I am a Left-wing Immigrant- Here are 10 Anti-Immigration points I agree with
so that you don't waste your breath arguing over common ground
The rich have convinced the poor that:
Hoarding resources at the top is a result of Darwinian justice
Poverty is a result of people migrating.
I want the poors convinced of this framing to listen to me, a fellow poor, and not the rich in poors’ clothing.
So, as a good leftie, I will use my four years of therapy and 12,5 years of marinading in woke metropolitan elite London to make them feel heard.
In this spirit, below are the anti-immigration points I, a left-wing immigrant and granddaughter of refugees, concede to.
Open borders, in the year of our Lord 2025, is more utopian than nationalising Greggs and making sausage rolls free for all British purebreds. In the current system of liberal democracies, without a nation-state, you can’t have a welfare state, you can’t regulate the market, and you can’t have social solidarity without a social contract of taxes and services. My friend says, “The right to have rights comes with a political community that defends your rights”.
Low-skilled immigration can depress wages in low-skilled industries because immigrants from poorer countries are willing to work under worse conditions and for less pay. There is robust evidence immigration helps local development, but the benefits do not extend equally to all classes. You are exchanging lower prices for consumer goods and services for everyone today versus designing and delivering a farsighted economic/industrial/skills strategy and being realistic about the tradeoffs.
Some successful asylum seekers are not in danger in their home country any more than any of the billions not born in a liberal democracy are. I know of people who applied for asylum seeker status because they were disorganised and forgot to apply to extend their visas on time. I know of people who have refugee status yet are buying houses and opening businesses back in the countries they got asylum to stay away from within the last few years. I have no authority to say what percentage that may be, and I am aware of my hubris in questioning the legitimacy of cases whose details I have not studied; there is no shortage of war and destruction across the world, and I do not believe a perfect asylum assessment system exists- nothing man-made can ever be so. That does not make the one we have anything less than a testament to humanity’s biggest virtues: compassion and solidarity. I understand mentioning these exceptional stories does not help dissuade the anti-refugee stigma that is rampaging Europe. I include it nonetheless because sharing a common reality is the only way to find common solutions.
The UK can’t take everyone who would benefit from moving here because that could be everyone not born in a liberal democracy. The UK is under enormous financial strain, and racial and ethnic tensions are chipping at its civic culture. Reviewing the Refugee conventions sounds like a nice idea until you realise how difficult it was to negotiate its terms the last time. The express intention of its current form was to ensure that even if countries feel selfish and unperturbed by the pleas of displaced people, as they did during WWII, and still do now and have always done throughout history, they are forced to regardless of changing government flavours. For example, if suddenly you had a wave of Jewish refugees but also an anti-semitic government that did not want more Jews because their supporters and media made a convincing case about how they are harmful to local culture. I wouldn’t *dare* of course, claim there is a direct parallel to today and any other specific ethnicities, but this was the historical rationale. Our ancestors were wise in creating these conventions. Our parents forced us to share our toys with our siblings. War-torn and war-wise predecedeeing generations force us to give shelter before we find out about the mass graves.
yes Immigrants sometimes come from very racist cultures, and that is a problem. While there is racism in the UK and the US, Britons and Americans are objectively two of the most open-minded nations in the world. There are simply no better places to be an immigrant than there! Sadly, the same cannot be said about the countries some immigrants come from. My beloved Greek motherland is an example. Greek people are objectively more bigoted than Britons, and when they move to the UK, if they are to be successful, they have to learn to avoid using the slurs that get them giggles in Greece. This is why sudden influxes of immigration concentrated in small areas are not a good idea, not least because the racial and ethnic minorities already settled there do not deserve racist abuse from emboldened large groups from ethnically hostile nations. For example, you wouldn’t send hundreds of Turkish immigrants to live in the neighbourhood I grew up in. The majority of people there were Pontiac refugees, a Greek ethnic minority that suffered genocide at the hands of Turkey and who were ousted from their homes after the Second World War. I get along swimmingly with my Turkish contemporaries now- we share cultural habits after all -but were my grandparents alive, they would have needed extra care to swallow this pill. I felt sad reading a story about an Indian Hindu cashier harassed by Afghan Muslim refugees from an asylum hotel in a quaint English village. No one can argue against granting people from Afghanistan asylum, but there needs to be provisions and expectations for integration.
