Let's cut to the
chase with the issue of immigration to the UK. I'm not a racist,
and mine is an economic/political and social case about the need to
restrict immigration. The economic case is quite straightforward,
and has bubbled under during the great debate leading up to the
referendum. It seems to me that immigrants are being recruited to
Britain on a false prospectus, and certainly, the occasional
interview with them seems to suggest that they think the UK is a land
of milk and honey, prosperity and tolerance. My own view is that
they are being exploited to become part of the reserve army of
labour: in Marx's day, that was made up of the unemployed, and,
later, of female workers.
Those who campaigned
in favour of remaining were able to cite official statistics showing
that the net economic impact of such immigrants was positive, that
their payments into the State exceeded their benefits. That could even support my case that they are being ripped off. More technically, in
the first place, that combines together high wage immigrants and low
wage ones, and there's a strong suspicion that low wage ones are
being paid only the minimum wage or less.
Further, there has been
some evidence that the net impact of immigration has not been to
diminish wages in Britain, rather that government policy has done
this. However, sometimes a relative lack of power and influence by
the trade unions is admitted to be responsible as well. I don't know
any data, but I am willing to bet that most poorly waged immigrant
labour is not unionized, and that their introduction into workplaces
has the effect of splitting the solidarity of the workers who are
unionized.
Finally, long-term economic impacts are unknown. However,
the impact of population growth in Britain, combined with an
austerity program, has produced undoubted effects on welfare
provision, from inadequate school places, to an underfunded National
Health Service. The increase in immigration is the largest factor in
such population growth.
Interestingly, the vote to leave seems to have finally weaned the Chancellor off his commitment to austerity too.There was much scorn for the pledge to spend all the money contributed to the EU on the Health Service instead, but some of it at least might be spent that way. The Leave campaign quoted the gross figure of payments to the EU as £350m per week.The Remainers patiently and patronisingly explained to the electorate that this was a gross figure and that the net figure was only about £110m --somehow they thought that was acceptable!
This still does not
mean that we should hate immigrants, of course. Indeed, I see them
mostly as the innocent victims of a continuing attempt to drastically weaken
the place of organized labour in Britain. This has been much discussed sometimes in terms of 'deskilling' or mechanisation as the 'emancipation of capital from labour'.
I'm not sure that working
class opponents of immigration are all simply racist either.
Contrary to popular belief, the British working class has actually
been surprisingly tolerant towards immigrants, although in a variable
way, depending on factors such as the social class makeup and the
social attitudes of immigrant groups themselves. However, people are rightly
resentful at being expected always to deal with the social
disorganization involved, which can last for a decade or so before
things settle down. It is particularly hypocritical to condemn such
resentment, when you are able to live in a safely isolated gated
community which admits only highly respectable immigrants of a
similar social class, and pay for your own health care and education.
This is not to deny
the presence of working class racism. However, I've also always seen
that there is significant racism in the middle and upper classes as
well, sometimes combined with class or gender prejudice. The upper
classes only seem interested in racism if it suits their ideologies.
With ideological intent, lots of things can be condemned as racism
and thus denounced. The marvellously hypocritical denunciation of
anti-semitism in the Labour Party is a good example: as soon as it has done its work to embarrass Labour, as a 'moral panic', we never heard of it again.
Indeed, the campaign to regulate immigration was initially managed by seeing it as simple racism, not worth discussing. I am still not sure what led to the failure of that strategy - maybe it was feedback from actual voters supporting Leave? The racism tag even became a bit of a liability, showing how distant elites were from their voters.
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