Having lived for much of my life outside our over-developed country, and working in contexts of extreme poverty and social exclusion in Africa and Asia, I am disheartened by some significant assumptions in the immigration debate:
Firstly, what gives us the right to preserve a global status quo comprising an economically, politically, and culturally dominant and exclusive club? Many phrases used amongst Liberal Democrats, seem paternalistic, even oppressive, towards people whose plight we perpetuate by our insularity:
“‘Soft’ on immigration“: We’re not ‘soft’ enough, if it means being repentant enough to share the world’s resources and opportunities.
“An ‘earned amnesty’ for illegal immigrants“: What makes people migrate illegally? Like a nasty electric shock, it’s caused by a large potential difference (between our assertive maintenance of our standard of living, and another’s desperation). Why should anyone have to ‘earn’ their survival? And on a semantic note, no person should be labelled ‘illegal’ – save that for their behaviour.
“‘Bogus’ language students“: How often are they in fact ‘desperate survival students’, with circumvention of our systemic intolerance their main lesson?
“Genuine asylum seekers“: Better just schedule the fake ones for deportation, not discuss our role in creating and perpetuating a global economy straitjacket that people are desperate to escape from.
“Keep a tight lid on future immigration“: To my dog-eared senses, this sounds like a call to more stringently suppress desperate people.
Calls for, “fixing the borders and enforcing the existing rules effectively,” make me gag: The rules are unjust, and appallingly protectionist; not unlike turning away refugees.
Second, why shouldn’t individuals try to improve their circumstances, even if it means their being part of a ‘brain drain‘? We are the real problem, not least with our institutions dependant on harvesting trained people from poorer countries. ‘Migration points‘ may sound nice, but it’s just economic oxpecking.
Third, a “British population who now view immigration as bad for the economy,” are entirely correct in a special sense: The UK will have to give up a lot in the transition to a truly equitable world. But isn’t global equity much more ethical than perpetuation of privilege?
Fourth, global equity will not emerge from a 0.7% GDP contribution to international aid; it needs a total rethink about the way we interact with the excluded world, not the minimum charity levels needed to titrate away our sense of guilt.
Why, with our democratic vision, do we impotently persist in tinkering with existing immigration policy? Are we just ignorant? Am I fundamentally wrong? Or is it possible that many of us don’t want to share equitably? I don’t believe the world’s poor need us to have, as has been argued, “a nuanced debate about… detail.” They need a resounding apology and a huge set of repentant actions for our impaired humanity which has contributed so significantly to the disabling of so much of our world.
* Ditch Townsend is a Liberal Democrat member in Exeter.
4 Comments
You are fundamentally wrong, dangerously wrong even, if one is to take your remarks as anything other than philosophical whimsy. It is not the UK’s role single handedly to right the world’s wrongs and a doubling the UK’s population in less than ten years, which is what would happen without any immigration controls and the ensuing impoverishment of all, citizens and immigrants alike would be the largest collective suicide note in history. The role of an enlightened UK is to work with other nations and supranational bodies on policies to improve the standards of the rest of the world’s population. That can be done without impoverishing the inhabitants of these islands. Our role is one of leadership, not one of trying to feed the world’s poor or house them.
Please, don’t let this man anywhere near the 2015 manifesto!
While I wouldn’t go as far as the author, I think he has a point.
There are a lot of studies that show that the single best way to improve the position of an entire family in the developing world is to have one member emigrate to a rich country – so allowing some people to migrate from the developing to the developed world would have a huge impact on poverty.
There are also a lot of studies that show that immigration has financial benefits for both countries, essentially because immigrants rarely consume much in the way of state resources and tend to work long hours in jobs that people from developed countries wouldn’t want to do anyway.
So no, I wouldn’t advocate open borders (actually I would, but only as part of a bigger dream of a world where all countries are rich enough not to need economic migration… which is a long way off!). But what about temporary work visas for people from the developing world? And, more importantly, what about a more compassionate immigration debate that acknowledges that most immigrants aren’t ‘scroungers’, they’re brave people desperate enough to risk their lives for a chance of helping themselves and their families?
The hunter-gatherer speaks! But hunter-gatherers went out of fashion 13,000 years ago. The BBC tells me that we discovered cultivation at that time. Cultivation means that humans become more sedentary, and take control of their environment. It leads to the ideas of ownership of parts of the environment, and regulation about who can be in parts of it and what they can do there. This is probably the basis of almost every society today. It makes towns and cities and medical advances and societies possible. That looks to me like the justifiable reason why almost every country today controls immigration.