The last few years it has been my great pleasure, and privilege, to spend a few weeks of June at the Danube Institute in Budapest. This is the conservative think tank run by the inestimable John O’Sullivan. I’m a recurring Visiting Fellow. After decades of my professional life spent in orthodox left-wing institutions (aka any university law school anywhere in the anglosphere) it is a treat to spend a little bit of time during the year with those who have a broadly similar worldview to mine. You might encounter Americans, Brits, Central Europeans, Australians, but not any Canadians that I’ve met over the years.

And forget political and philosophical views, the views from the offices up in the castle district of Buda are something else. Spectacular is not overstating it. The Hungarian Parliament buildings make you think of Westminster in London only bigger and maybe even better looking. The next tourist must is the big synagogue on Dohany street. By ‘big’ I mean the biggest in Europe. It seats almost 3,000. And boy is it moving to take the tour. Built in the mid-19th Century it was bombed by the pro-Nazi Hungarian party in early 1939. It took bombing damage throughout the war while being used by the Nazis. The communists let it return to being a religious building for the few Jews still in Budapest. And then after the Wall came down, it was renovated and restored in about half a dozen years and contains moving memorials to some of the many Jews who were murdered and sent to the camps. The very young ones are the most confronting.

But here’s a damning observation about this working synagogue in Budapest. There is almost no security around it today. Other than the ticket-takers you’ll see one or two shopping mall type security types milling out front. Nor are Jews hiding their Jewishness. Now obviously I’m not Jewish, but it felt dead-safe to me. I asked a couple of Jews and they said that they thought it was safe too. Put it no higher than this – I don’t think any Sydney or Melbourne or Toronto or New York Jew would think it’s safer being a Jew back home than it is in Budapest. Nor would he or she hesitate to swap ‘the feel’ of life as a Jew back home with being one in Budapest. (If I’m wrong about this second-hand observation let me have it readers. But I was struck by how 1980s it felt around the synagogue and on the streets around it.)

If readers are thinking to themselves, ‘maybe that has something to do with the fact that Hungary (like Japan) has not gone down the three or four decades of mass immigration pathway’ then full confession, I was thinking that too. In fact I asked a good few of the Hungarians I met – so not just those at the Danube Institute but tour guides, bar waitresses, coffee shop types, really all sorts of people – and not a single one of them indicated in any way that they regretted the restrictive Hungarian immigration policies. Not one. Here’s a counter-factual test for you: if people in Canada, Britain, the US, and Australia back in the early 1980s had been shown the extent to which their political classes would go on to run virtually the world’s biggest per capita immigration schemes (ones that allowed universities to be proxy visa-getting factories and more or less gave up fully on assimilation in favour of unthinking, threadbare and platitudinous cultural relativist slogans and foundational premises) do you think that anywhere near a majority would have voted for it? Would a majority vote for it today?

Because we now know as well that all the frequently trotted-out economic arguments for importing huge numbers of people are very, very suspect. (Irregular verb: you say ‘are suspect’ and he says ‘are garbage’.) Sure, if you lived on an island of a 100 people and you let 50 come in that year then GDP would go up. It virtually has to because GDP just measures economic activity, little more than spending. But all those years the politicians were boasting about Australia’s lack of a recession – GDP going up and up – they weren’t telling you about the GDP per person recessions. They weren’t telling you that over those years no-immigration Japan was doing as well as big immigration Australia was faring in terms of GDP per person (or how the individual was doing, the measure that counts). And the careful, low immigration countries of Japan, Hungary, and Switzerland don’t have the ancillary problems of housing shortages and sky-rocketing prices or of ever worse traffic and failing infrastructure and all the rest that ballooning numbers carries with it. (Sidenote: Net Zero is a measure per country. The more people we let in, the harder it is to meet. So the Net Zero fanatics who favour big immigration – aka the Labor party and the Liberal ‘wets’ – have a cognitive dissonance, no?) The economic argument for mass immigration – ‘we’ve got to keep the base growing to support economies of scale and an aging population’ – amounted to a sort of Ponzi scheme that would eventually collapse. But not before some big inroads were made on the underlying cultural confidence of the host nation. Want to know the supposed economic argument I hate the most? It’s when incredibly rich types in inner city cafes sipping on their six-dollar cappuccinos condescendingly say, ‘Well, these are jobs the locals won’t do…’ Democrat politicians in the US say stuff along those lines all the time. It is balderdash. What they mean is ‘for this price locals won’t do it’. But raise the pay enough and the market kicks in and locals will do that job or any job. The new arrivals are keeping the cost of labour down. In Budapest, all the hotel cleaning ladies seemed to be Hungarian. So this is rich inner-city types basically saying ‘we like our gardens kept and houses cleaned for as little money as possible’. It’s self-serving on steroids. Sort of like near-on all the arguments we heard in favour of lockdowns by those in the political, public service and public health castes who weren’t paying any of the costs of them.

By the way, if you want to amuse yourself before the upcoming British election recall this. President Orban in Hungary and the David Cameron/Theresa May/Boris/Sunak Tories in Britain both came into office in 2010. Look at what the two outfits have achieved since then – not what the Guardian says about them, but what policies they’ve adopted – and you’ll have a pretty good idea why Orban keeps winning elections and the Tories are about to be deservedly slaughtered.