August 27, 2009
Empire and Immigration
There was an interesting discussion at Liberal Conspiracy the other day. Dave Semple was basically arguing that debate isn’t the way to tackle the BNP, because it can’t work given the context, whereas others were challenging this view. I rather agreed with this comment by Lee Griffin, however:
“The mass media need to take their place, as do the political parties, to actually TRY the “debate” side of things in the first place. To claim it’s not working when no-one is actually en masse debunking these myths and lies is jumping the gun.”
But regardless I think it’s worth exploring ways in which the wind can be taken out of BNP sails apart from the medium of public debate in the immediate term.
Much of this will have to focus on immigration, resentment about which the BNP has capitalised upon. The problem is, in this country it’s very difficult to have an intellectually honest debate about immigration which doesn’t revolve around kneejerk racism, or pandering to knee jerk racism by passing off hollow platitudes like “it’s Just-A-Fact that we can’t take any more immigrants.”
Let me lay my cards upon the table. I find it very, very difficult to see a convincing moral justification for restricting immigration which extends beyond self-interest. Many people want to come here because they know that life in the UK offers a higher standard of living than where they are from. That applies, with varying degrees, as much to Polish plumbers as it does to Congolese rape victims. Whether would-be immigrants are motivated by economic or asylum issues, they want to come here because it’s better than where they are from.
Yet nobody anymore deserves to be born in Congo than in Poland or in Britain. Birth is something nobody controls – and yet it decides so much. The rub is this: we Britons no more deserve to be born into a prosperous developed nation with a welfare state and high standards of living than a Congolese deserves to be born in war-torn, devastated Congo, or a Pole into better-than-Congo-not-as-good-as-Britain Poland. So how can we look Poles or Congolese or whoever in the eye and say “no, you cannot come here and share in what we’ve got, because you were born somewhere else”. That argument holds no moral water with me: I honestly don’t see why it is any different, as it stands, from saying “no, you cannot come here and share in what we’ve got, because you were born black”.
Which isn’t to say there are no arguments for limiting immigration. The following would probably pass muster: “No, you can’t come here because if you did it would threaten our wellbeing to such an extent that as a matter of self-defence we must keep you out (sorry)”. But note two things. First, this is an argument from self-interest. Justified it may be, but self-interest does the spadework and that has to be acknowledged. Second, it’s not argument that can be applied to modern Britain. Pace BNP propaganda, NOTW op-ed pieces and the Daily Mail, Britain is not at risk of collapse from immigration. If anything, we enjoy a slight economic benefit from immigration overall. Now there are valid concerns – which i’m going to delicately leave aside here for now – about immigration suppressing wages for the indigenous working class. But to say that our lowest-paid workers have an unfettered right not to experience competition from migrant workers simply because they are British rests upon the unjustified use of the same arbitrary factors of birth I pointed to above.*
What is often doing the work in anti-immigration rhetoric, I contend, is something rather closer to the following: “We have more than you, and we don’t want to share, and we are going to keep you out and use the arbitrary fact of your being born elsewhere as our stated justification for keeping you out.” And that, when laid bear, is a rather unconvincing justification for closing the door to immigration, because it just amounts to selfishness.
But simply going through that process of argument isn’t going to cut it, I fear. The rightwing media has a stranglehold on the immigration discourse in this country, and lofty arguments about arbitrariness of birth coming from poncey egalitarians are not going to get a look in. At least, not directly.
But maybe there is a way in. For there’s something I’ve left out of my above argument, something which makes my points about arbitrariness even sharper: that much of the world is poor because we in the Britain in particular are rich. For in this debate about immigration, the British Empire is the biggest elephant that ever plonked itself into the tinniest of rooms. Acknowledging that elephant could be a very powerful thing to do.
Let’s cut the shit. Part of the reason Britain is so prosperous is that we spent several centuries sailing around the world, raping, killing, enslaving and exploiting indigenous populations whilst stealing their natural resources. As Joseph Conrad noted regarding the scramble for Africa, which was the last big land-grab the Western powers including Britain took part in: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
Yet we are in large measure either ignorant of, or in denial about, our shameful colonial history. With the exception of right wing historians like Nial Ferguson (who as far as I can tell wanted to make apologies for exploitation because it makes him controversial and therefore famous as a “revisionist”), Prince Charles (who as far as I can gather wants Empire to be taught in the hope that that way it’ll come back and make him King of the World), and commentators like Johann Hari (who spoils his arguments by going for the most extreme statistics available, even when they’re apparently disputed by most experts) we as a nation don’t talk about our Imperial legacy.
