.‘We need to talk about white identity,’ Eric Kaufmann writes at the beginning of Whiteshift, ‘not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other.’
Kaufmann offers a simple explanation for the rise of right-wing nationalism in ‘the West’, which is that, as a result of immigration, the white majorities in Western countries are decreasing.
‘Today’s populist earthquake has little to do with economics,’ he says. ‘Ethnic change – the size and nature of the immigrant inflow and its capacity to challenge ethnic boundaries – is the story.’Europe, North America and East Asia – are now seeing their share of the world’s population decline.
In 1950, Kaufmann writes, there were 3.5 Europeans and North Americans for every African; by 2050, according to UN estimates, there will be two Africans for every Westerner.
While Japan and Korea have historically used automation and guest-worker programmes to counterbalance their ageing populations, wealthy majority-white countries in North America, Western Europe and Australasia have depended on immigration from elsewhere.
Even without further immigration, Kaufmann says, the size of white majorities is likely to decline through intermarriage. Most major US cities, as well as states like California and Texas, are already ‘majority-minority’: they have a majority black, Asian and Latino
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