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On both sides of the Atlantic, people respect – even revere – the Economist. I’ve never been able to figure out why. Part of it might be its rather old-fashioned habit of not putting bylines on articles – a practice that can lead addled readers to believe that, rather than getting just one person’s take, they’re reading something definitive, trustworthy, authoritative. Perhaps some of the Economist’s better articles can indeed be described this way. But when the rag addresses such topics as immigration, absolutely nothing it says should be taken seriously. Its editors and writers seem unable to let go of the quaint view that immigration is virtually always good – at least for business, which is the Economist’s main concern.

Here’s something I wrote about The Economist in 2007:

In recent years, rising concerns about the growing Muslim presence in Europe have forced the Economist to publish the occasional article, or even cover story, about Muslims in Europe – the consistent purpose of which has been to deny that there’s any real problem.  The rest of the time, the Economist seems happy to pretend that the Muslims aren’t there at all.  Consider this sentence from an Economist article about the use of English in Brussels: “Perhaps Brussels should accept its fate as an international city, and switch to English.” To which one can only say: if the city wants to accept its fate, maybe it should switch to Arabic or Turkish.

Nine years after I wrote those words, ISIS members exploded nail bombs at Brussels Airport and set off another bomb at a Brussels metro station. Thirty-two people died at the time (three later deaths were also attributed to the attacks) and over 300 were injured. This was, of course, only one of many such jihadist atrocities that have taken place in Europe in the years since 9/11 – the latest being the execution by ISIS gunmen, this past March 22, of 60 people at a concert venue near Moscow. (As it happens, the Moscow killings took place eight years to the day after the Brussels attacks.)

These atrocities have been horrifying reminders of the downside of immigration, especially from Islamic countries. But the Economist has refused consistently to change its tune. On March 18 of this year, it ran a lengthy article whose sheer absurdity started with its headline: “Without realising it, Britain has become a nation of immigrants.” “Without realizing it”? The subtitle is also ludicrous: “Another surprise: it’s very good at assimilating people.” “Good at assimilating”?

First of all, where in Britain can you find anyone who needs to be told by the Economist that their country “has become a nation of immigrants”? The people of Britain have been aware for years of this transformation, although many of them dare not be politically incorrect enough to say anything – or, at least, anything critical – about it. One person who has dared to be critical is the comedian John Cleese, who famously said in a 2011 interview that “London is no longer an English city…it doesn’t feel English.” Eight years later, he recalled this statement in a tweet and added that, in the intervening years, “virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation.”

If Cleese focuses on London, the Economist prefers, in its March 18 article, to focus on Reading. And if Cleese laments London’s metamorphosis into what the Economist likes to call an “international city,” the Economist celebrates the changes that immigration has wrought in Reading. It opens with an anecdote about Reading’s Lifespring Church, which in 2013 had a “small and not varied” congregation but which now draws hundreds of people from “more than 40 countries,” their diversity “reflected in the thicket of flags on both sides of the stage during Sunday services.” One question: if these people are so assimilated, why the flags? (This in a country, mind you, where it’s considered the height of gaucherie – or worse – to fly the country’s own flag.)

Yes, a great many Brits “fret…about immigration and integration”; indeed, the number who “would prefer to see less immigration than more of it” is more than twice as large as the number of those who feel the opposite way. In a democracy, this should matter: if citizens don’t want their country to be radically transformed, they should be listened to. But the Economist doesn’t even acknowledge this point. Instead, it argues that these people are misguided. For one thing, when they think of immigration, they “often have places like Rochdale in mind.” But Rochdale, which “contains just one sizeable foreign-born group, from Pakistan, which has not always rubbed along well with the white British majority,” is, according to the Economist, “atypical.”

That’s an interesting euphemism: “not always rubbed along well with the white British majority.” In Rochdale, as it happens, scores of working-class white girls have, over a period of decades, been the repeated victims of Muslim rape gangs. Police, social workers, and journalists not only failed to protect the girls – they mocked them, threatened them, and treated them as trash. Why? Because they feared that the accusations leveled against the rapists would disturb “community cohesion.” And Rochdale isn’t alone. These so-called “grooming gangs” have terrorized several other English cities, including Rotherham, Bradford, Oxford, Newcastle, Bristol, and Telford. The abuse continues to this day. But the Economist advises that if you want to “understand Britain’s present—and future—as a nation of immigrants, it is better to look elsewhere.” Yes, by all means look away – just like the police, social workers, and journalists.

What does the Economist want us to look at? Well, for one thing, it wants us to note – and applaud – the fact that “[t]he number of international students enrolling in British universities has tripled since the turn of the century,” with “[m]ore than half com[ing] from China, India and Nigeria.” It also wants us to know that the National Health Service “relies heavily on foreign-born nurses, because Britain does not produce enough.” Then there’s the fact that while the children of immigrants in other European countries “score far worse” on standardized tests than natives, their counterparts in the UK “are a shade behind” the natives “in reading and a shade ahead in maths.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that immigrants in the UK are doing so well educationally; it’s just one more illustration of the fact that members of Britain’s white working class, even now, continue to be far more disrespected and underserved by schools and other public institutions than their counterparts elsewhere in the West.

To turn from the Economist’s rosy report to a debate posted online on March 22 was to experience something close to psychological whiplash. The debate, entitled “Is Immigration Good for Britain?,” had two participants on each side. But even the immigration enthusiasts weren’t anywhere near as gung-ho as the Economist. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee argued that the UK “couldn’t survive” without immigration; because of “our own failing as a society,” Britain needs foreign students, nurses, medics, carers, and IT specialists. (I looked up Toynbee. Yes, she’s the granddaughter of the famous historian. She lives in the beautiful East Sussex town of Lewes and also owns a villa in Tuscany.)