It’s known about, for sure. But generally in a sort of abstract “yeah that was supposed to be really bad wasn’t it?” sort of way, which is quickly glossed over with nostalgia about when Britain was a first-tier power and How We Won The War (And Saved The World). Accordingly, the thousands of colonised subjects from the Indian subcontinent and Africa who fought in that war for our freedom are usually pushed to the side by visions of Spitfires and black-out curtains. Throughout my educational career, for example, Empire only ever got the barest of mentions. Hitler’s Germany was a far more permanent fixture of my historical education than Britain’s Empire.
But you know, things may be changing.
I went away and did some research, and whilst I still couldn’t find substantial inclusion Empire on the GCSE syllabi of the main three exam boards – OCR, EdExcel and AQA [PDF] – I was delighted to see that for 11-14 year olds, things have apparently changed a great deal since my school days. For the National Curriculum website states in its blurb:
“Sequences of work should enable pupils to gain knowledge and understanding of key aspects of British history and of how these relate to the wider European and global contexts. In addition, pupils should have opportunities to study some exclusively European and world topics. For example, a study of the British Empire should include its effects both on Britain and on the regions it colonised.”
And in the specification [PDF] it emphasises that children should learn:
“the development of trade, colonisation, industrialisation and technology, the British Empire and its impact on different people in Britain and overseas, pre-colonial civilisations, the nature and effects of the slave trade, and resistance and decolonisation”
Now it’s hard infer from just this how much students are being taught about our colonial legacy. But the idea that they should be taught about the colonisation of indigenous peoples, the existence of pre-colonial civilisations and the effects of Empire upon colonised regions is probably a very good thing.
I’m not a teacher (though I’d be delighted to hear from one) so I don’t know to what extent the full horrors of Britain’s Empire are being taught. But if our kids aren’t yet learning about the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians, for example, or the brutal suppression of the Mao Mao rebellion in Kenya which saw thousands imprisoned in concentration camps to be tortured and murdered, then they really should be. (See Monbiot.com for more, though he like Hari relies somewhat on the Elkins book which I’ve been warned off by a reliable source for being over the top in its estimations). After all, we teach kids about the Holocaust perpetrated by Germany, so why not about our own millions of graves?
Yet however limited it may be in practice (though again, please tell me more if you know), the very fact that we are starting to teach our children about our shameful past is to be welcomed. This is for many reasons, but for one in particular that I’ll focus on today: the more that Britons learn about our nation’s disgusting history of exploitation – of the role we played in raping vast chunks of the rest of the world – the harder it may be for people to nonchalantly turn away the descendants of those whom we abused and exploited when they come to our doors asking for a slice of the pie.
If children learn that a lot of asylum seekers and economic immigrants – particularly from the Indian subcontinent – come here because one of the few non-harmful legacies we left them was our language, then dismissing immigrants as mere “scroungers” may be considerably harder to do.
If we as a nation can acknowledge our cultural history, then perhaps fewer people will find palatable a political party that advocates the very racism and amorality that underpinned our past colonial exploits.
And to get back to my starting argument, the idea that arbitrariness of birth is no justification for denying people a share of our wealth gains a whole lot more power when people know that what makes the arbitrariness of birth especially significant is a centuries-long history of exploitation that our forefathers facilitated. That many are so poor in large measure because we are so rich.
So if we want to not only beat the BNP, but also reclaim the discourse on immigration from the kneejerk right, let’s play the long game. Let’s teach our kids our history, but let’s teach it in all its rancid horror.
–
* Which means that if one cares about low-paid workers having their wages suppresed, as I do, then it’s no good simply blaming immigrants. Other solutions must be looked for, with the case for increasing the National Minimum Wage being a prima facie good one.
