01 April 2026
Published on Substack
Speech notes from an address to the Danube Institute’s Family Formation and Future Conference
E&OE
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Perhaps because it’s a small country, that can’t just think about itself, Hungary excels in hosting big picture discussion; and what could be bigger than population policy, and whether replacing-with-migrants, the babies the-West-won’t-have, is a form of civilisational suicide?
Plainly, these are disordered times.
People-who-should-know-better think that humans can change the planet’s temperature, much like Canute’s courtiers thought he could order the tides. Parliaments declare that gender is whatever someone says it is, even for minors. A couple of years back, world leaders, even the pope, took policy advice from a disturbed teenager. Perhaps the weirdest manifestation of this cognitive dissonance is “Queers for Palestine”, passionate in their support of a place where they’d be at risk of a push from tall buildings.
It was Chesterton who wrote, “the disintegration of rational society started in the drift from the hearth and the family”. The solution, he said, “must be a drift back”.
The modern world, tends to overlook that every person’s first source of nourishment and support, the first foundation for meaning amidst chaos, is the family.
Especially today, families come in all shapes and sizes, and unconventional families need be no less loving. But whatever their make up, they need to be strong, for society’s sake, because family is where the instincts of support and solidarity that nations need are first learnt. It’s the experience of family that feeds Burke’s key insight, of society, as a “partnership, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born”.
In this chain of existence, it’s our children that are the culmination.
Yet if, indeed, the greatest act of faith in yourself, your family, your country, and your culture is to seek renewal through having children, every Western country is in the grip of existential crisis.
Consider current birth rates: France, the US, and Australia, 1.6; and Britain, 1.55. Then there’s Italy at 1.2 and Spain at 1.1. Hungary’s birth rate, that was just 1.2 in 2011, rose to 1.6 after a decade of pro-natalist policy, such as exempting larger families from tax, but has now fallen back to just 1.3, suggesting that it’s societal morale, as much as economics, behind individuals’ instinct to reproduce themselves.
Throughout the West, receiving migrants has replaced having children.
Britain, for instance, had virtually no net migration prior to 1990. In the nineties it averaged about 100,000 a year; in the noughties about 200,000 a year; in the 2010s about 300,000 a year; and in 2022 and 2023 it exploded to almost a million a year, before falling back.
Migration to the US, much of it irregular, has averaged about a million a year since the 1990s, but exploded during the Biden presidency when perhaps 10 million people are thought to have entered the country, mostly illegally from Mexico.
Even Australia, that’s long-had a formal immigration programme, running at about 100,000 a year from the 1950s through to the early noughties, and about 200,000 a year till the pandemic, has since seen numbers explode to about 400,000 a year.
There are many good arguments for migration. Certainly, in all the settler societies, there’d be no nation but for migration. Migration can bring in new skills. It can open our minds to new ideas and ease our fear of difference. And by giving newcomers the chance to make a better life for themselves and their families, it can add a humanitarian dimension to a nation’s story.
The supreme patriotism of people from obvious migrant backgrounds, such as the two last British Conservative leaders Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, testifies to the gravitational pull of English-speaking civilisation.
But these days, the main justifications for immigration are that it’s needed to sustain an ageing population; and to fill the jobs that locals won’t do, or at least, not at current wage rates. Plus, in countries like Australia, Canada and Britain, that it builds multicultural diversity, even though this risks creating “a nation of tribes” and watering down national identity.
And there are two further factors in modern migration.
Cheap air travel and the internet mean that it’s possible more-or-less to live in two countries at once, mainly resident in the new country, but frequently in the old one too, to build a house for the extended family, or to maintain business contacts. Rather than joining Team Australia, for instance, some recent migrants are merely living in Hotel Australia and taking advantage of the facilities.
Then there’s Muslim migration.
A few decades back, there were almost no Muslims in the Anglosphere. Today, about 7 per cent of Britons are Muslim, as are almost 4 per cent of Australians, and up to 2 per cent of Americans. These percentages have roughly doubled in the past 20 years, partly through immigration and partly because most Muslims still take for granted large families.
