A Rant About Immigration

I am irritated by the discourse about immigration. Rapid demographic change is a dangerous destabiliser to society, this is a fact, but the way people have talked about dealing with it is so… messed up.

First of all, the scapegoating of asylum seekers, is absurd. Asylum seekers make up an absolutely miniscule portion of all migrants to the country, miniscule. We could be FAR FAR less strict in who we let in and still it would only be a blip (except in the sense that looser criteria might encourage more applications). Asylum seekers are here for a reason, we should be compassionate to them, the process as it is is humiliating and cruel. If we are going to limit immigration it is not here we should be looking. Most people who complain about “Asylum Seekers” just mean immigrants anyway, the whole asylum seeker issue is a distraction.

But the other thing that really irritates me is, like when Gordon Brown said he will only let in highly skilled workers that the country needs. Ok, from a purely selfish perspective that has a logic to it, but it is purely selfish. Skilled, especially highly skilled workers like doctors and lawyers and so on are exactly the kind of people who whether they like it or not are NEEDED in their own countries to build up infrastructure and improve quality of life for everyone there (thus reducing overall the need for economic migration). They are also the people least likely to actually need to economically migrate in absolute terms (that is they are less likely to be suffering severe poverty in their country of origin). If we are going to let economic migrants in it should surely be the ones who NEED to migrate to make a reasonable living, but who are not needed in their countries of origin, therefore basically unskilled workers.

Of course you can argue that letting unskilled workers in has more problems than skilled workers, unskilled workers can drive down wages in the unskilled sector, a sector which is most likely to have low wages in the first place. This is indeed a problem… but its just a reflection of the fact that globally wages are low, the answer is to encourage higher wages worldwide (thus reducing the need for economic migration in the first place) – something which is undermined by taking skilled workers able to develop their countries of origin from their countries of origin and do already developed countries. The second problem is that the lower educational attainment of unskilled workers makes it harder for them to integrate in general to a new culture and into a post-industrial western European culture specifically. There is not really a good answer to that unfortunately, problems with integration will always be an issue with immigration though. That is ignoring the point of whether or not they OUGHT to integrate, because while abstractly lack of integration causes social instability, there are significant problems with contemporary culture that could even be rectified somewhat by the presence of people with different values (maybe WE should integrate a bit with them…).

An argument that is made against this kind of thing is basically “if we let poor people into the country then statistically the country is poorer which looks bad on international measures”. Basically though all that has happened is that poor people who were poor in one place are now poor in another place, the rich people in the country have not lost anything by that, the problem is purely one of on paper statistics looking bad. Prettying up the appearance of our statistical achievements on paper is hardly a good aim of government.

Immigration policy should be realistic, we cannot let in everyone who would be better off here and seeks to be here, this is just a sad fact, any one place can only absorb so much stress. It should however be moral above all. We should not base our economic policy on purely selfish concerns, but think about what is best for the world as a whole – cheesy as it sounds, what is good for the world as a whole is ultimately good for us as well.

And now that everyone thinks I’m an evil internationalist communist I will for now be quiet, leaving you with a link to my flickr account bearing my pics of my trip to Constantinople: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49738859@N02/

Liberal Nationalism

There are a lot of history books which go something like this:

“the predecessors of my country many hundreds of years ago actually were über liberal/feminist/sexually unrepressed”

I have found this phenomenon in many countries. For countries like England people are quick to oppose the idea, England is of course an evil imperialist nation, liberalism/feminism/sexual liberation is of course an unmitigated good, therefore never the twane shall meet. Nonetheless people still try and write books with that premis about England, just that they are swiftly opposed by others. Probably contributing to this is the large amount of scholarship on English history.

But for countries which can claim to have been oppressed it’s easier to get away with it. Especially if there has not been much study into it, or if the study has all been done by either nationalists or foreigners with overly romantic notions about the nation drawn directly from 18th century accounts of medieval legends. So that it doesn’t matter that in the time period concerned the majority of the population were slaves, they were still extremely liberal for their time (and how odd that so many countries claim as much) etc.

Now it might be the case that specific laws are particularily charitable to slaves or women or that the system in some place is less harsh than the majority of contemporary Europe. But in truth, it is a wild mistake to intepret that as some kind of hearkening toward modern liberal values. The people of Wales in the dark ages for instance would not have understood modern liberal values, they would probably be horrified by them, so even if women had slightly more control over their property than did English women… it doesn’t change the fact the underlying motives for and understanding of society was completely different to what we have now. It doesn’t say anything special about the Welsh, yet because Wales is a small, romantic and traditionally under the foot of the English country people get away with such nationalistic allusions.

It’s not just Wales though. Lots of places get this treatment. I like a bit of romantic nationalism as much as the next person, but it’s recreation like playing video games or reading novels. It’s not really real. Truth be told, reality is more interesting than this kind of mythmaking.