Immigrant Nation
Written by Editor Tuesday, 12 July 2011 12:08
Great Britain is now an immigrant nation. So says Paul Scheffer, a Dutch academic and writer. His book ‘Immigrant Nations’ has just been translated into English. He points out that European countries now have proportions of their population born abroad which are just as large as in the United States, the traditional land of immigration. Currently, for the UK, the figure is 10%, compared to 13% for the United States. This is despite, a national self-image in many European countries of a homogeneous population.
This contradiction between reality and self-image has driven immigration up the political agenda in all of the European countries. Accor-ding to the British Election Survey, immigration was the second most important concern of the electorate during Britain’s 2010 general election. Immi-gration has never been this prominent an issue before. British politicians are now grappling with how they respond to the electorate’s concern.
Scheffer is addressing an audience of parliamentarians in Westminster this week. While his book underlines that immigration is now an issue across Europe, there is good reason, as this article will argue, to think that his analysis of how to respond to immigration is flawed.
Scheffer’s view is that the incorporation of immigrants into host nations proceeds by a process of ‘avoidance, conflict and integration’. At first, he argues both immigrants and the host population tend to try and avoid each other and retreat into their own communities. As immigrant populations increase, such avoidance is no longer possible and cultural conflict occurs. As a consequence of this conflict, both immigrant and host communities have to renegotiate cultural practices and when this process is complete, integration occurs.
Proposed solution
His fear is that the greater the divergence of the cultural practices of the immigrant community and the host nation, the more difficult the process of conflict and integration becomes. Specifi-cally, he is concerned that it may not be possible for negotiation to take place between Muslim communities and host populations. His proposed solution is that much greater emphasis needs to be placed on identifying differences and reconciling them although, it is very unclear how he proposes that this would be done in practice.
A major critique of Scheffer’s argument should be the choice of the word ‘conflict’ to describe the adjustments that take place between immigrant commu-nities and host populations. It is not conflict that leads me to prefer food from almost anywhere else to typical English food. I do not go to the Notting Hill Carnival because I am forced. Of course conflict can arise if cultural practices are both very divergent and mutually taboo. Honour killings, for example, cannot be tolerated under British custom or law. However, such conflict is relatively rare and it may relate to a practice which only small groups either within the immigrant or host population support.
Although Scheffer is an academic, his book is written as an essay. The evidence for his arguments nearly always takes the form of individual stories. This makes it very readable. It also makes it highly unreliable. The notion of ‘conflict’ is not defined and because it is not defined, it cannot be measured. And, because it is not measured, we cannot actually tell where and with whom integration takes place most smoothly. If we cannot identify this, then we cannot investigate those situations in order to see what smoothed integration in practice.
Pessimism as to the possibility of Muslim communities integrating is based on his view that Islam cannot accept the equality of other religions. For him, this means that Muslims cannot practice religious toleration. But in reality, it is very important to make a distinction between the formal claims religions make and the actual practice of individuals who subscribe to them. In Britain, we see in practice that leading British Muslim politicians (such as the Conservative Baroness Warsi or Labour’s Sadiq Khan) are very vocal advocates of religious toleration. Equally, it should be noted that a number of Christian denominations do not recognise either each other or other faiths as equal.
Ethnic TV channels
Nonetheless, this is no longer a source of major civil disagreement in most of Europe.
Ideological exclusion is, in his view, compounded by modern technology. Ethnic TV channels, internet and skype mean that immigrants can remain immersed in their home cultures and never integrate. Superficially plausible, this argument does not bear examination.
Few media academics nowadays would argue that media can have an effect that overcomes a lived daily experience. In any case, Scheffer provides no evidence that those consuming ethnic media are not also consuming media produced in the host nation. I read Mauritius News but I also watch BBC and Channel 4 News. In addition, history tells us that the existence of immigrant media has had no impact on the integration of earlier immigrant communities.
The Jewish people who arrived in the East of London in the early twentieth century are now thoroughly integrated. This is a description of cultural life in the East End in the 1930s: “Whitechapel in those days was exciting. It was all Jewish! The whole East End was Jewish. Yiddish was spoken in every home; Yiddish was spoken in the streets; the shopkeepers spoke Yiddish. We had three daily Yiddish newspapers! Daily! Three! Yiddish books were printed here. There were always two Yiddish theatres in the East End of London.” Following Scheffer’s argument this should have prevented integration.
Immigration hostility
Despite his acknowledgment that integration occurs as a result of negotiation, Scheffer focuses on only one party to such a negotiation, namely the immigrant communities. In so far as he considers hostility in the host community, he assumes it arises from the different cultural characte-ristics of the immigrant community. If we examine the polling data, it tells a different story.
What it seems to show is that hostility to immigration in the UK arises due to the arrival of low-skilled immigrants, not their cultural beliefs. Recent polling by IPSOS-Mori in 2007 found that the group whose immigration was most opposed by British citizens were eastern Europeans, while those most favoured were western Europeans. (The latter were more favoured than Australians and New Zealanders, perhaps the most culturally similar). Culturally, these two groups, from a British perspective, are fairly similar. However, their skill bases tend to be quite different
British citizens
There is also evidence that the reaction of British citizens to immigration derives from the occupational status of those British citizens. Polling of high-skilled workers versus low-skilled workers shows diametrically opposed views to immigration. This is quite logical from an economic perspective. The immigration of low skilled workers lowers wages in service industries to the benefit of high-skilled groups who consume those services. It will also tend to have the consequence of increasing pressure on the welfare services on which lower-skilled workers are more reliant.
The lack of scientific rigour undermines Scheffer’s work. His approach is unlikely to provide MPs with much assistance. Indeed, if it encourages MPs to focus on cultural differences between groups rather than economic issues, it may impede integration not facilitate it. The key to removing the tension which racist parties like the British National Party feed from is more likely to lie in delivering fairness in distributing the costs and benefits of immigration.
Reforming the criteria under which local authorities receive central government funding is the kind of practical concrete measure which could be envisaged. Currently, levels of immigration into an area have practically no impact on the proportion of grant which local authorities receive to provide social services such as schools and housing. They should.
By Andrew Tarrant
Andrew Tarrant is a UK political analyst
