Identity and empathy lie at the heart of the immigration debate
Like a lot of people, I am in two, if not three, minds about the wave of immigration currently washing up on the south coast of England.
I have considerable sympathy for those who set out from France. They are desperate human beings in need of a home. Not all of them succeed. Hundreds have drowned. There will be those among them who will sponge on the British state. All will expect to be fed and housed and given a job. But the majority are likely to end up as solid citizens – or at any rate as solid as the rest of us.
On the other hand (giving free rein to my second mind), I resent the fact that thousands upon thousands of strangers, many of them from lands with which we have no imperial connection, seem to feel that they have a legal right to live in England and to be assisted to do so by the British state.
They claim to be refugees, but, leaving aside obvious exceptions, the truth is that they are economic migrants, who, out of free choice, abandoned their own developing societies in the belief that they could do better for themselves in the UK. Most of the new arrivals are young men on the make. What about the families they left behind? Will they be following behind? Where and when will it end? Are we obliged, in principle, to accept that all the peoples of Africa and Asia have the right, if they choose to exercise it, to step ashore at Dungeness and be handed the keys to a flat in Tooting?
On the third hand, I don’t know what to think. I don’t believe myself to be racist or cold-hearted. When I see pictures of people in distress, I want them to be helped. I just don’t see why they all have the right to a house in Easy Street.
I live in France, to which my American wife and I moved in semi-retirement in 2016. Prior to that I was based in New York for 14 years, and before that – apart from 12 years as a correspondent in Brussels, Bonn and Amsterdam – I lived in London, Dublin and my native Belfast. I entered every jurisdiction legally and paid all taxes that were demanded of me. We are still waiting for our titres de séjour, for which we applied six months ago under the terms of the UK/EU settlement scheme. But we have paid income tax and local taxes for the last six years and have no reason to expect that good sense will not prevail.
Granted, I was not born in Somalia, or Yemen, or Sierra Leone. But if I had been, on what basis would that give me a free pass into Kent? The fact is that only a fraction of the thousands now crossing the Channel from France to England were in any serious way persecuted or singled out by the authorities in the countries in which they were raised. On the contrary, most of those turning up appear to be healthy and strong, motivated solely by the desire to make money in a richer, more successful country than the one into which they were born.
I completely understand this. If I were a Somali, or an Eritrean, I would almost certainly want to live somewhere else. But if I were English (which I am not), I doubt very much that I’d be putting out the welcome mat.
Where my argument falls down is when history intrudes. I’m pretty sure none of the millions of Britons (and Irish) who opted to cross the Atlantic in past centuries ever thought of asking the permission of the indigenous populations. They just turned up, took the land they needed and, if opposed, opened fire on the natives. It was the same in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa. We went wherever we thought a better life beckoned without giving two hoots for the opinions of those whose land it was. In the end, the Empire wasn’t built on trade, but on conquest. It was the Gatling gun and the Navy that guaranteed our right to remain.
Aaah, I hear you say, but that was a long time ago and nothing to do with us. We’re different today – more mellow, more tolerant. But are we, or is it simply that the boot is now on the other foot?
Underlying the concerns of the white majority population faced with uncontrolled immigration is the fear that a thousand years of history are being trampled underfoot and that a new Britain is emerging that has less and less connection with the old. It is as if every year is Year Zero. (The movie industry has anticipated this, of course, with its insertion of black and Asian actors into historical dramas, which, logically, ought in future to include black actors playing slavers and a Sikh as Clive of India).
I remember Mohammad Ali telling the boxing commentator Harry Carpenter that he would only ever marry a black woman “because I want my children to look like me”. That is how millions of ordinary English people feel about their country. They want it to be the place they grew up in, in which 1066 and all that still means something and British history, as they know it, has not come to an end.
It’s the same the world over. Black South Africans resent the arrival of immigrants from Zimbabwe. Their tribes and traditional territories remain important to them. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 grew directly out of the mutual hatred between Hutus and Tutsis. In Sri Lanka, the native Sinhalese are violently opposed to the continuing immigration of Tamils from India. Four hundred years on from the event, Nationalists in Northern Ireland still resent the arrival of Protestant Planters, who took their land by royal decree. The Balkans wars of the 1990s were all about boundaries that represented where “we” began and “they” were outsiders. Brexit itself was about the British having a right to make decisions in their own interests and no one else’s.
So what should we feel when we see another boatload of “asylum-seekers” being guided ashore from France by the UK Border Force? They have come a long way and been through experiences we can barely begin to imagine. How did that footage of the latest arrivals being stoned by angry locals make you feel? Did you agree with those who denounced their rescuers as “traitors”? When the chips are down, where do your sympathies lie? Will you make a donation to the RNLI or will you turn to Nigel Farage to stiffen your sinews?
It is an incredibly complex question, not least because it places us in conflict with our historical frenemies, the French. But the government doesn’t have the luxury of my three-way mental split. It has to make up its mind about what is to be done and then take practical steps to establish a firm, yet civilised, way forward. Suggestions should be addressed not to me but to Downing Street and the Home Office. I am, you will recall, still waiting for my own right to remain.