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.
I will be criticised by some of the left but that is not because they are bad or stupid, it is because they place an ultimate value of human life and solidarity and recognise rightly that the framing of the immigration debate is wrong (immigrants are criminals that make us poor). Immigrants are people and we are all either immigrants ourselves or the descendants of immigrants. I say all this because I believe we need a common reality to have common solutions, which means spelling out as many realities as possible.
I will be criticised by some of the left but that is not because they are bad or stupid, it is because they place an ultimate value of human life and solidarity and recognise rightly that the framing of the immigration debate is wrong (immigrants are criminals that make us poor). Immigrants are people and we are all either immigrants ourselves or the descendants of immigrants. I say all this because I believe we need a common reality to have common solutions, which means spelling out as many realities as possible.
Im sorry to hear that you think the UK immigration debate is framed as "immigrants are criminals that make us poor".
I don't see that over my time growing up and living here over the last 43 years. I've seen everyone bar a tiny fringe minority take great care to point out that immigration helps the country. The only concern you tend to hear is about the 'rate' of immigration and the rate of change to some areas. I think the data supports this in terms of polling and general values of the UK.
The issue is whether we can have a serious and balanced conversation about immigration which includes both positive and negative aspects, and then create sensible approaches to dealing with it. As far as the mainstrea conversation, people tend to be aggressively attacked and shouted down for questioning immigration or multi culturalism.
The left would do well to make their case for the value of human life and expectations to help and support those needing it, with the political right who wish to preserve and ensure safety, in a rational and reasonable debate. Mis-representing eachother for political gain gets us where we are now.
This was the case until a few years ago. Now I see a lot of people emboldened and no longer embarrassed to generalise about immigrants. They are a minority, for sure, but a vocal one, and they are getting traction. To the point where one of the top 5 parties is comfortable having members calling for “remigration” of people born in the UK. And so many other people formerly civilised and considerate are now comfortable making nativist and offensive racist arguments with zero benefit to a measured discussion around immigration. But anyway, my post was obviously not targeted at them, as I don’t think they’d listen to me, but what I am trying to say is that there is a dangerous ideology that those on the left of me are trying to protect against.
I think the fear you mention about 'dangerous ideologies' is patronising and has proven more dangerous than actually talking about the issues.
They say up to a hundred thousand girls may have been abused by the rape gangs, all because people were afraid of being called a racist, or 'giving fuel to the far right'. Ridiculous. As a country we need to grow up.
That was ridiculous yes. But the BNP and its racist offshoots still exist. I don’t see why it so hard to see both of these. We don’t event need to prioritise or say which one is worse or whatever, I hate whatabouterism and the oppression Olympics. But I am not going to not defend left wing people worried about racism in the immigration when I see it returning in public discourse. And the racism in the immigration debate I was referring to here was not about the grooming gangs scandal but about the general discussion of immigrants as being themselves at fault for the UK becoming poorer etc
I do not know your personal circumstances but I understand that you may be surrounded by nice people who are polite and considerate but much of my work is going in hostile political spaces and being shouted at by angry white men because their “island is being invaded by a swarm of migrants” - you understand why for me, as an immigrant myself and the daughter of refugees who literally arrived in Greece on a boat, it would be quite pathetic to fail to see a problem with the tone that is developing. Hence this post to clarify the reality from the inflammatory hysteria. And as I said I do see people saying racist things and I don’t use this word lightly. I should be able to not concede that “racism doesn’t exist” and also concede that “we need immigration reform”.
Have you seen a single Home Office set of stats? Immigrants are more criminal in every type of crime that I have seen: rape, murder, theft, possession of a weapon, human trafficking, the list goes on and on. Have you never wondered why the safest areas are also the most British?
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.
"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?" Yes, it's pretty cool.
It'd be a lot cooler if criminals and financial parasites were removed from Great Britain, en masse. Many people in the country have not acculturated, will not acculturate, and are a FAR, far bigger cost than their additions can justify. I think a more interesting question than 'what are some common sense immigration policies we can get behind' is 'why has the government REFUSED, for more than 20 years, to honor any of the wishes of the electorate on this issue, even to its own serious detriment?' It's almost as if there's another agenda behind or around it all...
> The poor hear those words and think of longer lines at social services, more competition for housing and jobs.