** Conrad was talking about Congo, under the exploitation of King Leopold II. But Britain was as guilty of exploitation in the African scramble of the late 19th Century as Belgium: witness self-authorising imperialist Cecil Rhodes’ arrogation of vast swathes of what is now South Africa and Zimbabwe to extend his diamond and mining empire.
Dave Semple said,
August 27, 2009 at 11:00 am
No most teachers that I know still don’t teach famine etc as a result of Empire, preferring instead to focus on high history even today, after the revolutions of history from below, social history and feminism. *shrugs*
As for the rest, I thought Lee’s comment was typically naive. I wasn’t jumping the gun because I wasn’t saying that “debate has failed” – I was saying debate will never work, tried already or not, because there are material predispositions within the ideologies and structure of capitalism that will act to prevent it.
The mass media engage in combatting racism? That’s got to be a joke, seriously. How long do we have to live with the open racism of the tabloids and the Daily Mail, and the covert prejudices of the Telegraph and Times before we actually acknowledge that there’s a reason why these papers might spew the guff they do. Of course ‘debate’ has not been tried – and on the liberal conception of democracy, it never will be tried. That’s not how things work.
As for the political parties, Labour definitely does try the debate technique: stressing local issues, organising immigrant workers and community forum meetings and so forth. There are also leaflets which directly call the BNP out on the number of lies they tell – but at a national level, from the point of view of the current orientation of Labour, Tories and Lib Dems, no way to correct the combination of deficiencies in the liberal ideology and pressures created by capitalism, impacting on working people.
I could go on to explain more of this, but I actually made the case on TCF, regarding liberal deficiencies, on the post about the argument between Zizek and Norman Geras.
Dan said,
August 27, 2009 at 11:41 pm
I agree with you (almost) wholeheartedly on immigration. I have a lot of trouble believing that geographical lines which came about mostly by a historical fluke somehow map on to fundamental moral borders which tell us who we should or should not care about helping. I have always been very impressed by this quote from the historian Parker T Moon:
“Language often obscures truth. More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue. When one uses the simple monosyllable “France” one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country–when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis“–we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors. How different it would be if we had no such word as “France,” and had to say instead–thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory! Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: “A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.” This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the “few”? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey?”
I think there is a moral to draw from that quote with respect to immigration, too. Anyway, even the arguments from self-interest which you mention as possibly mitigating the position of opponents of free migration are incredibly weak; you might enjoy the article Is there a right to immigrate? by philosopher Mike Huemer (it’s here: http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/Immigration.pdf) which in my always humble opinion makes mincemeat of them.
I don’t know what you mean here “Which means that if one cares about low-paid workers having their wages suppresed, as I do, then it’s no good simply blaming immigrants” because, if anything, the wages of low-paid workers are not being suppressed but rather are being buoyed up by the restriction of competition (from immigrants). That is literally what is going on: men with weapons are physically threatening people from other countries who want to peacefully engage in mutually beneficial transactions with British employers with violence. That is what offends my sense of decency, for the most part. I sense a bit of cognitive dissonance here because you apparently feel the same way, yet you baulk at the possible consequences for the “indigenous working class.”
Finally, I think you’re just wrong in saying that “many are so poor in large measure because we are so rich.” I have seen no evidence to suggest that economic growth in the west required imperialism, and quite a bit to suggest the opposite. It is one of those ideas which sounds very plausible in the abstract and by reference to the confirming cases, but if you do what rational people should always do and look for disconfirming evidence, the connection is lost. If it is imperialism that matters, how come Mongolia, Bhutan and Ethiopia so poor, and Singapore and Hong Kong so rich? At the very least, this should tell you that there is something more to the story. I don’t for a minute wish to attempt to justify colonialism, but it’s just not obvious to me that there is some causal link here between empire and prosperity
dingdongalistic said,
August 29, 2009 at 7:06 pm
It’s a well-argued, interesting piece, but I do wonder how this bit:
“Yet nobody anymore deserves to be born in Congo than in Poland or in Britain. Birth is something nobody controls – and yet it decides so much. The rub is this: we Britons no more deserve to be born into a prosperous developed nation with a welfare state and high standards of living than a Congolese deserves to be born in war-torn, devastated Congo, or a Pole into better-than-Congo-not-as-good-as-Britain Poland. So how can we look Poles or Congolese or whoever in the eye and say “no, you cannot come here and share in what we’ve got, because you were born somewhere else”.”
