Immigration

Another stray paragraph that I'm rescuing from the cutting floor and a follow-up.

One of the defining political issues of our time is immigration. Primates tend to think of this as strangers coming to live amongst us. It's stressful and it takes time to accommodate and/or assimilate them. But they also invigorate our gene pool and bring new ideas, attitudes, and practices, and so there are benefits to immigration as well. In recent decades net immigration to the UK has been in the hundreds of thousands each year. In 2015, 300,000 migrants arrived. This is less than half a percent of the population, but it is also a large town. If you set up a new town of 300,000 people it would require considerable investment in infrastructure: roads, schools, shops, health care, governance, police and so on. And yet, government has been cutting funding to all these functions at the local level creating strain on resources.  Even the mainstream are now using the phrase "housing crisis". As social primates having and maintaining groups norms is one of our main survival strategies. If our communities are unstable, if our standard of living is in decline, then we are unlikely to welcome strangers coming to live with us because we're already anxious about our society.

But let's not pretend that the UK is not also a very wealthy country with relatively high wages and a high standard of living compared to many nearby countries, for example in Eastern Europe or North Africa. So of course enterprising people will want to come here to seek a better life. Chances are that if someone reaches escape velocity from their own country to wind up in ours, then they are enterprising or desperate (I find the practice of referring to refugees as "migrants" puzzling). People often say things to me about the national character of Aotearoans based on Kiwis they meet in London. But they never meet the people who are put off by the high cost of travel, daunted by the difficulties, or who just want to stay home. Of course the young folk they meet in London are a lively, outgoing, friendly bunch. But they would be, wouldn't they? I expect many of the people I grew up with never made it out of our small town, let alone all the way to Britain.

I write this as a sort of inadvertent migrant. I think Britain is undergoing a crisis of identity. Unlike many other nations, the national character here has few unifying characteristics and many divisive ones. The idea of Britain in the post-imperial era is up for grabs. Popularist politics mean that we'll get no help in this from our political leaders - their "vision" is simply to remain in power. Society is fragmented and possibly atomising. And it is into this lack of cohesion and clarity that outsiders are pouring, fuelling the uncertainty. The most obvious result has been the vote to leave the European Union, yet another cause of division.

Strangers & Globalisation

This is another para that I've decided to cut from an essay, but don't want to just throw away. I wish I'd kept more of these edits over the years!

"The concerns over immigration in the UK need to be seen not simply as racist or some kind of phobia to strangers (i.e. xenophobia). We are social primates, for us xenophobia is a feature not a bug. Outsiders cause us stress, mostly because we don't know what norms they follow. If we are not assured that most people are following the norms most of the time we will naturally (and completely normally) be anxious. It goes to the heart of our being. It's all very well for liberals to scoff, but I think we've seen recently that liberals don't really understand people. They have fluffed a number of important confrontations because they treat people with contempt. In the UK it has meant leaving the European Union at an inopportune moment. In the USA it has allowed Donald Trump to get the Republican nomination and put him ahead in the polls as I write. We are seeing a general resurgence of nationalism and tribalism - because this is less stressful for most people than globalisation and mass migration. The break down in the Balkans. The rifts along religious and ethnic lines in the Middle East. Britain leaving the EU. In the background many Scots want to leave the UK; Catalans want to leave Spain and so on. In Europe we are also seeing the rise of far-right, nationalist, political parties. For Europeans to be entertaining Fascism again is by the far the most striking augury of our times. We cannot simply override the needs of social primates and expect them to be content. And discontent is an unpredictable force in society."

 Also

"Globalisation was instituted in the 18th Century and then reinstituted in the 1970s and 1980s because it makes more profit for the 1%. It's not because it makes the world better, unless by "better" you mean the rich get richer. The four freedoms of the EU, including the free movement of labour and capital are central pillars of Neoliberalism. They undermine pay and working conditions in richer countries which means that companies make more profits. And then they allow those companies to take their profits offshore to tax havens where government cannot tax them. Globalisation is not for the little people, not for the 99%, there is no benefit to ordinary people in globalisation."