Like everyone else, most Muslims just want to get on with life. Yet there’s a strong strain of political Islam, that believes in a caliphate; in Sharia law; and at least notionally in “death to the infidels”. That elevates religious solidarity above all other concerns; and that reaches out, especially in the secular West, through schools and mosques, urging “good Muslims” not to become contaminated.
For many Muslims, the choice is to give up Islam altogether or to become part of a militant minority working to subvert the “Dar al-Harb”.
After the Bondi massacre, when a sub-continental Muslim and his Australian son slaughtered 15 innocents, in the single worst attack on Jews anywhere since “October 7”, the local Muslim leadership insisted that this had nothing to do with Islam, even though the pair had Islamic State flags in their car. This is typical of the official Muslim reaction whenever people shouting “Allahu Akbar” commit atrocities; to insist that there can be nothing wrong with Islam, whatever might be done in its name.
As well, the reaction of the government was not to denounce this attack as un-Australian, but to warn against outbreaks of “Islamophobia” and to repeat the multicultural mantra that “our strength is our diversity”. Even though the problem with any diversity that comprises, both liberals and cannibals, say, is that eventually the cannibals eat the liberals.
Lately, at least in Australia, Britain and Canada, mass migration has produced the paradox of overall economic growth along with declining wealth per head; hence the ongoing “household recession” that’s a factor in political disruption and social unrest. Record migration has meant downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, sustained pressure on social and physical infrastructure and serious strain on social cohesion.
In short, especially when combined with official multiculturalism, immigration is now badly damaging much of the West – so if we do need more people, to staff our care homes, pick our crops, serve our tables, and clean our premises, it’s high time that we looked to ourselves rather than to others.
Sure, to those convinced that countries like the US, Britain and Australia are fundamentally tainted by slavery, imperialism and Aboriginal dispossession; to those persuaded that the West is only rich because others are poor, and that environmental destruction was an essential part of the West’s commercial success, mass migration is the third world’s way of fighting back, via peaceful invasion.
And if a country really is built on unceded, stolen land; or if we’re all going to fry in the coming climate Armageddon, what’s the point of having children to compound the injustice?
Yet the truth is that no countries on earth are less racist or more colour-blind. The Anglo-Celtic core culture is the world’s most welcoming. The Judaeo-Christian ethos is the world’s most universal. The long Anglo-American ascendancy produced what were until recently the best times in history, that were more free, more fair, more rich, and more safe for more people than ever before. And until conservation efforts were hijacked by the emissions obsession, air and water quality and landcare, at least in the developed world, hadn’t been better since before the Industrial Revolution.
The West should always be open to newcomers who have a claim on us, or who can genuinely make a contribution. But as a former Australian prime minister once said, the best migrants are our own children – who’ve absorbed from birth the character of the country.
Not everyone can have children, of course. Some are so rapt in good works that they lack the bandwidth; some devoutly wish to have children but can’t. What’s sad is that so many people want the perfect home, the perfect career, and an abundance of experiences, before they have what’s perhaps the most fulfilling experience of all, only to find that they’ve put off having children until it’s too late.
So here’s what’s to be done.
Immigration numbers must come down, drastically, at least till infrastructure can catch up and social cohesion can rebuild. “The numbers are too high, and the quality is too low”, as the new Opposition Leader in Australia has declared; so let’s have longer probationary periods, tougher citizenship tests, and a much more rigorous definition of the skills we supposedly need, for all long term newcomers.
And let’s do as much to encourage women to have families as we do to encourage them to have careers. Like more generous parental leave, like tax systems that acknowledge taxpayers’ family responsibilities, as well as just their income, and like making it easier for first home buyers.
I used to think that the West could endure, in a way that no previous civilisation had, because of its readiness to learn from others and to absorb the best of the rest. Yet in recent decades, that capacity for self-criticism has metastasised into a form of self-loathing: a corrosive disdain for its own strengths; a readiness, at least among the intellectual classes, to take anyone’s side but its own; finally, coming to see having children as just another lifestyle choice.
Yet for all our current failings, it’s only Western countries that people naturally flock to. That surely makes them worth preserving – and gives each generation the duty to reproduce itself.