…compares with your thinking re: tax havens.
Paul said,
September 2, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Dave,
I suspected that history is still being dominated by the Great Men What Did Stuff approach, but still I think that the introduction of Empire onto the syllabus is to be welcomed; it could be the groundwork for better things.
“As for the rest, I thought Lee’s comment was typically naive. I wasn’t jumping the gun because I wasn’t saying that “debate has failed” – I was saying debate will never work, tried already or not, because there are material predispositions within the ideologies and structure of capitalism that will act to prevent it.”
Well, I’m not sure you’re being fair to Lee there. You’re kind of supposing that the material predispositions within the ideologies and structure of capitalism *will* necessarily act to prevent that debate. I can see why from a rev Marxist position that this seems true…but I’m not convinced a rev Marxist position is the right one on this point. I certainly don’t think you’ve demonstrated it – thus I think Lee’s point about jumping the gun is a fair one. We need to try some other forms 0f (heavily moderated) capitalism and see how debate works out in those before we can write them all off as necessarily bound to failure.
But then, I suspect I’ll always have a lot more time for On Liberty than you do.
“As for the political parties, Labour definitely does try the debate technique: stressing local issues, organising immigrant workers and community forum meetings and so forth. There are also leaflets which directly call the BNP out on the number of lies they tell – but at a national level, from the point of view of the current orientation of Labour, Tories and Lib Dems, no way to correct the combination of deficiencies in the liberal ideology and pressures created by capitalism, impacting on working people.”
But how much of this is “capitalism” the monolithic concept, and “the media” acting as an agent within the capitalist monolith? The right-wing stranglehold on the media is, of course, a product of capitalism as it is composed currently…but I suspect i’m less convinced of the necessity of this than I suspect you are, and would want to stress contingent historical variables and the capacity for alternatives a little more than I’m guessing you’ll let into the equation.
however, I’ll read your post at TCF when I get a minute over the next few days and probably follow-up there.
Paul said,
September 3, 2009 at 12:09 am
Dan,
“I don’t know what you mean here “Which means that if one cares about low-paid workers having their wages suppresed, as I do, then it’s no good simply blaming immigrants” because, if anything, the wages of low-paid workers are not being suppressed but rather are being buoyed up by the restriction of competition (from immigrants).”
Yeah, reverse the thought-process. Of course if we restrict the number of immigrants, that bouys wages. I was referring to the situation of worrying about wage decreases as a result of NOT restricting immigration. (So I think we agree, just crossed-wires)
“I sense a bit of cognitive dissonance here because you apparently feel the same way, yet you baulk at the possible consequences for the “indigenous working class.””
No cognitive dissonance here, you misread me. My point was simply that if one has an open-door policy, and as a result wages for indigenous workers decrease, it’s not good lazily blaming immigrants for this and saying “oh, horrible immigrants suppressing wages”, because of the arguments from arbitrariness given above. Something else – something more complex – must be offered up.
“I have seen no evidence to suggest that economic growth in the west required imperialism,”
I never said required. I never alluded to historical deterministic necessity. But as a contingent truth about how many western nations DID become rich, I point you towards Spain’s exploitation of South America, the USA being based on the graves of millions of indigenous peoples, the British exploitation of the Indian Sub Continent in particular, Dutch exploitation of the Indonesia and Malaysia, French exploitation of North Africa, and all of the European powers (but especially Britain) carving up Africa in the so-called Scramble of the late 19th Century. (read for example King Leopold’s Ghost: 10million dead Congolese, many more enslaved, and one very rich Belgian king and later country). Colonialism paid, and its effects were far reaching the established prosperity of the colonial powers. This is pretty hard to deny, if you think about the long-term benefits of mass-resource exploitation undertaken at the barrel of a gun…or did Western nations ONLY get wealthy because of the natural advantages of European climates and geography? Hmm…
“If it is imperialism that matters, how come Mongolia, Bhutan and Ethiopia so poor,”
1. I never said it was only imperalism that matters, or that imperialism was the only cause of poverty
2. In the case of, say, immigration from the Indian sub continent, imperalist Britain seems to matter a lot more than in the case of Mongolia. So why cite mongolia as a counter-example to the claim about British Empire? Ditto Bhutan.