Then there was the left-wing commentator Aaron Bastani, who actually defended immigration by pointing out that Hans Holbein (1497-1543), Henry VIII’s court painter, was an immigrant. Bastani asserted, condescendingly, that it’s important for Brits to meet people who don’t “look, think, and sound” like them. And he noted that while poor countries like North Korea and Eritrea have very low levels of immigration, rich ones like Qatar, Singapore, and Switzerland have very high levels of it – as if the levels of immigration accounted for the degree of wealth and not the other way around.

On the other side – not criticizing immigration in general, but opposing mass immigration of the kind currently underway in Britain – were podcaster Konstantin Kisin and university professor Matthew Goodwin. Like the Economist, both men pointed to the scale of the immigration – but unlike the Economist, they were anything but blithe about it. Kisin noted that Britain took in more immigrants during the premiership of Tony Blair (1997-2007) than it had between the years 1066 and 1950. Last year, 700,000 immigrants entered Britain – “not a number of people that we can credibly attempt to assimilate.” Goodwin observed that because of these sky-high numbers, “over the next 12 years, this country is going to change in ways we can never begin to imagine,” with the number of newcomers equaling “five cities the size of Birmingham.” Like the Economist, both Kisin and Goodwin mentioned the unpopularity of the UK’s mass immigration, but unlike the Economist they didn’t dismiss this detail out of hand. “There is no mandate” for Britain’s mass immigration, said Kisin; Goodwin pointed out that this mass immigration was taking place “without popular consent.”

If you’d bought what the Economist was selling, you’d come away from its March 19 article believing that Britain’s immigrants represented a boon to its economy; Goodwin emphasized that, on the contrary, the people pouring into the UK are overwhelmingly unskilled workers who are taking “more out of the economy” than they’re putting in. The Economist made glowing references to doctors, nurses, and computer experts; in reality, however, only 15% of immigrants to the UK have high-skilled jobs, and the result has been the country’s “longest decline in GDP since the 1950s.” Kisin pointed out that because of this mass importation of cheap labor, the UK is actually “one of the poorer rich countries,” with the world’s 25th (or so) largest GDP per capita. Goodwin agreed: Britain has “the sharpest regional inequalities in the Western world,” and its immigration policy is nothing more or less than “a Ponzi scheme…to help our leaders avoid dealing with the long-term structural problems that this country faces.”

Unlike the Economist, which chose to focus on a few productive, law-abiding immigrants in Reading, Kisin emphasized that “not all immigrants are the same”: while there are ten times as many Poles in Britain as there are Albanians, there are twice as many Albanians in prison as there are Poles. The Economist applauded the number of foreign students at UK universities; Goodwin focused on the truth behind this misleading statistic: the “second- and third-tier” universities (which “shouldn’t be universities” to begin with) draw “one-year MA students from abroad, most of whom quit before the year is up.” The Economist cheered foreign doctors: Goodwin, noting that many of these doctors have “second-rate” educations, called for more medical-school slots for British citizens.

In support of mass immigration, Toynbee and Bastani served up cloying clichés. Bastani contended that immigrants “drive taxis” and “teach our kids”; immigrants whom we think of as “they,” mused Toynbee, eventually “become us, and we forget that they were they.” When Kisin told a harrowing story of immigrant crime, Toynbee chided him, saying “it’s quite low to use anecdotes instead of figures,” and adding, pathetically: “All sorts of people commit crimes.” Both she and Bastani complained that the illegals coming to the UK on boats are only “a tiny percentage” of immigrants; Kisin pointed out that this is only because the number of legal immigrants is so high. He praised Australia for stopping such boats: “They have politicians with balls.”

Perhaps because of time constraints, there were important points that none of the debate participants got around to mentioning. For example, nobody mentioned that the huge jump in immigrants under Blair was, as a former Blair advisor told the Telegraph in 2009, partly due to Labour’s desire to “radically change the country” and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” Nobody mentioned the last few months of violent antisemitic protests by Muslims in several British cities, which show the reality of welcoming armies of people into your country who don’t “look, think, and sound” like you. Nobody mentioned the development in Britain of cowardly two-tier policing that gives such protesters wide berth while coming down hard on anybody waving a Union Jack; or the hundreds (or thousands?) of Brits who have been arrested, tried, and even imprisoned for criticizing Islam online; or the grooming gangs, which still thrive.

The other day, I scrolled quickly through my X (formerly Twitter) feed and ran across the following within the space of a few minutes: a video of Pakistani immigrants going berserk in London, apparently because they want free public transport; a video of another melee bearing the caption “THEY ARE USING ILLEGAL MIGRANTS TO EVICT BRITISH PEOPLE FROM THEIR HOMES”; and yet another video, reposted by the British actor-turned-activist Laurence Fox, in which two British Muslims agree that the “age of consent doesn’t exist in Islam.” It’s clear to anybody with eyes to see with and ears to hear with that, no matter what the Economist wants us to believe, Britain is in the midst of a massive immigration crisis that has already transformed it dramatically and that, as Goodwin promised, will transform it even more dramatically in the years to come. In the face of this dire state of affairs, the Economist’s mendacity is breathtaking. At the debate, it was Konstantin Kisin who stated the principle that should have been the bottom line from the start, and that, if taken seriously by British authorities, would have saved Britain from the dire fate that awaits it: “We get to choose who comes into our country.” The very idea, it would seem, is alien to the sensibilities of the folks at the Economist.