You can be racist against white people. It is annoying feral right-wing men on the internet made this claim sound inflammatory and juvenile by adopting the same victim narrative they accused the left of, but it is true. Some non-white people speak about white people as a unified group with equal moral standards. I personally don’t mind a good white ppl joke if it is funny and punching up. The problem is when these attitudes metastasise and develop into phenomena like the Rotherham grooming gang scandals where Pakistani men prayed on poor white girls and explicitly said that they considered them to be fair game because they are non-muslim white trash. This to me is evidence we have reached a stage where you can be racist against white people. One of the grooming gang victims said her abuser told her that: “Muslim girls are good and pure… They are our girls. White girls and non-Muslim girls are bad because you dress like slags…therefore you’re immoral. White girls sleep with hundreds of men. You are worthless and you deserve to be gang-raped.” The use of the derogatory term “Kafir”/“Kuffar” is a case in point. The poorer, older and more vulnerable white majority nations become, the more culture could move that way.
Some skilled visas are not very skilled and have no economic necessity for them to be granted apart from making it easier for businesses to hire (which is not unmerited but also not unalloyed). I will never understand why Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, for all their unhelpful rhetoric on immigration, would come up with a list that includes professions that are not urgently needed, not particularly skilled and plenty of people already in the UK want to do. I am sure the business lobbyists who cornered Boris argued their case well, but the UK does not have a dearth of Florists, Customer service supervisors, Market research interviewers, or Fitness and Wellbeing instructors. Sure, if one were particularly good, it would make sense to have a way to bring them over, but this way, anybody with a registered business willing to pay the Home Office to become a sponsor can bring people in whether they have tried to hire locally or not. There is a kebab shop that has given out dozens of skilled worker visas since 2023 to ‘butchers’. Redditt is overflowing with horror stories of legal workers being essentially used as slave labour. Sectors such as social care, where there is a genuinely urgent need for workers, have ballooned with people in limbo brought over by rogue agencies that sprouted up to take advantage of the new visa scheme under Johnson.
The government should be able to deport immigrants who commit violent crimes and are a threat to the public. Human rights must apply to everyone, including criminals, but it goes against most people’s natural conception of justice (apart from lawyers who believe legal fictions are as immutable as the laws of physics) that people will be able to stretch the right to family life or against persecution, degrading treatment and torture to the extend where rapists and paedophiles continue wasting public funds appealing their deportations because they were in witness protection decades ago or because they have family in the UK. The legal, prison and deportation costs for a Somali man whose deportation was stopped after passengers staged a pre-flight revolt came up to £1 million. The passengers didn’t know that this man was a convicted gang rapist of a 16-year-old girl, and they were reacting to noble human instincts by responding to his pleas- he was screaming that he was being sent back to a place where he would be killed. It is a net positive to have a legal system that works, and we must cherish civic sentiment that intervenes when they see a man who looks afraid and distressed. I do not want to see those soft hearts harden by the realisation that they are being conned into supporting rapists.
Integration is a two-way street. It is a virtuous attitude of a culture to be tolerant of other cultures. We should not be tolerant of intolerance. For example, we criticise Christians who believe that being gay is a sin. We should also criticise people from other religions even though we are not from their culture. It is not ‘punching down’ to point out that a person has cultural hang-ups that are harmful to our social fabric, like sexism or homophobia. I have a lot of Muslim friends who have found shelter from their homophobic communities in the UK. They want to continue being able to practice Islam and live with their gay partners openly. In my undergrad in London, I had started a dialogue about religions with a Muslim girl who was into student politics with me. She encouraged me to attend a Muslim lecture that was happening on campus. I went in good faith and was disappointed at the soft sexism that was present throughout. I asked her then what she thinks about my Muslim friends who are gay. She told me she questions their motives and that they are going to hell as they are not really Muslim and everybody who doesn’t genuinely convert to Islam before they die will go to hell. I asked her if that means that my deceased grandmother, who was married to a Greek orthodox priest so wouldn’t have the chance to convert to Islam, was in hell now. Most definitely. When she ran for student council, I was talked out of bringing up her bigotry because it’d make me sound petty. I agree that it would have, but even a tiny percentage of such a hateful attitude would not have been tolerated on, say, a British catholic Tory.
Learning basic English is a reasonable requirement and expectation for people moving here, though we should remain patient with incomprehensibly thick Greek accents. If you expect boomers who retire to Mexico to pick up Spanish, you understand why it is essential that people permanently living in the UK can speak to their doctor without an interlocutor.