If that argument works against immigration, shouldn’t it also work for deporting or killing an arbitrary fraction of the people who already live in your country and are not wealthier than you, as long as it doesn’t include you or any of your family or friends? I know, in order to coördinate, you need some clear marker to tell whether a random person belongs to the group being scapegoated or not. Yes, this gets very ugly very quickly.
"Immigrants sometimes come from very racist cultures"
Sometimes I ask foreigners to open my mind (which as an American, I am well informed is both parochial and closed,) on issues where I feel I lack perspective.
I've learned from the Cameroonian landscapers that all snakes are bad; from my Salvadoran neighbor that African Americans are altogether lazy; from the Indian proprietor of the beer store near me that you "can never trust any Chinese person of any kind."
Interesting post. I could comment on other points, but it's (4) that I think is at the heart of many issues and the one which may be most challenging to discuss.
By design, that convention (and arguably all such conventions) acts like a Ulysses contract.
On one hand, binding future governments to humanitarian principles regardless of shifting political winds seems like a smart move. There are plenty of social norms and conventions that aren’t written into law and can later be reinterpreted, sometimes for better but often for worse. A lot of the recent political debate — in the US, the UK, and elsewhere — has been about these norms and the limits of relying on everyone “playing nice” rather than having clear expectations and enforced behavioural standards.
That said, there probably has to be limits. We don’t know where they are (and they seem to be ill-defined) but countries are continually running up against the fight between contemporary democratic sovereignty of their elected officials in the here and now, and the ghosts of governments passed. Some American factions are toying with the idea that the constitution itself is outdated. Britain has been in a state of turmoil about the precise value of Parliamentary sovereignty with respect to international law since Brexit. I think all of this is exacerbated by the rate of change in our world increasing, too. More happens in a decade than used to happen, so a “a long time ago” is increasingly just short while.
If Parliament is sovereign, should any prior parliament rightfully constrain it? I would say no, except for the ordinary prudential considerations of avoiding whipsaw policy. (Even if you're charting a path to radical change, moving slow and signalling clearly can be surprisingly, pehraps frustratingly, important.)
However, I ought to admit that taking up such a position places me in a moral thicket and potentially at odds with myself. In issues like advance directives about voluntary assisted dying in the contemplation of severe, progressive neurodegeneration, I'm somewhat persuaded by a Ulysses-like contract condition. At the level of principles, this may make my stance on the whole class of 'future-constraint issues' a bit murky, inconsistent, and not entirely clear. Or perhaps these issues are vaguely similar on the principle level but sufficiently differentiated by context. I don’t know, but it felt appropriate to flag and to leave you with that mix of thoughts in the hope that it stirs something useful for either of us.
Bravo!! This reckoning must come from the left to have any chance of getting traction. Just like the reckoning that lowering taxes to the rich solves nothing and creates problems must come from the right.
WOW, I keep reading and agreeing with a fully support what I am reading. I enjoy objective opinion that is coming from a place of genuine logic. There isn't a single thing that you have stated in this piece that I don't agree with.
I wish more people had the grey matter to realize this is not xenophobic thinking.
Racism is such a difficult thing to define. The woman who was imprisoned for three years for a fb post in the riots last year was a childminder with a number of ethnic minority clients. It seems many speak highly of her. Not, then, a naturally racist individual but nevertheless undoubtedly guilty of an abhorrent racist outburst.
Is the apparent rise in racism actually a rise in frustrated anger at the smug condescension of the political class who continue to wilfully ignore the reasoned arguments you’ve outlined here?
As you say, Denmark is the exemplar. Continuing to ignore the issue contributed to giving us Trump. It could give us Farage here.
The denial of problems with immigration has contributed to pushing otherwise more politically moderate people to the right, but it has also emboldened those who were never on board with the progressive agenda of equality. I think racism is a human phenomenon and quite natural, I think we would be better off if we were more forgiving of people for it because we are all instinctively racist to an extend- which is how we evolved to protect ourselves, to distrust those different and prefer our own kind. It is rarely the case that someone is just a racist bigot, most people are on a broad spectrum of vices and virtues. The Facebook lady I believe got the sentence because she was inciting violence, I need to dig out the case and read it properly though because a lot of ink has been spilled about it and when a court hearing is involved I need to know the details before I commend.
