Clearly I support Immigration, if I didn’t then my future plans are hypocritical.
What is immigration?
Put simply, it is a person not born here but living here. It covers both those here temporarily and those intending to settle.
Break it down further and it also covers people like the Governor of the Bank of England (no less) or the man who just hitched a ride in a truck through the tunnel from France. Both those are migrants.
Are both legal though?
That rather depends because it isn’t strictly speaking an easy answer.
Bank Manager is not on the list of those people we seek from abroad to work in this country so, how comes the Governor got his job? I guess it’s because he knew someone who knew someone. I can’t believe we are lacking suitable UK talent we need a Canadian to run the bank which represents this country.
This, however, highlights the problem.
We are not as a nation against immigration, what we are against is a certain type of immigrant. If they are wealthy, in jobs we cannot hope to have and speak English then we seem to be OK with it.
If they are poor, in need. If English isn’t their first language and, particularly, if they are black, we seem to have real issue with that sort of immigrant. Perhaps because we don’t see an immediate benefit to ourselves of that.
You see, we have zero problem with someone from India who opens a restaurant, no issue at all with anyone from Asia if they open up a restaurant because we sort of like Indian or Chinese food so, they’re OK but, the random black guy … hmm, what benefit?
In reality, probably not a lot at first, give it time.
We have this instant acceptance for those who are familiar. Americans, Australians, those from New Zealand & Canada, anyone who looks like the people down the Chinese restaurant, we are cool with all of those and why? Well, most if not all of those just integrate by default. They all speak English after a fashion and none of them have radical ideas which might in some way change the familiar country we’re used to.
Now, we are left with two categories we have the biggest issue with.
Eastern Europeans & those from India and Pakistan, or the Middle East.
Eastern Europeans because, well, too often they don’t integrate at all. They have no intention of settling here, they are just here to work and send money home. They will do jobs we wouldn’t want to do for the money we wouldn’t want to accept. In short, the UK Pound is worth so much in their country that even minimum wage is an attractive proposition to them. So, whilst they do pay taxes here and provide services, they are too visible. Our towns and cities are becoming seemingly over run with people who don’t speak English in the street and who open shops selling the stuff they are used to back home making some parts of the UK feel like ‘Little Poland’. Of course, we’d never do such a thing .. you know, like in the Spanish Coastal Resorts or Ibiza where every other bar is a British Pub and a huge amount of restaurants are owned by the British, likewise shops catering for our needs. So, that’s the way Europe works but our society is full of NIMBY’s (not in my back yard)
The other category, the Indians, Syrians, Muslims generally, from Pakistan and so on … we don’t like the heavy influence of their religions. We don’t like the skyline broken up by a Mosque, it’s not British. We don’t want Muslim Schools … Catholic schools are fine and Catholicism is not British either by the way, as Henry VIII.
So, what is the answer?
Look, we keep blaming them, it’s not them it’s us who are the problem. We have an inconsistent and prejudice view of immigration.
On the one hand we’re dead against it because they are not like us and yet, on the other, if they suit our needs we love them.
What would really solve the issue is if this country learnt a little from some of the countries immigrants come from. In many there would be zero tolerance of any religious symbolism which wasn’t their own. They will take offence at those who refuse to wear ‘suitable’ clothing. They will make laws we would class as prejudicial and why do they do this? To preserve the personality of their culture.
In contrast, over here, we’ve had an anything goes policy. People are free to practise their own religion, set up their own faith schools, never to integrate into British society. There is the problem right there. By allowing so much freedom we’ve given away a significant part of our identity. We are so afraid of being called racist we’ve allowed them to ignore the race of the country they now live in and to imprint their own identity over ours. That is wrong on so many levels. We’ve allowed freedom to deny freedom to those others who do not share the beliefs of certain immigrant groups. Even 2nd and 3rd generation are perpetuating this voluntary apartheid between their culture and ours.
Look, the people in Calais, that’s a smokescreen, the same with the refugees on the boats, they are not the same problem and should never be connected with the problem we have.
With those we need to end the hostilities in their country of origin, stop talking about it and do something. We need to close down the criminal gangs we know are operating, keep those people safe as close to their homes as possible. As humans we should not tolerate the treatment these people are getting. Many are legitimate migrants. We didn’t earn the right to be British, we didn’t chose to exit the groin of a British citizen, we are here by no more right than the randomness of birth. Sure, that matters but, the saying, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ should mean something. We’ve not earned the right merely by birth to say we are better than them, we need to show some compassion.
There is nothing a government likes to do more than find scapegoats to distract us from the issues they are not dealing with. In this country we’re experts at the blame game. I believe it was Kennedy who said “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”.
We need to stop relying on our politicians to tell the truth and do the right thing, we certainly need to stop believing everything we read in the press.
Time to think about think about this properly.
