How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. This is the opening line to the 43rd Sonnet of William Shakespeare, that epitome of Englishness and the English language. And some would argue he had Welsh ancestry. Which begs the question about how you define Englishness and Britishness.
Some people in the UK have traced their DNA back to the Vikings, so we should remember that the British and the English are originally a mongrel breed – Celt and Viking, Angles and Saxons from what is now Germany, Normans from 1066, and a steady mix of others from all over the world across the centuries. And ultimately, every one of us has our deepest roots in Africa.
When does someone stop being an immigrant? One generation, or four, or 20? Would my having an Irish grandmother class me as an immigrant? Would the Norman ancestry of my 13th great-grand-parents, born in Yorkshire in the 1500s, class me as English or foreign? Or does it not matter because of the colour of my skin?
And I write as an immigrant who lives in France.
Why do all the politicians wave the same flag with the same rhetoric?
David Cameron pledged that he would reduce immigration to under 100,000, and failed miserably. Nigel Farage used immigration to win a grubby and fraudulent vote for Brexit, and despite now being in a different party, is still peddling the same thing. Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch, all the children of immigrants, demanded that we stop the boats and invented the ludicrous Rwanda scheme to deport asylum seekers. They all failed. And now Keir Starmer has echoed taking back control, claiming he will bring down immigration.
Our politicians almost seem intent on twisting Shakespeare’s words into something new and vile – How do I hate thee, let me find the ways? For none of them seem interested in the real costs and benefits of immigrants. ‘How many immigrants?’ is the wrong question. We should be asking whether we need immigration, and which immigrants we might need – not just which we want.
Do any of the arguments against immigration hold water?
Let’s start with the small boats that do not always hold water and from which children, women and men sometimes drown. Some claim these individuals are illegal immigrants. Most of the people using these boats claim asylum within hours of landing. This is permitted under treaties signed by the UK and is a part of UK law. The Labour government replaced stop the boats with smash the gangs. This ignores the simple way to prevent the boat crossings – by providing legal routes or accepting the French offer, now four years old, of processing facilities near Calais.
‘Why don’t they stay in France?’ Most refugees head for a country where there is some link of language, family or community. North Africans stay in France because they have some French. Refugees from what were once UK colonies often have English as a second language.
‘Millions are wasted on putting them up in five-star hotels.’ The truth is that millions are wasted on hotels – where entire families or groups of young men live in single rooms with £49.18 a week for food, travel and everything else. If processed, most of them will be granted refugee status and can go on to earn money, pay their own way and pay taxes, all whilst bolstering the UK economy.
‘They are all young men of fighting age.’ Most are young men of working age, because if you are a family devastated by war or climate change and able to send only one person as a refugee, then you do not send your elderly or your young women.
‘They take public resources such as the NHS and benefits.’ According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, on average, immigrants pay more in taxes and take less in benefits than the resident population, so they are paying for the NHS and other services they use.
‘They use housing needed by the people already here.’ There is some truth in this, but the prime responsibility lies with successive governments that have spent 50 years selling public housing and preventing councils from replacing it. This has resulted in soaring house prices, so older people have accumulated wealth, many younger people can never get to buy their own homes, and some people have made fortunes as slum landlords.
Do immigrants bring any other benefits?
The number of care workers needed in most European countries is steadily climbing – because we are living longer. This need is not just in care homes. Many elderly people want to stay in their own homes as long as possible, and that means care staff visiting, and the vast majority are immigrants.
And as the resident population ages, the birth rate is declining, as many couples are having fewer children. To what extent that is their own choice and how much it is driven by economics is impossible to say. And how many of those staffing the childcare industry are themselves immigrants?
NHS waiting lists have got worse and worse – both from cuts to funding under the Conservatives’ austerity measures and from doctors and nurses leaving after Brexit. Pay policy over many years meant that more doctors considered emigration, and many left the UK. The situation is made worse by the underfunding of GPs, meaning that practices cannot employ the doctors they need, whether they are trained in the UK or arrive from abroad – so newly qualified doctors as well as more established professionals are considering leaving the UK.
What about seasonal work?
A range of jobs, from hospitality to fruit picking, do not provide year-round work. When the UK is made a hostile environment for anyone from abroad, then people do not want to come here to work – even if they are planning on leaving after a few months.
The argument that these jobs can be done by people who are unemployed does not hold water. If an unemployed person takes a low-paying job that will only last for weeks, when it disappears, they will have to restart the process of claiming benefits and may well end up worse off.
What about all those homes taken by immigrants?
Everyone needs housing, whether resident or immigrant. And the best way to increase the amount of available housing is to build more. But that takes people with the right skills in the construction industry, and the UK simply does not have enough.
The construction industry has been saying it needs more skilled staff, and that was even before Labour announced they were going to build 1.5 million new homes in the course of this Parliament.
So, why do so many people dislike immigrants?
Human beings have been emigrating and immigrating for tens of thousands of years. Is anti-immigrant sentiment just the result of the work of opportunistic politicians and the words of social media warriors peddling the language of job-stealing criminals?
Do people feel unhappier about immigrants because they see their relative incomes falling? Immigration had been slowly rising in the 1990s, increased under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and held steady until the post-Brexit blip. Anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of the far-right Farage parties in the UK did not happen until the Conservatives started squeezing working people with austerity.
If I walk through a town or city in France, I do not look sufficiently different to register, but the moment I open my mouth, I am marked as an immigrant. I have tried and failed to learn the language of my adopted country. I can manage enough to get by most of the time, but I cannot hide my origins.
Is that all we are left with – that immigrants are singled out for hatred because we can identify them and because we can see by skin colour and style of dress that they are from a different country or a different religion? The Jews were identifiable in 1930s Germany by their clothes and types of business.
And why do the politicians say what they say?
I think I understand the obtuse logic of leading Conservatives, who despite their immigrant roots have wanted to prove themselves more anti-immigrant than the voters to whom they would like to appeal. It might have been couched in terms of ‘illegal’ immigrants and economics, but I feel the truth is that it has been a dog-whistling attempt to stir up racism.
At least Farage and his fellows are a little more honest. They campaigned for Brexit on keeping out foreigners – whilst tactically avoiding any mention of their own children with German passports – and have continued to point the blame for everything at immigrants.
What I do not understand is Keir Starmer’s recent speech. I accept he is in a difficult position, with many Labour voters holding anti-immigration views, but did he really have to echo ‘Enoch Powell’s made strangers in their own country’ by speaking of an ‘island of strangers?’
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