I completely agree, and would extend that a little further with the idea that a lot of smearing of racism is really useless and divisive. This is because true racism is quote rare nowdays, so hustlers need to try to find a more subtle issue which is 'affinity bias'. I don't regard affinity bias as racism, more just our tendency to choose people more like us because that feels more known and safe instinctively. We need to consider this and try to work with it, but trying to ruin peoples lives for it is pointless and stupid.
> There is robust evidence <link> immigration helps local development
The link provided here is so irrelevant to the modern case, as to refute the very point. It concerns itself with immigration levels to "US counties between 1860 and 1920", and cross-checking with how rich those counties are now.
Thus this concerns: documented official immigration (e.g. through Ellis Island), from UK, Europe, and China mostly, with a strong dominant social and moral infrastucture to integrate it (not the modern void), to an already extensively ethnically mixed nation (US), in its big boom of economic rise industrial development (the opposite of where US and Europe are now).
Not to mention the happy accident of 2 world wars that left Europe and European big powers in ruins, and gave the US the global lead and reserve currecy, further propping it up (instead of the modern immigration combined with failing local economies and job prospect combos).
The USA is wholly owned and operated by immigrants of some level. DId the best of each of these countries send the best and brightest? Maybe they sent the devious and stir crazy, the innovators, the crooks and villains, the farmers, and their easily captured to indentured servitude. Immigration is great when there is no system in place or established. Basic assimilation is a requirement of entry into systems that is established as well as some trade of from the learning from each entity. As in nature something that enters a system and does not assimilate and corrupts or infects is a virus or parasite. No system or entity can stay healthy in those conditions.
I can't decide if this is meant to be offensive, but I also often say that discrimination is part of human nature and existence, and something to be managed and its rough edges civilised, not something to pretend can be avoided in an open society.
Categorically not the case that "the rich have convinced the poor that migrants cause poverty". The rich do not bother convincing the poor of anything. The middle class doesn't convince the poor of much either, these days; all of their persuasive energies are wholly expended on each other. As to who, then, is convincing the poor of what to believe --- you'll never believe it, but the poor can and do make their own judgments on the basis of their own observations and ~lived experiences~. Sure, the poor are unhappy about their declining material living standards. They are, as a separate matter, unhappy about the loss of their cultural space.
The white British working class and nonwhite immigrant working class have conflicting interests. This is just a fact, almost a boring one. Of course, we can and probably will continue denying this, and act as if it's some spell that the gammons are under. The consequences will be funny.
The decline in cultural space in the UK is due to resource loss and young people (low birth rates). You could still have as many migrants, and if the country's working and middle class were doing better and the government machine was working, you could incorporate people harmoniously. Global capitalism is immisarating poor Brits.
It might be a boring piece to write, but what does UK politics do well? How did Boris Johnson, as the head of the anti-immigration party, basically endorse open borders by enacting legislation/policies with loopholes so wide that the Spanish Armada could navigate through them? What incentives or beliefs motivate UK politicians to act in such counterintuitive ways? It’s difficult to tell as a US citizen, but is US politics (politics meaning the way politicians act given how the voting public acts, institutional constraints, etc) just much more legible than UK politics? I feel like UK politicians are more unpredictable than say, French politicians.
Institutional and political incompetence. Immigration policy is hard to design and implement. The home office is gutted from resources and it’s where a lot of civil servant careers go to die. Boris got lobbied by business and didnt plan long term.
In the USA the migrants from Latin American countries work all of the outdoor, hard physical labor jobs that American citizens will not. You could offer a young American man or woman $100.00 per hour and they wouldn't do it. And don't even get me started on the slaughter houses.
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.
I will be criticised by some of the left but that is not because they are bad or stupid, it is because they place an ultimate value of human life and solidarity and recognise rightly that the framing of the immigration debate is wrong (immigrants are criminals that make us poor). Immigrants are people and we are all either immigrants ourselves or the descendants of immigrants. I say all this because I believe we need a common reality to have common solutions, which means spelling out as many realities as possible.
I will be criticised by some of the left but that is not because they are bad or stupid, it is because they place an ultimate value of human life and solidarity and recognise rightly that the framing of the immigration debate is wrong (immigrants are criminals that make us poor). Immigrants are people and we are all either immigrants ourselves or the descendants of immigrants. I say all this because I believe we need a common reality to have common solutions, which means spelling out as many realities as possible.
Im sorry to hear that you think the UK immigration debate is framed as "immigrants are criminals that make us poor".
