Immigration to the UK - do you have concerns?

[Edie]

Ive got some legitimate concerns tbh. I'm legitimately concerned about bigoted parochial racist people and what they are capable of doing and what kind of world they are creating in their image. Maybe someone on here can psychoanalyse my very real fear of these Others.
They dont do themselves any favours though do they. Keep themselves to themselves. Live around 'their own people'. Dont make an effort to integrate. Some of them are good nurses though tbf.

People like you are authoritarian.

Believe what I believe without question.

You get peoples backs up. And ultimately it’s why the vast majority of working class people of whatever skin colour or racial origin don’t listen to a fucking word people like you say. Too fucking arrogant to talk to others. Just fucking right, and if others don’t agree they are bigots.

Also don’t for a fucking minute think that racism or fear of the other is a white, Western thing or anything as fucking stupid and racist as that ok?

 

[Orang Utan]

Macho trolling, 'woke', 'lefty scum' etc on a thread about far right attacks does though.

I do think Spy is coming from a genuine place here, but I can understand why someone might be sceptical, considering past behaviour on threads on other subjects, eg cycling and green/environmental issues. And he certainly exaggerates his authoritarian stance on certain issues for shits and giggles. However, it’s pretty clear here from his tone and citation of lived experience, that on this subject he’s being sincere.

 

[klang]

To jump from a right wing riot endangering lives and dividing communities to imaginary lefties attacking emergency services speaks for itself and legitamisies the actions of the rioters.

 

[Spymaster]

In that case, the waters will continue to be muddied. And it's your own fault as you threw the dirt in there in the first place.

I don't think that's the case and also appreciate that you're coming from a position of being given a bloody nose last night and lashing out.

Everyone on these boards can read all of the posts. Some will agree with me, and some with you and others.

That's fine.

 

[SpookyFrank]

As if by magic a survey on immigration:

How serious a problem is immigration in the UK?

How much have you heard about an idea called "the great replacement theory"?

www.yougov.chat

How serious a problem?

Doesn't that just sum up the whole narrative. Could be a big problem, could be a small problem. Can it be neutral, or god forbid something good? Can it be a natural part of human existence that will always exist regardless of our opinions? No, it's either big problem or small problem.

 

[mojo pixy]

People like you are authoritarian.

Believe what I believe without question.

You get peoples backs up. And ultimately it’s why the vast majority of working class people of whatever skin colour or racial origin don’t listen to a fucking word people like you say. Too fucking arrogant to talk to others. Just fucking right, and if others don’t agree they are bigots.

Also don’t for a fucking minute think that racism or fear of the other is a white, Western thing or anything as fucking stupid and racist as that ok?

Come on, there are plenty of people on the political Right who are ideologues, my-way-or-the-highway loudmouths - even if ska invita were one of those and this weren't only a discussion thread on the internet. Nigel Farage is one, Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson, 'Tommy Robinson', Katie Hopkins They repel people too, maybe even you - and they have real influence - even real power. They really are bigots.

I'm just saying because I hate personal attacks on threads, and I started this one for my sins, so I want to echo danny la rouge and ask please stop accusing each other of stupid shit.

So far by the way there's no problem with immigration been mentioned that couldn't be dealt with by decent government (lol who?) more social justice and people chilling the fuck out and talking to each other instead of shouting at each other.

I have to add too that racism might be popular everywhere, but that doesn't make it right. If 99% of people were racists, it'd still be wrong. Call that an opinion if you want but I'd stand by it in every respect.

Anyway.

 

[smokedout]

There are two different ways of "listening to concerns" though, and the difference is crucial.

The one that successive governments have favoured is to listen to concerns and say "yes, you're right, migration is at the root of these problems you're concerned about. We will stop any more of these problematic migrants getting here and causing the problem".

The other way is to say "we understand and share your concerns, but we disagree that migration is at the root of the problem, which is actually caused by neo-liberal capitalism and inequality. We will address these concerns, not by attacking migrants but by actually confronting the real problem, in a way which unites migrants and the existing British working class against their common enemy"

Too many on"the left", including some posters on this thread, are too quick to dismiss all those with concerns which they incorrectly blame on migration as irredeemable racists, maybe because they don't have the confidence to make the argument for confronting the real problem.

If only it were that simple. I see three main problems with this.

Firstly that kind of jargon based language isn't winning over anyone. You can have some success shifting the target of people's anger towards the rich/government (as Class War did in their heyday) but it has to be done in ways that are not offputting and it has to be done from within the class, and that particular commmunity, not outsiders using rhetoric they think will appeal.

Secondly, we've not nothing to offer. Yes we should unite as a class against capitalism, but it doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. It's perceived as utopian, and it is under curent conditions. Again organising within communities, gaining small wins, demonstrating the advantages of solidarity etc can have some success but it's a huge undertaking to do that on scale (which doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it).

And perhaps most importantly. A lot of the racist working class are not socialists. They hate socialists. They voted for Thatcher in the 80s and are ideologically committed to capitalism. Often this is the more upwardly mobile section of the class in which capitalism has been a mechanism for them to improve their living standards and they frequently look back with contempt on those they left behind. They don't want to pay more tax, they hate claimants and scroungers as much as immigrants, they are socially conservative and have no time at all for anything they regard as lefty, whether class or identity based.

This isn't the majority by any means. But it is one of the more vocal and resourced sections of the working class and it has always existed. We won't win them over with more understanding and appeals to class struggle.

 

[ElizabethofYork]

If only it were that simple. I see three main problems with this.

Firstly that kind of jargon based language isn't winning over anyone. You can have some success shifting the target of people's anger towards the rich/government (as Class War did in their heyday) but it has to be done in ways that are not offputting and it has to be done from within the class, and that particular commmunity, not outsiders using rhetoric they think will appeal.

Secondly, we've not nothing to offer. Yes we should unite as a class against capitalism, but it doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. It's perceived as utopian, and it is under curent conditions. Again organising within communities, gaining small wins, demonstrating the advantages of solidarity etc can have some success but it's a huge undertaking to do that on scale (which doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it).

And perhaps most importantly. A lot of the racist working class are not socialists. They hate socialists. They voted for Thatcher in the 80s and are ideologically committed to capitalism. Often this is the more upwardly mobile section of the class in which capitalism has been a mechanism for them to improve their living standards and they frequently look back with contempt on those they left behind. They don't want to pay more tax, they hate claimants and scroungers as much as immigrants, they are socially conservative and have no time at all for anything they regard as lefty, whether class or identity based.

This isn't the majority by any means. But it is one of the more vocal and resourced sections of the working class and it has always existed. We won't win them over with more understanding and appeals to class struggle.

How patronising.

 

[andysays]

If only it were that simple. I see three main problems with this.

Firstly that kind of jargon based language isn't winning over anyone. You can have some success shifting the target of people's anger towards the rich/government (as Class War did in their heyday) but it has to be done in ways that are not offputting and it has to be done from within the class, and that particular commmunity, not outsiders using rhetoric they think will appeal.

Secondly, we've not nothing to offer. Yes we should unite as a class against capitalism, but it doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. It's perceived as utopian, and it is under curent conditions. Again organising within communities, gaining small wins, demonstrating the advantages of solidarity etc can have some success but it's a huge undertaking to do that on scale (which doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it).

And perhaps most importantly. A lot of the racist working class are not socialists. They hate socialists. They voted for Thatcher in the 80s and are ideologically committed to capitalism. Often this is the more upwardly mobile section of the class in which capitalism has been a mechanism for them to improve their living standards and they frequently look back with contempt on those they left behind. They don't want to pay more tax, they hate claimants and scroungers as much as immigrants, they are socially conservative and have no time at all for anything they regard as lefty, whether class or identity based.

This isn't the majority by any means. But it is one of the more vocal and resourced sections of the working class and it has always existed. We won't win them over with more understanding and appeals to class struggle.

I'm not suggesting it's simple, and agree about not using jargon, but if we simply dismiss a huge part of the working class as racist rather than continue to try to work with them in our communities, workplaces etc and convince them of the importance of working together then we all lose as a class, not just those of us who are directly attacked by racists.

 

[smokedout]

I'm not suggesting it's simple, and agree about not using jargon, but if we simply dismiss a huge part of the working class as racist rather than continue to try to work with them in our communities, workplaces etc and convince them of the importance of working together then we all lose as a class, not just those of us who are directly attacked by racists.

I don't think it is a huge part, it's a very vocal minority who often make up the (equivalent of the) rank of file of parties like UKIP and Reform, and occassionally have success in whipping up wider resentment.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

Not sure it’s been mentioned on this thread yet. And I can’t be arsed to go through page and page of argument.

There is a problem with unchecked immigration.
These immigrants arrive on yachts or private jets and buy huge swathes of land and property.

And then they laugh their arses off whilst we all argue about whose fault it is, that life is difficult for those at the bottom of society.
Look at the banking class. Gæld goblins.

 

[Edie]

Not sure it’s been mentioned on this thread yet. And I can’t be arsed to go through page and page of argument.

