Really interesting discussion about the cultural encounter aspect of immigration. That’s certainly been noticed by my lads who have been raised, educated and now work alongside Muslims in Leeds and Bradford.
I’m interested in exploring the open borders question and if anyone thinks that’s a good idea.
And if not, how and why we limit immigration.
And if for example we put restrictions on where new immigrants can live or what work they can do to or how much they should earn (this one seems particularly stupid to me).
I’m intuitively not convinced the “we’re full” argument is a load of bollocks. But I work in the nhs and drive on the motorways quite often. I do understand that better roads and amenities could be built so it doesn’t ’feel full’- but do we want that? An always climbing population number, expanding cities, just so “the economy” grows?
My fella- Kenyan born, British educated, US resident- is an open borders proponent. I’m uncomfortable, even fearful of, the social change that would bring. Maybe the end point would be a ‘everywhere’s like London’ melting pot vibe and we would just build more amenities.
Lots of interesting questions there. But I think the place to start is what assumptions are being made.
First question I’d ask is “who is ‘we’?” Because that’s important. When talking about global population growth and movement, is it actually sensible and coherent to think we can treat the UK as an independent, separate entity that can operate somehow outside of global population dynamics.
I think not. Not because I believe in promoting something called “Open Borders”, but because I think it just has to be accepted that these islands are not somehow removed from the effects of climate change, of history, of global economics, of geopolitics. We aren’t. It’s impossible.
So for me that’s the starting point. As impossible as it may seem to do otherwise, there is no solution that is anything other than a sticking plaster that can be made by the UK state on its own. No amount of bureaucracy on our borders will change the movement of people caused by climate change, war, hunger, need. So “we” had better come to terms with that.
And as has been pointed out above, the vast majority of migrants stay put in the first country they come to, even when conditions are terrible. If they’re not
as terrible, that’s an improvement. And the UK is actually not very high on measures such as ‘international migrant stock as a %age of population’. Last time that was measured by the World Bank, the United Arab Emirates was at 88.4%. The UK, “next door” alphabetically, was only 13.2%. (
World Bank Open Data ).
So. Yeah, we can be better at infrastructure. We’ll need to be. But that’s nothing to working together as a globe. Sorry if that seems too high a bar to set. And it probably is until we in the “West” (or “Global North” or whatever we’re supposed to say) are up to our ankles in flood water, so to speak, ourselves.
And that may sound pessimistic. But I’m afraid I am.
www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk
