I’m not in
favour of immigration. Bizarre, you’d think given my ‘wife’ is a second
generation immigrant, as is my best friend, but no I’m not in favour of
immigration.
People
who’ve read my blog in the past will be confused at this juncture. You might be
asking how I could come to such a conclusion. Have I suddenly gone mad and
watched Cameron’s infamous ‘multiculturalism speech’ so many times I made some
semblance of sense out of it?
Or am I just
trying to play some sort of semantic game? Perhaps I’d rather call immigration
“a natural and fluid interchange of people from between arbitrarily prescribed
boundaries.” But no that’s just a definition, and I’m not a lexicographer.
The media
and politicians have renewed their attack on the political hot potato of
immigration to worryingly little dissent. Their lies and half-truths go
unnoticed and unpunished, fed to an audience often too stupid and racist to question
the things they want to hear whatever their veracity.
Which is why
stories like this and this make me so angry, because they’re littered with hate
and inaccuracies and an unfortunate number of people don’t have any ability to
interrogate source material so it goes into their brain unquestioned,
unthinking and, ultimately, unaltered. One
of those people is apparently the Prime Minister of this country, who along
with Theresa May, has shown a worrying dedication to the lies and twisted
truths found in the Daily Mail.
Cameron’s
speech against immigration shows a worrying desire for the kind of racist,
fear-mongering more associated with the American South than Britain. “Shop an
illegal immigrant” schemes will raise fear, mistrust and racial profiling.
Hardly the mark of a free society.
Point out
the stupidity of a comment based upon this kind of nonsense and you get a
series of uninterruptable “well they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t” or
“they’re everywhere, my mate at work…” The big problem at the last election
wasn’t that immigration was an issue but that Labour refused to discuss it, in
a negative attempt to win votes, whilst the Lib Dems did what the Lib Dems do,
say a lot of nothing before breaking the mould and manoeuvring themselves into
power with a party not one of their voters would ever vote for.
What we must
realise is that if families have been forced out of everywhere they once called
home and Britain played a major role in that destruction, we have a
responsibility to help them with a life, to find the opportunities we denied
them in finding our own. Our kids will find out all about this when we have our
giant war for resources with China in 2040.
If you raise
your family with a work ethic and love of education and pay your taxes and
work, you are to be respected as a human being. The colour of your skin and the
arbitrary borders you were born within are not a mark of character. These
people must be respected, not held in contempt for doing everything a good
citizen, a good human being, should do. The truth, and shout it from the
rooftops please, is that immigrants add to the culture, stability, economy and integrity
of our country.
Immigration
should be a willingness to incorporate the best of every culture and
individual, not a battle for supremacy. When Cameron and others talk of
integration, they mean assimilation into an ill-defined culture with
ill-divided opinions and priorities. Our country is already multicultural, all
Western nations are. Look at the states in America. That is the beauty of living
in a free and rich country.
Immigration often
comes in “waves”, the decision in 1948 to extend citizenship to those of the
Commonwealth brought West Indian immigration alongside those fleeing the
Stalinist oppression of Poland. The 60s and 70s brought waves of South Asian
immigration as a result of Ugandan and Kenyan oppression and outright poverty
in India and Pakistan, caused by the end of the Raj, amongst others.
All of these
“waves” added something to the diverse culture of Britain and immigration continues
to do so, forget the fear-mongering about how Islamic culture is overrunning
Christian culture. We live in a predominantly secular nation with a small minority,
about 2%, of practicing Muslims, the vast majority of which have nothing but
contempt for the hatred spouted by fundamentalists like bin Laden and his ilk.
It’s also
important to remember the impact these waves had in the British labour markets.
Without immigration London’s streets would not have been cleaned, the postal
service would have failed, the NHS would not have developed and the
manufacturing heart of this country in the Midlands, something the Right is so
keen to reclaim, would not have survived without the work of decent, motivated
people who gave up everything to make a new life on this island.
We are all
immigrants, pick up a history book. The Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain when it
was inhabited by the Welsh and Celts. Over the next 1500 years waves of French
and Danish immigration and invasion further altered the cultural make-up of
Britain. Add to that the British penchant for invading any country we fancied
and you have a nation made up of a million little pieces of a thousand
different nations, races and cultures.
Which is why
I’m not in favour of immigration, I’m in favour of an immigration exchange.
Every racist, lazy, hateful, workshy arsehole who calls themselves “British”
just because they’re white and they were born on this island should be
exchanged for an immigrant, principally asylum seekers running for their lives.
It’s what I
call the “poo flick”, what my friend does to remove the floating turd her son
has just unleashed in the bath. You don’t get your hands dirty much and the
shit ends up somewhere hot where they won’t survive long. That should be policy
instead of stigmatising and breeding hatred of a group of people who have
contributed more and have far more right to be here than smug, ignorant
arseholes like Cameron, May and Griffin who only divide our country instead of
relishing the real Britain, in all its technicolour glory.