There is a problem with unchecked immigration.
These immigrants arrive on yachts or private jets and buy huge swathes of land and property.

And then they laugh their arses off whilst we all argue about whose fault it is.

And more often than not they’re not white or Western. Go figure eh.

 

[isvicthere?]

Any idea what the ethnic makeup of Hull and Rotherham is like?

According to this, Hull is high of the list of "majority white British" cities, with 89.7% in the 2011 census. Plymouth (where there was also rioting) was even higher at 92.2%.

 

[Edie]

And perhaps most importantly. A lot of the racist working class are not socialists. They hate socialists. They voted for Thatcher in the 80s and are ideologically committed to capitalism. Often this is the more upwardly mobile section of the class in which capitalism has been a mechanism for them to improve their living standards and they frequently look back with contempt on those they left behind. They don't want to pay more tax, they hate claimants and scroungers as much as immigrants, they are socially conservative and have no time at all for anything they regard as lefty, whether class or identity based.


This isn't the majority by any means. But it is one of the more vocal and resourced sections of the working class and it has always existed. We won't win them over with more understanding and appeals to class struggle.

This made me fucking laugh so much. Man you are so out of touch. Go speak to some GenZ ffs.

 

[Pickman's model]

I largely agree with everything danny la rouge and Smokeandsteam are saying, and with many of the things Spymaster is saying too.

I think it's a bit patronizing to expect people to just be totally fine with the amount of immigration there has been, as if very rapid and visible changes to communities were not something people might feel anxious about. As has been stated by others better, that "concern" does not necessarily mean full-on racism, but some unease about the rapidity of change in the area you live.

The numbers don't seem to have been mentioned once in this thread so far, so I'll do it:

In the 2001 UK Census there were 4.9 million foreigners, or 8.3% of the total population. In 2011 there were 8 million foreigners, or 12.7% of the total population: a 63% increase in the number over 10 years. And between 2011 and 2021, another 4.25 million foreigners arrived to live in the UK, making up what is 42% of the total number. Others have left due to Brexit and Covid, of course, but the current estimate is over 10 million people, or around 16% of the total population. It's a doubling of the foreign-born population in 20 years.

In Italy, by contrast, the number has grown significantly faster, quadrupling in the same 20-year time period from about 1.5 million to about 6 million foreigners (one of them being me) -- but the overall % is still much lower than the UK's, around 10%. It's very clear that this has driven people in massive numbers to the political parties that openly say "this is a problem", and not to the political parties that have largely ignored the question and pretended it had no impact on anything because they were, to all intents and purposes, the voice of Brussels, which loves free movement (among white people) insofar as it benefits capital, so wisely keeps its Frontex operations on the down-low and doesn't brag about it's (racist, and failed) attempt to keep non-EU immigrants out of Fortess Europe.

Still waiting for your source for your 4.25m

 

[smokedout]

This made me fucking laugh so much. Man you are so out of touch. Go speak to some GenZ ffs.

I can speak to people in my own family thanks, who would laugh in my face if i started going on about neoliberalism. And yes they are older, who do you think is voting for Reform and pushing this rhetoric?

 

[ElizabethofYork]

The way some of you write about the "working class". It's a joke. It's like you're looking down your noses at "those people over there".

 

[Pickman's model]

The way some of you write about the "working class". It's a joke. It's like you're looking down your noses at "those people over there".

Some of them are

 

[nino_savatte]

Just fucking right, and if others don’t agree they are bigots.

Funny how right-wingers (including the far-right) utter this kind of stuff but never once look at themselves. Hypocrisy much?

 

[kabbes]

This thread is depressing me, because wise posters, who I know for a fact understand that society operates in dimensions beyond the obvious things you see on the surface, seem determined to approach this subject only in the most simplistic, direct possible way. “Who cares what concerns racists have?”, these posters say, as if analysis is impossible beyond “ask people what is on their mind and then take the response completely literally”. It’s like 50 years of research on social constructionism never happened.

I can only reiterate. You don’t ask somebody, “what are your concerns with immigration” and then say, “oh, okay then, we better react in the most literal and surface way possible to the exact thing you’ve described”. What you do is try to understand how the way people are making sense of their reality fits into wider theorisations of reality-formation, and use that to understand what the intervention points could therefore be.

