Simon Sebag Montefiore scapegoats migrants for Western decline
By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso ·
On The Free Press, Simon Sebag Montefiore claims migrant care threatens Western stability, ignoring the hard labor sustaining the comfortable nations he seeks to defend.
On the latest episode of "The Free Press," host Bari Weiss sat down with British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book on Middle Eastern geopolitics. Amidst the grand historical parallels, Montefiore offered a detached assessment of global movement. He claimed that European governments welcoming migrants was a "disaster." He warned that offering "free welfare, free health, free housing, free hotels" will cause wealthy nations to "cease to be comfort democracies and they will become failed states."
The View From the Grand Hotel
Montefiore’s narrative rests on an illusion. He treats working people moving across borders as passive beneficiaries of Western largesse, lured north by soft welfare and lodging. Having spent years organizing hotel housekeepers and reporting along the U.S.–Mexico border, I know who works inside those hotels. They are not freeloaders taking a vacation on the public purse. They are the mothers stripping linens at dawn, scrubbers polishing tile floors, and cooks feeding the cities that debate their right to exist. To describe human migration as a run on boutique hospitality inverts economic reality.
Montefiore and Weiss spend much of their conversation lamenting the decay of Western confidence and historical knowledge. Montefiore rightly notes that air power and targeted assassinations rarely overthrow entrenched security regimes like Iran’s. He calls the belief that military strikes alone can topple a dictatorship "wildly overoptimistic." That specificity holds up when analyzing Middle Eastern statecraft. Yet when the conversation turns to migration, historical rigor vanishes. The familiar anxiety of the comfortable class replaces it.
When Empire Blames the Help
The strongest case for Montefiore’s warning is one that local mayors and urban planners often make. Rapid arrivals can place real pressure on municipal services, housing stock, and local budgets if state administrative capacity fails to adapt. When public infrastructure is stretched thin without coordination, working-class neighborhoods bear the immediate friction of integration while policy elites debate from afar.
That argument, however, misdiagnoses the cause of the strain. Migrants do not drain host economies. They build and sustain them. In construction, agriculture, elder care, and service industries, foreign-born labor fills the essential low-wage floor that keeps Western cities functioning. They pay payroll and sales taxes while being excluded from the welfare benefits Montefiore claims they consume. The fiscal strain does not stem from human labor. It stems from political systems that demand low-cost work while refusing the legal visas and wage protections that allow families to settle, pay taxes, and integrate openly.
The Long Record of Border Rhetoric
The long record reveals a consistent pattern. Whenever inequality deepens or consensus falters in the West, leaders declare human migration an unprecedented crisis threatening civilization. We saw it when Operation Blockade lined the Rio Grande with patrol vehicles. We see it now across Europe. Yet border enforcement and security budgets expand exponentially. They grow not because they stop movement, but because private contractors, security firms, and border bureaucracies bill billions to manage the apparatus.
Nations do not become failed states because housekeepers, farmworkers, and asylum seekers cross a line on a map. They fail when they believe comfort can be preserved behind higher walls and militarized borders while relying on the labor of people they refuse to recognize as human. A country that treats human movement as a security threat to be caged rather than an economic reality to be governed by visas and fair wages has already abandoned its democratic standing.