THE IMMIGRANT

I admire immigrants. I know something of the trials they endure: I was born and grew up abroad, and first lived in Britain as a very young man, almost as much a stranger to my ancestral home as an immigrant would be.

I understand what it feels like to be a stranger in a foreign land: you may speak the language, but your accent marks you immediately as an outsider. I understand how weirdly 'other' some aspects of local culture can at first seem to the immigrant. I understand how that yearning for the lost land, and the loved ones you’ve left behind, can sometimes ambush you, and grasp you by the throat, and shake you till you feel like howling.

I think I understand the immigrant better than most native-born Britons. I understand in part what drives him from his homeland; I understand something of his courage. I understand that if an immigrant can get ahead, and make a life for himself in another land, he has had to draw on reserves of toughness, resilience and inner strength that few of the native-born and raised have had to draw on to anything like such an extent.

Which is why I admire immigrants who show a willingness to integrate, and to put down roots in their adoptive country. And why I most certainly do not yearn for “zero immigration.”

But I am not persuaded by the neo-liberal argument that Britain needs immigrants in order (a) to take up jobs that native-born Britons are avoiding; (b) to grow her economy, and (c) to care for her aging native population.  

If employers paid a genuine living wage (or pro-rata) to workers in the hospitality trade, in the agricultural industry, in the retail trade, and in the care industry, there would be many more native-born Britons willing to undertake this sort of work. But of course, these industries are full of zombie businesses: they only survive because they will not or cannot pay their staff a genuine living wage. Perhaps what is needed is a clear-out of these zombie businesses. And those that are left can pay their employees a genuine living wage.  

The economic and population-replacement arguments put forward by the neo-liberals seem to me to be elements of a classic Ponzi scheme: will these immigrants themselves never grow old? Will they in turn never begin to draw hugely on the economy - in the cost of healthcare and old age care? And when they do in fact grow old and sick, do we shout out for more (ever more) immigrants to care for them, and to take their place in the economy?

As to deaths in Britain now outpacing births: the solution lies with British governments. If life were not such a desperate financial struggle for so many in Britain, the British people themselves would soon rebalance the births versus deaths disparity. But in this, Capitalism’s final evolutionary phase, with genuine full-time jobs that pay a true living wage becoming ever more scarce, and temporary, part-time, and zero hours work becoming more and more dominant, the people of Britain hesitate to make up the disparity between births and deaths.