3. Re Ethiopia: probably a bad example for your case, there. Ever heard of Mussolini?
“and Singapore and Hong Kong so rich? ”
They’re rich because they were for so long bastions of empire! OK, I know what you were getting at, but think a little harder: these tiny places were originally trading ports that then became vast focal points for imperial power. When Empire receded, they retained their strategic significance (and, incidentally, became tax havens having nothing else to survive from). But they are quite obviously the exception not the rule. That my argument that generally empire caused poverty does not cover every single post-colonial territory is hardly surprising, is it? Nor is it particularly problematic.
“but it’s just not obvious to me that there is some causal link here between empire and prosperity”
So presumably we just went around conquering bits of the world for fun?
Paul said,
September 3, 2009 at 12:12 am
dingdongalistic,
if you’d care to elaborate any apparent incoherence you think you detect in my arguments, I’d be glad to answer the charge.
But frankly I’ve no idea what you’re getting at…
Migration is not a crime, but the way it’s discussed is criminal « Left Outside said,
September 6, 2009 at 1:34 pm
[...] quite a good discussion why a Socialist must fight for the rights of migrants. Funnily enough, this Paul does as well arguing against the arbitrary benefits of [...]
dingdongalistic said,
September 7, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Ok, sorry Paul, should have elaborated.
Your argument on tax havens basically seems to contend that it is an avoidance of responsibility for rich people to move abroad to low tax countries, thus avoiding paying tax. This may be true, and I sympathise with the view that tax avoidance is inherently selfish, but the problem is that if you apply the logic that “So how can we look Poles or Congolese or whoever in the eye and say “no, you cannot come here and share in what we’ve got, because you were born somewhere else” ” to emigration, you really have to apply the same logic towards emigration, even for reasons as selfish as taxation.
Paul said,
September 7, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Dingdongalistic,
OK, your reasoning is based on a confusion about tax avoidance and tax evasion, and tax exiles.
People who actually physically uproot to go and live in tax havens are not actually engaged in tax avoidance or evasion: if they leave the UK and reside elsewhere, they are not liable to UK tax (except for on earnings arising in the UK, depending on double taxation treaties etc). What’s probably confusing you are exceptional cases like Lord Ashcroft or the Barclay brothers, who are often discussed because they occupy an alleged gray area: both Lord Ashscroft and the Barclay brothers reside overseas, thus are legally not due for UK tax…except there is allegedly a question mark about whether they “really” reside overseas for various reasons, and how much of their income is UK generated in the UK and liable for UK tax. So far, the law says they’re not resident here, so they are not liable. They are arguably tax exiles, sure (though Lord Ashcroft has a well-stated love of Belize, so maybe that’s what motivates him more to be resident there), but that means they are liable to tax elsewhere and are not breaking UK law (the issue with Lord Ashcroft in particular is how he can be a member of our House of Lords and reside overseas. But as far as I understand it, Lord Ashcroft breaks no laws and the issue is an ongoing one of constitutional debate, not a legal question – that’s important to stress, because I don’t want to get sued: again, I stress, Lord Ashcroft is doing nothing legally wrong, as far as I understand the situation. And neither are the Barclay brothers, just for the record.)
Tax avoidance and evasion are not the same as being a tax “exile” – i.e. actually physically uprooting to live in another jurisdiction. These are practices which allow individuals who are resident in the UK to find methods of not paying UK tax whilst still residing in the UK. The whole point is that the individual doesn’t emigrate: they enjoy the privileges of living here whilst not paying the full tax the state expects to be due of them. This frequently relies upon the use of offshore “tax haven” structures. But note: tax havens are places where only *paper* transactions take place. no real money sits in these places (well, hardly any); the point is to make it *look* like money is sitting in these places, so as to avoid/evade tax due here in the UK.
It’s all done through legal wizzardry and creative accounting, but it’s a long, long way from actually emigrating in the vast majority of cases.
So your point about emigration/immigration rests essentially upon a confusion about what tax avoidance and evasions consists of in 99.9% of cases, namely specifically not emigrating but relying on paper transactions and financial skullduggery.