I know none of you looked at the academic paper I linked to earlier, but it was honestly doing that exact thing. It was asking, “which white people in New Zealand object to laws that seek to make financial reparations to Māori people, which white people object to laws that aim to reinstate Maori culture and are these the same white people? And if not, why not? Through this, the authors elaborate on how society displays two quite different forms of racism and prejudice — one that focuses on the allocation of resources and one that focuses on the production of symbolic capital (eg whose culture gets to be visible and prevalent). Lo and behold, these types of prejudice are driven by very different psychosocial mechanisms.

So please stop it with the “but we’ve paid attention to racists for thirty years and look where it’s got us, so now we need to just bash them instead” oversimplified straw man. We’ve only just started to really pay attention to racism in any kind of systematic and theoretical way. Most of the models date from the last 25 years. You can ignore that work, fine, but don’t pretend that it’s about appeasement or whatever other simplistic story is in your mind.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

And more often than not they’re not white or Western. Go figure eh.

I don’t know. Look at the amount of column inches given to someone who died when their yacht did not compute, for shits and giggles, compared to those who lose their lives in a treacherous journey on an overcrowded boat in search of sanctuary.

To paraphrase Immortal Technique. There is no such things as Mexicans or Latinos or blacks and whites. There’s only rich people and poor people.

 

[brogdale]

wrt to the recent riots, I don't think that ethnicity census data gives a full picture of what 'concerns' the fash might have exploited.

Those on the left might well have very well placed about the government's (neoliberal) asylum seeker dispersal programme. It is for the most part a privatised/out-sourced programme in which corporations are awarded contracts to house asylum seekers. Given the 'logic' of capitalism this therefore means that providers will seek to minimise their costs by housing in low cost areas. This has the effect of concentrating those seeking asylum in predominantly Northern, working class areas:




So, again whilst offering no excuse for the racist hate mobs, it is potentially misleading to just look at the census data to understand how the mobs were motivated to attack. The UK state's privatised system of asylum-seeker dispersal has, without doubt, produced a spatially imbalanced demographic geography.

 

[belboid]

I know none of you looked at the academic paper I linked to earlier, but it was honestly doing that exact thing. It was asking, “which white people in New Zealand object to laws that seek to make financial reparations to Māori people, which white people object to laws that aim to reinstate Maori culture and are these the same white people? And if not, why not? Through this, the authors elaborate on how society displays two quite different forms of racism and prejudice — one that focuses on the allocation of resources and one that focuses on the production of symbolic capital (eg whose culture gets to be visible and prevalent). Lo and behold, these types of prejudice are driven by very different psychosocial mechanisms.

Do you really think that discussions about racism have only just cottoned onto the fact that there are different drivers? That there are differing material and ideological reasons for those beliefs? Anyone involved in anti-racist struggles has known that for decades if not hundreds of years. The exact interplay between the two has been argued all that time - 'bread n butter issues' v 'ideological warfare'. It's not a great insight.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

It’s more than racism, it’s stayinyourplacism

 

[smokedout]

The way some of you write about the "working class". It's a joke. It's like you're looking down your noses at "those people over there".

I'm sorry if discussing how to challenge racism in our families and communities bothers you. Perhaps you have some suggestions for talking about this in a more appropriate way?

 

[brogdale]

People like you are authoritarian.

Believe what I believe without question.

You get peoples backs up. And ultimately it’s why the vast majority of working class people of whatever skin colour or racial origin don’t listen to a fucking word people like you say. Too fucking arrogant to talk to others. Just fucking right, and if others don’t agree they are bigots.

Also don’t for a fucking minute think that racism or fear of the other is a white, Western thing or anything as fucking stupid and racist as that ok?

people like you x 2

 

[belboid]

Any idea what the ethnic makeup of Hull and Rotherham is like?

Here's Rotherham - it hasn't actually changed that much since the last census. Number of muslims up from 3.7% to 5.1% 92% were born in England, down from 93.5%. On most other indicators (health, housing, age) it is all incredibly similar to ten years previously.

How life has changed in Rotherham: Census 2021

Find out how life changed in Rotherham between Census 2011 to Census 2021, including data on ageing, ethnicity, health, housing and more.

www.ons.gov.uk

 

[Wkdloz]

The way some of you write about the "working class". It's a joke. It's like you're looking down your noses at "those people over there".

It's called class prejudice and unlike race prejudice it seems to be quite acceptable on here. Some of the posts about the recent riots made me cringe.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There is a genuine unpleasantness and nastiness to the unfounded statement that the reason we're in the state we're in is because 'lefties' are somehow doing it wrong. How about this for another unfounded statement that is just as likely to be true: without the existence of 'lefties', things would be even worse right now than they are.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

Class prejudice is acceptable, what’s your point caller?