The EU should "do its best to undermine" the "homogeneity" of its member states, the UN's special representative for migration has said.
Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural.
He also suggested the UK government's immigration policy had no basis in international law.
He was being quizzed by the Lords EU home affairs sub-committee which is investigating global migration.
Who is Peter Sutherland? He is an Irishman linked to big business:
Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development, which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas.
He told the House of Lords committee migration was a "crucial dynamic for economic growth" in some EU nations "however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states".
Peter Sutherland puts forward two arguments for breaking down homogeneity in Western nations. The first is that it's necessary for prosperity, but the second is that it's a matter of individual freedom:
"at the most basic level individuals should have a freedom of choice" about whether to come and study or work in another country.
What are we to make of all this? First, I think the argument that you have to have open borders to do well economically isn't really what's behind the push to break down ethnic homogeneity.
A clue that Peter Sutherland isn't really motivated by "prosperity" arguments is that he advocates that Europe accept anyone who wants to work or study there rather than targeting those with skills. If I expand the quote I gave above it reads:
Mr Sutherland ... called on EU states to stop targeting "highly skilled" migrants, arguing that "at the most basic level individuals should have a freedom of choice" about whether to come and study or work in another country.
If that were put into effect then the European taxpayer would just end up footing a much larger welfare bill. One of the wikileaks revelations, for instance, was that 24% of Muslim men and 21% of Muslim women in the UK are living off disability pensions. Imagine if the Sutherland policy were put into effect and anyone could move to the UK. How would the massive pensions bill be paid for?
What Mr Sutherland also ignores is that if there is no longer an ethnic loyalty and identity in a nation, then there is less to keep the best and brightest of the native population there. In other words, let's say Mr Sutherland got his way and in 50 years' time there was no longer a sense of ethnic English solidarity in England. Why then would a productive Englishman choose to remain in England? He might instead go to wherever the weather was nicest, or the pay was highest, or the cost of living lowest.
So if radically open borders make no sense in terms of prosperity, then why push for them? Perhaps it's a case of multinational big business chafing against any types of restrictions on its operations. Perhaps those who see themselves as international movers and shakers see the more closed loyalties of the nation state as limiting the control of a globalist bureaucracy. Perhaps too it's the enduring influence of a right liberal ideology in which what is thought to matter is a self-determining life and so it's thought to be immoral for something predetermined, like ethnicity, to influence where we might choose as individuals to live or to work.
The Peter Sutherlands of the world need to be resisted. Imagine if he got his way and everyone in the world had the right to move to England. It would, over time, drive down the quality of life in England until the point was reached that it was no longer such an attractive place to live in, and it would make those living in England rootless - disconnected from a particular culture and tradition.
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