I don't see that over my time growing up and living here over the last 43 years. I've seen everyone bar a tiny fringe minority take great care to point out that immigration helps the country. The only concern you tend to hear is about the 'rate' of immigration and the rate of change to some areas. I think the data supports this in terms of polling and general values of the UK.
The issue is whether we can have a serious and balanced conversation about immigration which includes both positive and negative aspects, and then create sensible approaches to dealing with it. As far as the mainstrea conversation, people tend to be aggressively attacked and shouted down for questioning immigration or multi culturalism.
The left would do well to make their case for the value of human life and expectations to help and support those needing it, with the political right who wish to preserve and ensure safety, in a rational and reasonable debate. Mis-representing eachother for political gain gets us where we are now.
This was the case until a few years ago. Now I see a lot of people emboldened and no longer embarrassed to generalise about immigrants. They are a minority, for sure, but a vocal one, and they are getting traction. To the point where one of the top 5 parties is comfortable having members calling for “remigration” of people born in the UK. And so many other people formerly civilised and considerate are now comfortable making nativist and offensive racist arguments with zero benefit to a measured discussion around immigration. But anyway, my post was obviously not targeted at them, as I don’t think they’d listen to me, but what I am trying to say is that there is a dangerous ideology that those on the left of me are trying to protect against.
I think the fear you mention about 'dangerous ideologies' is patronising and has proven more dangerous than actually talking about the issues.
They say up to a hundred thousand girls may have been abused by the rape gangs, all because people were afraid of being called a racist, or 'giving fuel to the far right'. Ridiculous. As a country we need to grow up.
That was ridiculous yes. But the BNP and its racist offshoots still exist. I don’t see why it so hard to see both of these. We don’t event need to prioritise or say which one is worse or whatever, I hate whatabouterism and the oppression Olympics. But I am not going to not defend left wing people worried about racism in the immigration when I see it returning in public discourse. And the racism in the immigration debate I was referring to here was not about the grooming gangs scandal but about the general discussion of immigrants as being themselves at fault for the UK becoming poorer etc
I do not know your personal circumstances but I understand that you may be surrounded by nice people who are polite and considerate but much of my work is going in hostile political spaces and being shouted at by angry white men because their “island is being invaded by a swarm of migrants” - you understand why for me, as an immigrant myself and the daughter of refugees who literally arrived in Greece on a boat, it would be quite pathetic to fail to see a problem with the tone that is developing. Hence this post to clarify the reality from the inflammatory hysteria. And as I said I do see people saying racist things and I don’t use this word lightly. I should be able to not concede that “racism doesn’t exist” and also concede that “we need immigration reform”.
Have you seen a single Home Office set of stats? Immigrants are more criminal in every type of crime that I have seen: rape, murder, theft, possession of a weapon, human trafficking, the list goes on and on. Have you never wondered why the safest areas are also the most British?
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.
Austin, this is an excellent comment. You have articulated the problem and the solution with crystal clarity. May I quote you in my next post?
Thanks. Yes feel free to quote me.
"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?" Yes, it's pretty cool.
It'd be a lot cooler if criminals and financial parasites were removed from Great Britain, en masse. Many people in the country have not acculturated, will not acculturate, and are a FAR, far bigger cost than their additions can justify. I think a more interesting question than 'what are some common sense immigration policies we can get behind' is 'why has the government REFUSED, for more than 20 years, to honor any of the wishes of the electorate on this issue, even to its own serious detriment?' It's almost as if there's another agenda behind or around it all...
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/leviathan
The rich are hardly anti-immigrant. They like cheap, pliable labor. The London yuppies you know should be your first clue.
When yuppies hear "more immigrants" , they think "cheap au pairs and ethnic restaurants! Yes, please!"
The poor hear those words and think of longer lines at social services, more competition for housing and jobs.
I am generally all in favor of immigration, but let's not pretend that there are no costs to immigration, or that those costs are evenly distributed.
Sadly correct
> The poor hear those words and think of longer lines at social services, more competition for housing and jobs.
If that argument works against immigration, shouldn’t it also work for deporting or killing an arbitrary fraction of the people who already live in your country and are not wealthier than you, as long as it doesn’t include you or any of your family or friends? I know, in order to coördinate, you need some clear marker to tell whether a random person belongs to the group being scapegoated or not. Yes, this gets very ugly very quickly.
