If you took a drive through areas like Sparkhill and Sparkbrook in Birmingham, Britain’s second city, there would be little to indicate that you were in England at all, beyond the gray skies and Edwardian terraced housing. These neighborhoods are almost exclusively Pakistani, with halal restaurants, sari stores, and Muslim charities occupying much of the commercial spaces. Former churches are now mosques, pubs have given way to shisha lounges, and Palestine flags hang in shop windows. But drive just a few minutes to areas like Northfield, and you will be met with a very different scene—no Palestine flags here, but countless English and British flags dangling from lampposts. 

These flags are the clearest visual symbol of what Fred Siegel called the “Lebanonization of Europe” nearly 20 years ago. They are the physical markers of the ethnic divisions that exist in Birmingham and in many other towns and cities across Europe—from Brussels and Paris to Stockholm and Berlin. Just like the murals that have long been a feature of Belfast—a city divided between Catholic and Protestant—these flags indicate when you have travelled from an area occupied by one ethno-religious group to an area occupied by another. 

“Diversity is our strength,” is a slogan routinely trotted out by Western politicians to celebrate the new multicultural European societies they have created (“Diversity Built Britain” was even minted onto a 50p coin in 2020), yet Birmingham doesn’t feel particularly strong. Rather, it feels profoundly divided. Different groups may live in adjacent areas, but they remain contained in their own ethnic enclaves. They don’t shop in the same stores, go to the same schools, or revere the same holy texts. In many cases, they don’t even speak the same language. Mutual distrust has, in many European cities, led to hostility, civil unrest, and outright violence.   

This status-quo is the consequence of decades-worth of mass immigration into Europe from every corner of the world. At first—in the years immediately after the Second World War—the numbers of incoming people were comparatively small, and the reasons why they were invited were understandable—Europe was ruined after history’s most devastating conflict and foreign workers were needed to help rebuild it. But this decision to allow limited numbers of people to work on the continent opened a door that Europeans have since been unable to close. There was an assumption that these people would stay only for a while and then return to their home countries. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel said as much in a speech she gave in 2010: “At the beginning of the ’60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany, and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay; sometime they will be gone.’ But this isn’t reality.” These workers, mostly men, stayed in Europe and soon after, they invited their families to join them in their adopted countries. Within a few decades, immigration had gone from a highly targeted policy of seeking workers to plug specific gaps in the workforce to an unstoppable flow that almost no government was able to stem. As the populations of Europe changed from ethnically homogenous to diverse, the sense of what these societies had always been disappeared and was replaced with the tenets of multiculturalism—an ideological position that implicitly advocated for ever more immigration by framing it not only as a good and enlightened but necessary for survival in the modern world. In the process of all of this, European societies were changed beyond recognition despite no populace ever voting in favor of such a transformation. 

In recent days, it has been announced that Taiwan will open up many service sector roles to foreign nationals for the first time in more than 30 years. Just as with Europe in the post-war period, the reasons for doing this are totally practical and understandable. Taiwan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world and therefore needs young people from abroad to swell the ranks of the country’s working population. It has also been made clear that significant restrictions will remain on immigration, with strict language and salary thresholds. But again, Europe’s early experiments with immigration were similarly contained. 

This is not to say that the proposed changes will backfire or that Taiwan’s birthrate is not a huge issue that needs to be resolved. But it is to say that any Taiwanese lawmakers promoting immigration as a solution to domestic problems should proceed with extreme caution.  If Europe’s example proves anything, it’s that it is very difficult to close the border once it has been opened—even a little. There is no guarantee that foreign workers will leave once their work is complete. Some will, but many others will put down roots, make friends, form relationships, and maybe start families. In that case, it is not impossible that they will invite their parents or other dependents to join them in Taiwan. What was intended as a few workers arriving to fill job vacancies could soon become entire families or even communities arriving on the island. The nature of Taiwanese society, especially in the big cities, will change, and the idea that Taiwan wouldn’t be able to function without immigration will become conventional wisdom. Immigration will be just another feature of Taiwanese life—something that may upset some people but that nothing can really be done about. 

It is important for Taiwan’s leadership to fully consider whether this is a road they want to embark down. The island is, obviously, at the center of one of the planet’s most fractious geopolitical struggles, but day-to-day life remains generally unaffected by events on the other side of the world. There is the occasional pro-Ukrainian rally in Liberty Square or Ximen, yet there is realistically little chance that the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, or anywhere else will be played out on the streets of Taipei or Kaohsiung. For Western societies, however, mass immigration has made international conflict domestically dangerous. To import millions of people from across the world means to import—to some extent—the problems of the world. Only last week, the violence of the Middle East was replicated on a Sydney beach. It is unlikely that this attack would have occurred if those groups engaged in Middle Eastern wars did not also live in sizeable numbers in Australia. 

Taiwan faces threats from abroad, but within the country itself, it has managed to preserve what many Western countries have lost—a harmonious society with a strong sense of its own culture, traditions, and values. During my three years on the island, I felt far away from the tumult of the rest of the world. Life in Taiwan is, by and large, stable and peaceful and safe. Of course, no nation will ever be totally free of violence, as the terrible mass stabbing in Taipei just a few days ago shows. However, this was an isolated and highly unusual event. In Europe and other Western countries, such atrocities have become depressingly routine. 

Taiwan is not just a country but a national community, in which it is implicitly understood that the people who live beside you think, feel, and act in the same way you do. It takes a long time to build a society like that, but it can take no time at all to shatter it. Whatever the long-term remedy to Taiwan’s birthrate crisis, I hope there is a solution that doesn’t endanger the fragile and precious harmony that Taiwanese society enjoys.