Moving and committing to the UK has made me both more enlightened and more civilised. This has been in no small part because it challenged my Greek biases and exposed me to different cultures. Seeing the nation I joined in good faith indulging its smallest vices makes me deeply sad.
Stop suckling on Xitter’s race war tit.
Leave the racism to the racists. Nativism is a cope. Pluralism is the real flex. Turning the other cheek is BDE. I didn’t learn this growing up in Greece; The masters of suave taught me by example right here in London.
Isn’t it cool that in the UK, a foreign-born immigrant woman with a difficult-to-pronounce surname became the leader of the most successful political party in the world? I think it’s cool, even if that’s not my own party’s achievement - yet.
I applaud you for writing this which I expect wasn't that easy. I honestly don't think most on the left are brave enough even if they agree, and my inner cynic tells me that if you weren't Greek, you may well be criticised or even ostracised by some people for saying it. Certainly it would have been impossive 5-10 years ago.
Unfortunately the current liberal-left society has proven too weak to uphold the neccessary values to make Pluralism work. Now we will have to endure a serious right-wing counter reaction. In Denmark the liberal parties had the presence of mind to pivot and fix the problems themselves, but there's no chance the ideologues of the British Labour could do that. We'll be lucky if even the Conservative party here has the stones.
The problem the modern right and left have with immigration control is mainly psychological and leads to ideological consequences.
People of the left believe in the equality of the personhood of all humans. This idea is enshrined in human rights legislation (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). This is an idealised notion of relationships of mutual respect and support. We can contrast this with nationalism which usually believes in a folk (volk), - a culture and a way of being developed over a long history of which a foreigner can never truly be a part (Herder).
Nationalists always protest that they are not racists because they bear no ill will towards citizens of other countries, including visitors to their own. They believe that they are simply asserting their right to sustain their own culture and don't have an issue with other people asserting their own culture - but for them, this should be done in their own territory because cultural mixing leads to confusion and decline.
However the link with cultural identity and opposition to large scale immigration connects easily with ethnicity and discimination against ethnic minority citizens. This is where you often encounter confusion in nationalists who may feel that their black mate is okay because he's like us. The outsider is always archetypal.
The left regards nationalists as racists because they perceive, usually correctly, that nationalists treat people of different ethnicities as "other" and in power, would accord them different rights.
The universalism of the left dovetails, but roughly, with economic liberalism. Economic liberalism is concerned with the flexibility of labour and resists any claims by labour to considerations of ethnicity which might constrain the labour market.
For the nationalist right, this frames the current political split in which they see threats to a culture from immigration and seek to defend it against universalists for whom as they see it, economic and social equality represents interchangeability. To nationalists, universalists are all the same. They are what Alexander Dugin calls "globalists".
However the left is much more ambivalent about economic globalism than economic liberals because globalised capital has disempowered many local communities. Unsurprisingly, such local communities are tempted by the nationalist message as with some justification, they see themselves
as victims of uncontrolled globalism.
Its my opinion that globalism has failed because for decades, democratic states have been governed by economic liberals (neo-liberalism) who failed to manage the problems of globalisation adequately. By failing to co-ordinate policy, in particular over tax, they lost control of global capital and became its supplicants, competing to disempower their peoples in a competition for investment. This ruined their credibility in many communities.
Fear drives nationalism. It is a psychology of withdrawal, behind walls, psychological,
legal and physical. Yet economic liberalism has always operated, and continues to operate, by coercing labour to work at the lowest cost (wages, tax, regulatory and with subsidy) in order to generate the greatest profits. Workers under capitalism are driven by fear of the poverty and purposelessness it manufactures for the losers of its game.
The Trump moment should bring some clarity to all of this. The confusion of the Trump
administration lies in the fact that it is attempting to meet so many contradictory agendas.
But for the left, the answer is to attack the
fear. It is to renew social democratic control over capital by sponsoring global agreements on tax, to create a protected local banking system provding capital to and recycling profits through local communities. It is to fund regeneration schemes in de-developed areas. It is to take climate change seriously. It is to acknowledge cultural difference, yet to insist that the basic values of the left on free
speech, freedom of choice of religion and the equality of women are not negotiable. If this means a robust debate with cultural authoritarians of the left and right, take it on.
We have tried leaving the future to markets. Its a silly idea that focus on short term benefit
leads to optimal results for the future. The left has too often been about defending against change. Now it needs to build a future which consists less of getting as much for ourselves as we can and more where we all contribute our best selves to its creation.