Good piece. Given this, id be interested to know which of the recommendations in my recent Policy Exchange paper you'd disagree with
https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/why-is-it-so-hard-getting-immigration-numbers-down/
"Immigrants sometimes come from very racist cultures"
Sometimes I ask foreigners to open my mind (which as an American, I am well informed is both parochial and closed,) on issues where I feel I lack perspective.
I've learned from the Cameroonian landscapers that all snakes are bad; from my Salvadoran neighbor that African Americans are altogether lazy; from the Indian proprietor of the beer store near me that you "can never trust any Chinese person of any kind."
valuable lessons from diversity
Interesting post. I could comment on other points, but it's (4) that I think is at the heart of many issues and the one which may be most challenging to discuss.
By design, that convention (and arguably all such conventions) acts like a Ulysses contract.
On one hand, binding future governments to humanitarian principles regardless of shifting political winds seems like a smart move. There are plenty of social norms and conventions that aren’t written into law and can later be reinterpreted, sometimes for better but often for worse. A lot of the recent political debate — in the US, the UK, and elsewhere — has been about these norms and the limits of relying on everyone “playing nice” rather than having clear expectations and enforced behavioural standards.
That said, there probably has to be limits. We don’t know where they are (and they seem to be ill-defined) but countries are continually running up against the fight between contemporary democratic sovereignty of their elected officials in the here and now, and the ghosts of governments passed. Some American factions are toying with the idea that the constitution itself is outdated. Britain has been in a state of turmoil about the precise value of Parliamentary sovereignty with respect to international law since Brexit. I think all of this is exacerbated by the rate of change in our world increasing, too. More happens in a decade than used to happen, so a “a long time ago” is increasingly just short while.
If Parliament is sovereign, should any prior parliament rightfully constrain it? I would say no, except for the ordinary prudential considerations of avoiding whipsaw policy. (Even if you're charting a path to radical change, moving slow and signalling clearly can be surprisingly, pehraps frustratingly, important.)
However, I ought to admit that taking up such a position places me in a moral thicket and potentially at odds with myself. In issues like advance directives about voluntary assisted dying in the contemplation of severe, progressive neurodegeneration, I'm somewhat persuaded by a Ulysses-like contract condition. At the level of principles, this may make my stance on the whole class of 'future-constraint issues' a bit murky, inconsistent, and not entirely clear. Or perhaps these issues are vaguely similar on the principle level but sufficiently differentiated by context. I don’t know, but it felt appropriate to flag and to leave you with that mix of thoughts in the hope that it stirs something useful for either of us.
Bravo!! This reckoning must come from the left to have any chance of getting traction. Just like the reckoning that lowering taxes to the rich solves nothing and creates problems must come from the right.
I think there is something to be said about not deserting a political debate to your competitors
Poverty IS a result of migration because:
- immigrants are lazier, more criminal and claim more in dole. All these cost the taxpayer i.e. me, money
- they suppress the wages of the poor by expanding the workforce and being prepared to live in foul condition six-to-a-room
- they make life worse for the British: they lower trust, make public life worse and are protected by laws e.g. the Equality Act which disfavour us.
This is why you have to go back.
WOW, I keep reading and agreeing with a fully support what I am reading. I enjoy objective opinion that is coming from a place of genuine logic. There isn't a single thing that you have stated in this piece that I don't agree with.
I wish more people had the grey matter to realize this is not xenophobic thinking.
Not bad for an un f able hate nerd!
I don’t think adding grey matter helps. There are good reasons why all the grey matter in the world doesn’t agree on anything more complex than “four legs good, two legs bad”: <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-get-about-five-words>.
Thanks for this, excellent piece.
Racism is such a difficult thing to define. The woman who was imprisoned for three years for a fb post in the riots last year was a childminder with a number of ethnic minority clients. It seems many speak highly of her. Not, then, a naturally racist individual but nevertheless undoubtedly guilty of an abhorrent racist outburst.
Is the apparent rise in racism actually a rise in frustrated anger at the smug condescension of the political class who continue to wilfully ignore the reasoned arguments you’ve outlined here?
As you say, Denmark is the exemplar. Continuing to ignore the issue contributed to giving us Trump. It could give us Farage here.
