Immigration is a force for good – and Labour must say so

Our many social ills have wrongly been attributed to migrants, rather than the powerful. The narrative has to change

With all the focus on the problems supposedly caused by immigration, it is striking how little scrutiny there is of the problems actually caused by opposition to immigration. It fuels bigotry towards anyone deemed to be “other”, from being screamed at to “go back to where you came from” in the street to being turned down for work. As we saw during the Windrush scandal, it leads to a country’s own citizens being kicked out of their homes, deprived of medical care and deported. It means that the wrong people are blamed for social injustices caused by the powerful – a lack of secure jobs or affordable housing, stagnating living standards, struggling public services. It causes staffing crises in essential services such as the NHS. It drives political phenomena ranging from Donald Trump in the US to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who use xenophobia as a means to garner support. At its worst, the scapegoating of those deemed to be “foreign” paved the way for conflicts such as the second world war. Immigration has never destroyed a single nation; scapegoating has.

Britain has been consumed by the worst peacetime political turmoil in modern history and is set to become poorer, in large part because of opposition to immigration. However you believe the country should navigate its current problems, there is no question that the relentless blaming of migrants was a critical factor leading to the Brexit vote. David Cameron set impossible targets and relentlessly portrayed immigration as a social burden while pursuing an economic strategy that suppressed wages. It did not end well for him, nor, more importantly, for the country. Theresa May – whose only genuine political passion seems to be migrant-bashing – has built on those ruinous foundations with an immigration white paper that would more truthfully be titled “Keep Them Out”.

One obvious response would be to focus on the economic damage the government’s strategy will inflict. Our gross domestic product will shrink. EU migrants are overwhelmingly younger, mostly in their 20s and 30s, and so tend to pay taxes and spend money, while using the NHS little. Reducing immigration, then, will reduce tax revenues. According to the government’s own projections, its plans represent a fiscal cost of between £2bn and £4bn. But relying on this strategy, which I have done myself in the past, is a mistake. Reducing the worth of people to their financial costs and benefits is dehumanising. It doesn’t work, either. Opposition to immigration is an emotional argument, and human beings are emotional, not robots powered by data. As the American Paralympian Josh Sundquist put it, you don’t win arguments by “bringing a calculator to a knife fight”. This is something that Nigel Farage is keenly aware of: four years ago, in response to the argument that reducing immigration would depress economic growth, he responded: “There are some things that matter more than money.” He cast his progressive opponents as money-obsessed accountants.

There is some good news. Although a significant majority still favours reducing immigration, overall hostility to immigration has fallen since the referendum, among both remainers and leavers. That may partly be because of the rise of a left that directs popular anger at bankers, big business and tax dodgers. For some remainers, the shock of the anti-immigrant official leave campaign may have led them to affirm support for immigration more strongly. But there’s more to the picture: some leavers feel that the act of Britain voting to leave has defused their concern, while among a hard core, anti-immigration sentiment has become more extreme.

The left’s argument for immigration should target the emotions. We should speak from experience: the midwife who brought our child into the world, the nurse who tended to our dying grandmother. Labour’s Dennis Skinner once spoke with passion about his “United Nations bypass”, which was “done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor, a Nigerian registrar”. We need to organise unapologetically anti-racist campaigns in our communities, ones that emphasise the fact that the blame for social ills lies with the powerful. From a genuine living wage to a mass housebuilding programme and strong workers’ and trade unions rights preventing a race to the bottom, our answers to the grievances that help drive anti-immigrant sentiment must be front and centre.

There is another looming debate. A new EU referendum may happen, and some so-called centrists have suggested that extracting concessions on freedom of movement will help win it. Forget the rights and wrongs of that for a minute: the remain campaign would win nothing meaningful from the EU. The referendum would be framed on the terms of the Tory Brexiteers, who would be able to say that remain concedes the problem without offering a compelling answer. The leave campaign would always be able to outbid them with promises to end freedom of movement.

Whatever happens, the left must renew its defence of migrants. Corbyn, like the shadow chancellor John McDonnell, is a veteran of anti-deportation campaigns and began his leadership at a pro-refugee rally, while his key ally Diane Abbott is passionately pro-immigration. Some of the commentators and politicians who once attacked Corbyn for ignoring resentment of immigration now absurdly portray him as a Tory Brexiteer. But the Labour leadership’s glib acceptance that freedom of movement ends with Brexit means that a sufficiently strident defence of migrants is sorely lacking, and that must change. There are also some on the left who argue that there is nothing progressive about freedom of movement because it excludes non-Europeans. This is excruciatingly naive: do they really believe a vindication of the argument that there are too many European migrants strengths the case for more from beyond the continent? Opposition to immigration has led Britain to national disaster. Labour, and the left as a whole, must be far more resolute in its defence of migrants – and confront a Tory project that offers nothing but insecurity and bigotry.

Fonte: theguardian