Immigrants good – immigration, very, very bad

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land - foreigners

Time for a rant with no apologies for so doing but all this talk of an ‘immigration crisis’ is really doing my head in.

The reality is that there is no crisis apart from that within the fast sinking Conservative party which is banging on about immigration to distract attention from its terrible poll ratings. Less clear is why the Labour opposition consistently falls into the trap of playing this game. And despair deepens as the debate over immigration spills over into the realms of racism.

So, what is this so called crisis? Is it simply that immigrant numbers are rising? Has Britain suddenly become overflowing with people? What are immigrants doing that’s so very awful as to make the government embark on a lunatic scheme to send wads of cash to Rwanda to somehow deter new arrivals and, in the process, to defy international law?

While panic is being manufactured over a so called immigration crisis why is little being said about the contribution immigrants make to Britain?

Would it be better if foreign students stopped keeping universities afloat with the high fees they pay?

Would the NHS and the care sector benefit by getting rid of immigrants who are doing jobs that native Britons don’t want? Would the ranks of well qualified medical professionals benefit from excluding those who have the temerity to be born overseas?

Who is going to keep the corner shops going once we rid ourselves of these wretched immigrants? Who is going to keep public transport ticking over?

And what is so problematic about immigrants who arrive with a determination to build a better life after taking the often agonising decision to leave their homes?  

I naively believed that all this had been debated to exhaustion. Yet here we are again with a new  immigration scare fuelled by political leaders spreading alarm with little regard to the consequences.

And, as ever, this debate is characterised by a staggering level of ignorance. You would imagine that Britain is somehow one of the biggest recipients of immigrants. This is poppycock, in Europe Germany, for example, takes in far more. Globally the immigrant league table is topped by the United States. Turkey, alone, has taken in more refugees than the rest of Europe combined.

Immigration is generally described as being some kind of dreadful burden on the economy. Yet numerous studies show that immigrants make a substantial net contribution. The arrival of younger incomers also helps to mitigate the serious problem of an aging population.

Boring old facts are less attractive to those who say that they this miss the point because what is at stake is the erosion of British identity caused by immigration. Good luck with this idea. It came on a  boat that sailed centuries ago with the arrival of Vikings, Romans and non-occupying foreigners who have contributed to the creation of a British culture which is far from being nativist. Why, we even have a German royal family.

As a third generation immigrant I am prejudiced but have some insight into what it means to have a family that arrived penniless and worked day and night just to survive. The second generation, my parents, emerged from this background to provide countless opportunities for those of us in the third generation who were able to go to universities and get the kind of jobs that non-English speaking immigrants could not even dream of. My family was so bent on integration that my parent’s generation engaged in a frenzy of name changing to make us all sound and behave in a more British way.

So, what’s the problem? Why is immigration consistently seen as a problem? Is it really not known that many of the most prosperous countries on the planet have been built on immigration?

While a Tory Party is grasping for scapegoats, you would have thought that the Labour Party would have sufficient backbone to stand up for immigrants and kick back at the scapegoating. But it does not, on the contrary Labour leaders say they will be ‘tough on immigration’.

Tough on immigration? What the hell does that mean? Please don’t pretend, even for one moment, that this is about concern for desperate people arriving illegally in small boats.

That problem could be solved by tackling the smuggling gangs (who won’t be going to Rwanda) and vastly expanding the system of processing immigrants – but the people who hate immigrants really don’t want that to happen because it usually results in the bulk of ‘illegals’ being shown to have legitimate claims to be here.

When my father was spending his last days in a care home, there was not a single Brit among the United Nations of staff competently caring for him. For some reason it did not occur to me to berate them for being there.

And here’s the rub, because when people come into contact with immigrants, they tend to say that although they are worried about immigration that, of course, does not include the wonderful career from the Philippines, or the nurse from India or indeed that family working all hours at the corner shop.

Immigration is hardly without problems but it is not intrinsically problematic – a not so fine distinction.