Mainstream politicians, for the most part, seem to fail to understand the popular sentiment on immigration. The famous case of Gordon Brown describing one woman as a ‘bigot’ comes to mind. As a universalist, I believe wholeheartedly in the right to freedom of movement. I also believe that the popular understanding of immigration is wrong. I will not, however, describe people I disagree with as bigots and racists, unless I intend to utterly alienate them from my position.

In progressive circles, insulting people may shame them into changing their minds. The average person, however, does not seek your respect or admiration and will reflect your disgust right back at you. Many of the arguments in favour of immigration seem to ignore or belittle the concerns people have. Concerns which I believe are unfounded, but I can understand them.

By failing to properly address these concerns, the left has largely allowed both the pro and anti immigration arguments to be dominated by the right. Since the right wing arguments for immigration largely consist of calling British workers lazy, it’s not difficult to see why opposition to immigration is so high.

People have noticed that wages are stagnating. Unemployment is low, but many of those jobs are temporary or otherwise unsatisfactory. Opponents of immigration point to the competition they face from migrants who may work for little money and live in squalid conditions, especially if they came here illegally.

Of course, the natural response upon hearing this is to ask why we are expected to sympathise with the former and not with the latter. But we should find it in our hearts to sympathise with everyone.

People correctly recognise that they should have a right to earn a living. The social darwinist argues that nobody owes you anything – you have to make yourself useful. My response is that if you deny people sustenance they will eat you instead.

As we have argued in the One World League, manual labour is being made increasingly redundant by improvements in machinery and computing. Staff who feel entitled to inconvenient things like lunch breaks can be replaced by terminals which can run throughout the night.

The end result of this will be poverty and starvation on a mass scale, enforced by brutal dictatorships using advanced military and policing technology. In the meantime, as the European working class is being made irrelevant, workers from the rest of the world are filling in the slack. Currently a lot of manual labour still needs to be, well, manual, even as low level service jobs are withering.

Though much of it can be performed abroad, plenty still needs to be done here, and immigrants from poor countries are more pliable than local labourers.

However, in this regard, illegal immigrants are preferable to legal ones. Although we might wince at people being referred to as ‘illegals’, as if they weren’t even human, that’s close to the truth of the matter. If you live in hiding from the government, you have no protection, no way to fight back against abuse, no way to assert your rights. In the same way that anyone who has entered into an illegal agreement with a landlord to save money has found themselves compromised when it comes to complaints.

But this is the first hole in the argument against immigration, though you may not see it yet. I’ve heard people often say they have no problems with legal immigration, just illegal immigrants. Well, if you’re serious about wiping out illegal immigration, I can tell you right now the quickest and cheapest way of doing that. More legal immigration.

Let people be registered. Let them work for the same wages you do. Let them be covered by the same rights you are. Then they can’t be exploited, and you won’t have to face competition from people living in slums and scraping by on barely anything.

Not convinced? Okay. You want to end all mass migration, legal or not. Right you are. So do I.

That’s one thing that astounds me in all this. So little investigation into the root causes of mass migration. Sure, people point to the war in Syria, or famines in Africa, and so on. But that’s not the question. Throughout history, individuals have been possessed by wanderlust, thrown their possessions over their shoulders and gone travelling. But that’s not what we’re seeing. Generally speaking, people don’t want to leave their homes. Given a choice between living somewhere that speaks your language and practices your culture, where you have a home and a place in society, and throwing all that away to make a dangerous journey to a place which doesn’t even want you there in the first place, which would you choose?

What makes people move en masse from one place to another? Global inequality. People move from poor areas to rich ones. Places plagued by war and famine to more peaceful pastures. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s right. If you think, for some reason, you deserve to live in a secure location and they don’t. It doesn’t matter how high you build your walls and dig your trenches. They will come, and they will come to get some of what you’re having.

So if you really want to end immigration, you are really committed to doing whatever takes, you will join me in calling for world peace and global equality.

Now you might say, you don’t want to give up anything. Maybe that’s one thing you care more about than immigration – maintaining your quality of life. You might perhaps be outraged that I suggest we surrender money for our health care and social services, and give it to people who haven’t given us anything in return.

But I agree with you there, too. You shouldn’t have to give up anything. In fact, you should still be demanding more. There is enough for all of us to share, we just have to distribute it properly. And right now it’s the people at the top, in every country, who are taking everything and leaving us to fight over the scraps.

My solution – the one proposed by the One World League, begins with a land value tax and universal basic income. Not just for the UK or the US, or the western world, but anywhere people exploit the land and natural resources for their own benefit.

Maybe you’re worried about what else would have to be done to implement those policies. It’s an understandable concern. Many governments and organisations which have promised redistribution used it as an excuse to line their own coffers and crush their opponents. Those who claim the noblest intentions should be subject to the harshest scrutiny. But that is an article for another day.