have predictably used this story to further their hobbyhorse view that immigration to the west must be shut down to protect western cultural homogeneity–which is of course yet another form of identity politics. Musk’s apparent inconsistency on immigration–shifting from defending its importance to America’s economic success to calling out the coverup of migrant rape gangs within a small span of time–actually points to a better and more consistent approach–individualism.

The insight of this approach is that we cannot create a just society, let alone a just immigration system, on the basis of collectivist identity politics. The far right wants to treat immigrants differently by downgrading their humanity. The left wants to treat them differently by not addressing criminality and violence among immigrants as they would among native, white males. But the libertarian approach, and indeed the Christian approach, is to treat the immigrant not as better or worse, but as an equal human. This means punishing them just as we would punish the native born for victimizing innocent people. When our approach to open immigration looks like this, and not like the progressive double standard of identity politics, immigration will be the consistent net positive that libertarians traditionally argue that it is.