Dave Hill's Big Britain

The Emigrants Are Taking Over

The Telegraph's Sam Leith says Something Must Be Done:

"The obvious thing to do is to reassert control over our own borders. Every doctor, teacher, accountant and engineer should be forced to register with a government agency. They should be given vouchers for food, and their passports held by the state. Those considered a flight risk could be detained in camps - or 'domicile centres' - in and around the Channel ports. If their appeals to be allowed to leave are turned down, they should be forcibly repatriated to Esher, Tunbridge Wells, Dorking and Hammersmith and, if necessary, tagged."

He continues:

"It is no longer enough to shrug our shoulders in a bien-pensant way, and prate about 'yooman rights' while our middle-class white migrants are allowed to swamp the peoples of other nations, destroying their unique characters and their traditional ways of life. That, at least, is the view we can expect the self-styled "hard-headed pragmatists" of the Right to take...This newspaper believes in free trade, and is in favour of the unhindered movement of labour across borders to areas of economic need...[But] many British expatriate communities refuse to integrate with their host nations. They congregate in ugly ghettos in the French countryside and along the Spanish coast, eating their own food - egg and chips; imported Marmite - and speaking their own language. They offend the tolerant and peaceable people of their host nations with their imported and alien customs of 'binge drinking', promiscuity and visible displays of pink flesh."

Hear, hear Brigadier! Let's face the facts!:

"Though many of them claim to have been 'forced' out of their own country by a 'totalitarian' government and a punitive tax regime, let us be clear: these people are selfish economic migrants. The worst of them write seditious letters to newspapers back home in an attempt to destabilise the Government."

What a scamp. Leith's mischief was not appreciated by a majority of commenters. Quoth one, tenderly:

"A typical hypocritical bourgeois attitude and sanctimoniously sickening criticism towards all English working person wherever they reside. Go outside your office and look, listen and learn. Don't be so neo-liberally fascistic as all your greasy journalist and media pals."

The columnist's sin in such eyes was to put his finger on the great contradiction in much Right thinking: the one arising from, on the one hand, lauding unimpeded market forces while, on the other, angrily resenting some of the cultural changes that inevitably occur as a result. Oh yes, and the hypocrisy. He's got a handle on that too.

It's rather fashionable to say that the Left is caught in a paradox over the effects of globalisation, for favouring immigration yet, at the same time, fretting over the strain on public services and the erosion of social solidarity. Insofar as that is true - itself debatable - I've a feeling that the Right's double bind is at least as disabling and, boy, does it hate anyone pointing it out.

Talking Immigration

In the wake of Monday's undercounting disclosure, there was an informative debate about immigration on the Simon Mayo programme yesterday (listen again). The participants were the ubiquitous Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, the Tories' Damian Green, immigration advisor Charles Kelly and Danny Sriskandarajah of the IPPR. Two from the left(ish), two from the right and, intriguingly, more consenus than might have seemed likely. All agreed that workers from overseas have both brought benefits and posed challenges, and that more efficient counting and monitoring mechanisms would be helpful. The differences were largely about degree: numbers, long-term effects and the desirabilty and likely efficacy of various possible measures to control immigration more closely. Many of these came down to how big we want our economy to become, though Sir Andrew, as ever, was fretful about "the nature of British society" and so on. (I fret about that too: but I'm a good liberal who is prepared to tolerate the presence of Sir Andrew in my country so long as he pays his taxes, respects the law and behaves in a civil fashion). But the strongest impression the debate left on me concerned the practical difficulties of slowing or stopping immigration. Can it actually be done? Which brings us to another question. Should a freedom-loving nation even try?

Just asking

Immigrant Workers & Crime

The usual shudder passed through me when I awoke to the Beeb leading with an immigration story: an immigrants-and-crime story to boot. Why the shudder? One of the Right's standard whines has it that "we" aren't allowed to "tell the truth" about immigrants because "the politically correct brigade" will say it's racist. That's crap, of course. Firstly, the Right drones on about immigration unendingly - as if anyone could silence them! Secondly, the truth is that people on the Left are sometimes wary of debating immigration not because we think it intrinsically racist to do so, but because decades of history show that such debate gives others the opportunity to be racist and stir up fear and hatred for immigrants - especially by linking them with crime.

So what did Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, actually say? She wants her force to have more money because its job has become bigger and, in some ways, trickier. It's bigger because there's been an influx of newcomers settling in Cambridgeshire and it's trickier because much of that influx comprises migrants from overseas with a poor command of English, some of whom haven't understood that, unlike in the countries they've come from, it's not OK to drink-drive or carry knives and it takes time - police time - before they cotton on. She said those within the immigrant population who were dedicated criminals often took more police resources to investigate because there was an international dimension to their dodginess. She also said that the immigrant population did not have any greater propensity for crime than the native one. And she definitely did not say that immigrants were responsible for a crime wave in Cambridgeshire.

Sadly, this is not how some have chosen to spin her remarks. And the Right claim it's the Left who won't debate immigration honestly. The nerve!