Lies, damned lies

It is time we rebutted the stock-in-trade mendacity of the anti-immigrants

David Aaronovitch
Sunday January 26, 2003
The Observer

Three straws in a gale. First, the Labour MP I met on Thursday, who told me that his constituents were 'up in arms' about asylum-seekers, then added: 'But we don't have any asylum-seekers in my constituency, or anywhere in the area.' On the same day, the BNP, with 29 per cent of the vote, won a council by-election in the Mixenden ward of Halifax. And on Wednesday, I got my copy of Prospect magazine, carrying a long article by the former Marxist economist, Bob Rowthorn, headlined 'In Defence of Fortress Europe', and arguing that mass immigration is of little economic benefit, while being a threat to the identity of Britain as a nation.

I feel the shadows closing in. In Sittingbourne on Friday night, 2,000 residents, interlaced with members of the BNP, turned up at a meeting called by the council to discuss the establishment of short-term accommodation for asylum-seekers undergoing induction. Many accused asylum-seekers of high levels of criminality, of wanting to poison the water supply, of depriving British people of health facilities, of sexually harassing indigenous women and of terrorism. What is one to do with such unreason?

Rationalise it, according to Bob Rowthorn. Because what is going on here is, he argues, understandable. The insurgent citizenry of the northern towns and Kentish ports are 'raising, albeit often in a xenophobic form, issues of community, identity and self-determination that should concern all democrats'. And even their xenophobia is not, he suggests, completely irrational.

First, there is the issue of numbers. Rowthorn seems to buy into the calculations produced by the journalist Anthony Browne and the organisation, Immigration Watch, which famously suggest that we are adding a city the size of Cambridge every six months. By extrapolating forward from today's high figures, and making all kinds of assumptions about rates of return of refugees, future birth rates (all these assumptions tend to boost the figures), Browne et al paint a picture of a vastly increased British population come 2050.

Or, as Browne has put it, 'an unprecedented and sustained wave of immigration_ utterly transforming the society in which we live against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion, and with questionable economic benefits'.

The problem for people like me is that while there are good reasons to believe that Browne's figures are inflated, there is the possibility that they may not be. So I need my own figures and then, to answer the next question, how much does it matter?

Let us first agree, as Rowthorn does, that there is no greater propensity among immigrants towards crime, pros titution and anti-social behaviour than among the population at large. But what about economic factors? Here there is the sharpest possible debate. Rowthorn believes that 'immigration on a modest scale brings benefits in the form of diversity and new ideas', but beyond that he says that the benefits cease, agreeing with Browne that we do not need immigrants to replace an ageing work force.

There are plenty of economists and experts who would dispute this analysis, but Rowthorn does not mention them, instead adding some remarkable problems of his own. Like this. 'Too much reliance on immigration,' he writes, 'may remove the incentive to educate the domestic population and develop its entrepreneurial capacities.'

I note the plausible 'may' here, but is Rowthorn really suggesting that one of the problems with immigrants is how much better they are than us? The logic of this would be to admit only stupid, feckless ones, thereby forcing us to educate our indigenous workforce and make James Dysons out of them.

You can't help feeling that Rowthorn is arguing backwards from his true posi tion, as Browne certainly does (and maybe as I do). Which is that the cohesiveness of nation and community is threatened by mass immigration. If such immigration continues, says Rowthorn, Britain will 'soon contain a very large number who have no personal connection with the fairly recent past and feel neither pride nor shame in this past'. This has already happened to an extent, because 'the presence of ethnic minorities has made it more difficult to teach a coherent national history'.

We will lose that which binds us together, our sense of nationhood, for 'a nation is a community and, to some extent, exclusive. Its members share a sense of common identity and share moral obligations with each other'. It is a legitimate feeling of loss, he implies, which gives rise to xenophobia. Or, to put it another way, the racists are right, but for the wrong reasons.

Rowthorn and Browne do not blame immigrants themselves. Instead, Rowthorn fingers a shadowy 'cosmopolitan elite', which rides roughshod over the ordinary folk by attempting to 'refashion' national identity 'to accord with its own vision of how the world should be'. Rowthorn is not just vague on who this cosmopolitan elite is, but allows the reader complete latitude to construct his or her own. Freemasons perhaps, or Jews, or New Labour, or Guardian readers or, more likely, irritating fellow dons at high table.

Whatever this elite is, I suppose I join it when I say that Rowthorn's definition of nation is just piety masquerading as analysis (has he even read Linda Colley?), and his suggestion that mass immigration necessarily undermines a sense of nationhood is completely contradicted by the experience of the United States and Australia. If nationhood is just a series of particularities (eating fish and chips, taking the dog for a walk, knowing who is tenth in line to the throne), then Rowthorn may be right.

If it is embodied in values, then he may well be wrong. Let us say that the things that we most value about Britishness are tolerance, free speech, non-violence, a vibrant popular culture, comedy, a belief in fairness, representative democracy and complaining to anyone except the person who has given you offence. Are these necessarily put at risk by high levels of immigration?

And are they likely to be better preserved if we become Fortress Britain, repatriating people, turning relatives back at the ports and airports, imprisoning torture victims and refusing facilities to refugees?

Ironically, Rowthorn has also become something of a family-values campaigner and must know that the major causes of upheaval and community disintegration have nothing whatsoever to do with immigration (or, for that matter, with cosmopolitan elites). They have to do with consumerism, feminism, wealth, choice and mobility. Immigration doesn't make us divorce, leave our home towns and villages, drop litter or marry brown people.

Nor can the new anti-immigrants solve their moral problems by tacking on to their long and tendentious articles a final paragraph magically invoking a fairer New World Order. You know, the one where things become so wonderful in Somalia that no Somali would want to leave. I'd like to see them explain the consequences of this new order to the ordinary, unemployed folk of Halifax.

There are changes that I'd like to see to the way we handle immigration which might make things easier. Many of them are already being made. The asylum system is, as critics charge, a deception, in which economic migrants are effectively forced to ride on the backs of the one-fifth of applicants who are indeed refugees.

By allowing in more economic migrants, we are likely to reduce this problem. People who do come here should be asked to subscribe to certain values and strongly encouraged to learn English. This is just common sense, not a fascist imposition. I also want to see a national ID card instituted.

And I want to see those of us who are not prepared to bend before the oncoming storm equipping ourselves with argument and standing to the defences of the country we also love.