The denial of problems with immigration has contributed to pushing otherwise more politically moderate people to the right, but it has also emboldened those who were never on board with the progressive agenda of equality. I think racism is a human phenomenon and quite natural, I think we would be better off if we were more forgiving of people for it because we are all instinctively racist to an extend- which is how we evolved to protect ourselves, to distrust those different and prefer our own kind. It is rarely the case that someone is just a racist bigot, most people are on a broad spectrum of vices and virtues. The Facebook lady I believe got the sentence because she was inciting violence, I need to dig out the case and read it properly though because a lot of ink has been spilled about it and when a court hearing is involved I need to know the details before I commend.
I completely agree, and would extend that a little further with the idea that a lot of smearing of racism is really useless and divisive. This is because true racism is quote rare nowdays, so hustlers need to try to find a more subtle issue which is 'affinity bias'. I don't regard affinity bias as racism, more just our tendency to choose people more like us because that feels more known and safe instinctively. We need to consider this and try to work with it, but trying to ruin peoples lives for it is pointless and stupid.
> There is robust evidence <link> immigration helps local development
The link provided here is so irrelevant to the modern case, as to refute the very point. It concerns itself with immigration levels to "US counties between 1860 and 1920", and cross-checking with how rich those counties are now.
Thus this concerns: documented official immigration (e.g. through Ellis Island), from UK, Europe, and China mostly, with a strong dominant social and moral infrastucture to integrate it (not the modern void), to an already extensively ethnically mixed nation (US), in its big boom of economic rise industrial development (the opposite of where US and Europe are now).
Not to mention the happy accident of 2 world wars that left Europe and European big powers in ruins, and gave the US the global lead and reserve currecy, further propping it up (instead of the modern immigration combined with failing local economies and job prospect combos).
The USA is wholly owned and operated by immigrants of some level. DId the best of each of these countries send the best and brightest? Maybe they sent the devious and stir crazy, the innovators, the crooks and villains, the farmers, and their easily captured to indentured servitude. Immigration is great when there is no system in place or established. Basic assimilation is a requirement of entry into systems that is established as well as some trade of from the learning from each entity. As in nature something that enters a system and does not assimilate and corrupts or infects is a virus or parasite. No system or entity can stay healthy in those conditions.
Racism is a euphemism for diversity. Multiculturalism requires a minimum of racism or it ceases to be multicultural.
I can't decide if this is meant to be offensive, but I also often say that discrimination is part of human nature and existence, and something to be managed and its rough edges civilised, not something to pretend can be avoided in an open society.
Not at all meant to be ofensive. Just a thought.
Not doubting it haha
Categorically not the case that "the rich have convinced the poor that migrants cause poverty". The rich do not bother convincing the poor of anything. The middle class doesn't convince the poor of much either, these days; all of their persuasive energies are wholly expended on each other. As to who, then, is convincing the poor of what to believe --- you'll never believe it, but the poor can and do make their own judgments on the basis of their own observations and ~lived experiences~. Sure, the poor are unhappy about their declining material living standards. They are, as a separate matter, unhappy about the loss of their cultural space.
The white British working class and nonwhite immigrant working class have conflicting interests. This is just a fact, almost a boring one. Of course, we can and probably will continue denying this, and act as if it's some spell that the gammons are under. The consequences will be funny.
The decline in cultural space in the UK is due to resource loss and young people (low birth rates). You could still have as many migrants, and if the country's working and middle class were doing better and the government machine was working, you could incorporate people harmoniously. Global capitalism is immisarating poor Brits.
It might be a boring piece to write, but what does UK politics do well? How did Boris Johnson, as the head of the anti-immigration party, basically endorse open borders by enacting legislation/policies with loopholes so wide that the Spanish Armada could navigate through them? What incentives or beliefs motivate UK politicians to act in such counterintuitive ways? It’s difficult to tell as a US citizen, but is US politics (politics meaning the way politicians act given how the voting public acts, institutional constraints, etc) just much more legible than UK politics? I feel like UK politicians are more unpredictable than say, French politicians.
Institutional and political incompetence. Immigration policy is hard to design and implement. The home office is gutted from resources and it’s where a lot of civil servant careers go to die. Boris got lobbied by business and didnt plan long term.
In the USA the migrants from Latin American countries work all of the outdoor, hard physical labor jobs that American citizens will not. You could offer a young American man or woman $100.00 per hour and they wouldn't do it. And don't even get me started on the slaughter houses.