I have let some time pass (about a week) to see if I would change my thoughts after a period of reflection - I didn't.
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On my travels, I saw a moderately interesting speaker called David Goodhart [@David_Goodhart]. David Goodhart is one of David Cameron's [@David_Cameron] favourite xenophobes as he somehow believes that he adds some legitimacy to his obvious racism. The reason for this legitimacy is that Mr Goodhart heads up a thinktank that has said it is of the left - Demos. I have a feeling that Cameron may like him for his views and his former school (guess - it is Eton, of course) - though not sure which is more important. Similar to all the (more vocal) people that cross the divide of left to right, he seems to have realised a little late that his "comrades" did not seem to believe in the divisiveness of singling people out for their place of birth/skin colour and attacks the apparently homogenised "left" with the zeal of a born-again evangelist. For some context, this is in the same week as #racistvan[1] stories were in the press and the continuing EDL campaign ran on.
He is touring (this could be rhymed with a leading "h" sound) his anti-immigrant/immigration book at the moment "The British Dream" (named with a deliberate allusion to the American Dream) which has had a mixed reception. The usual suspects have jumped on it as with any debate around immigration - those that are numerate have called it incoherent, those that are in the Right-Wing Press have called it a damning indictment of Labour's open door immigration policy. I sometimes worry at the apparent lack of Venn diagram intersection there sometimes.
This review [link] in the LRB by Jonathan Portes [@jdportes] could be good context. I had not read the book or the review at the point of the discussion. Interestingly many of those that disagreed with him in the last CIF piece I read of his [here] kept calling him Portas - a delightfully subtle way of showing that you had not read the piece or could not handle detail.
The talk was in London (Camden to be a little more precise) and the city, for all its faults, is a diverse place with plenty of differing people and ideas intermingling.
Or so I thought.
Apparently, it wasn't as it appeared and we live parallel lives where we pretend to all get along but actually it is all a façade - we are deeply divided on racial lines. He then used a load of statistics that may have been entirely accurate as data points but were not quite supportive of his points as he was using them as proxies to mean something else. And this is so common in immigration debates as you are often using these proxies to talk about people to other people that are ignorant of what they mean. I don't mean this pejoratively (maybe I could have used a better word, the fact I didn't may suggest something), but many people genuinely do not understand households outside of their immediate community. One that annoys me a lot is the use of "first language" or "mother tongue" statistics to point to an idea (and it always seems to be used for that) of a bulk of immigrants that cannot speak English competently, or at a native level. [link]
The statistic that often goes with it, to emphasize the sense of "other" and parallel lives, is households that do not predominantly speak English at home. Needless to say, I fall into both categories. I didn't speak English at home, my parents do not speak English with each other and so English is spoken in my family home only between myself and my sibling. My parents both had "professional" roles in their English-speaking workplaces and myself and my sister have both been through higher education in English-speaking environments - I have even been in gainful employment teaching it.
This writing here may not always be of the highest standard, it may sometimes be incoherent and there might be some problematic sentence structures, but it is clearly at a native level. Isn't it? Or am I labouring under some misapprehension that I can communicate (maybe not effectively, but less a linguistic issue, more communicative...)?
Interestingly, there is census data that captures whether people do not speak English[2] that could be used directly rather than trying to ascertain from other bits of information.
138,000 (note the UK population is approximately 60,000,000 - so about 0.2%) [link]
And then this "does not speak English" data is actually used as a proxy for something else anyway. But what does it even mean? Is someone who does not speak English now unintegrated and also impossible to integrate? The thrust of these articles is that there are "these people" who live here and don't understand and will not (try to) understand.
Census data is a snapshot in time - it does not show intention and future expectation. It is entirely unclear what happened to those 138,000:
Were they here temporarily and so never learnt English? Did they then learn English? Were they actually mute?
Another statistic, quoted by Goodhart, is about how many people now live in areas where they do not have "white-British" neighbours and this is used as evidence of ghettoization. Again, I do not have two sets of neighbours that are exclusively "white-British". As it happens, I believe one of my neighbouring flats has a couple with a white partner and non-white partner (not sure if they fulfil "white-British" criteria) which would be further "proof" of my ghettoization as I am now in a non-white-British part of town and we have separated ourselves from white people. Goodhart also uses the loaded term "white flight" with gay abandon and when questioned over this, he says that he writes his pieces for a more academic audience which will be aware of the meaning of this and it is not inflammatory as a result. I'm not sure if he genuinely believes that or if he is fully aware of the significance of these words.
I'm not the most opinionated person, and I'm not the least but I could not completely ignore his disregard for the effects of anti-immigrant feeling that regularly spills into racial, and other forms of, discrimination as he spoke of Woolwich and how even though tensions had been raised by his friends in the press, there had been little to worry the Islamic community so I interjected:
"What about the ongoing bombing campaign taking place around the mosques of the country?"[link]
His callous disregard for the loss of life (in islamophobia attacks) and the genuine feeling of fear that people understandably have was remarkable. Given the opportunity to comment, he said something about it not being that bad... And played down the statistics of islamophobic attacks with other statistics. I didn't go back to him on that point but discussing with others later, I did mention that the effect of any terror campaign cannot be captured by the statistics he talks about as people are scared to leave their houses.
He also talked of being in a post-racism world where people of all races were not subject to large levels of racism and were not held back in a meaningful way. Most people disagreed but there was one man, needless to say another white man, who agreed and said that the link between immigration and racism had been broken. He pointed out, as if to prove it, that immigrants from different communities have differing outcomes and that, for example, the Chinese community had higher levels of income and attainment than the "white British". And then, to show his incoherence, as held them up as proof that immigrants themselves shoulder the blame for their difficult circumstances, he also pointed out that they do of course have lower levels of income when compared with those that have similar levels of education... He gave an example of a small business not employing people with different sounding names being entirely reasonable as a small business is like a family and you have to be aware of a cultural fit. It was incoherent, frankly - as it seems he had a conclusion and the facts did not need to get in the way.
As he wrapped up, questions were sought and dealt with in groups. Of course I had questions but I reiterated my point about the on-going bombing campaign (and islamophobic murder before Woolwich [link]) and also tried to explain how difficult it is when people talk of a post-racist world when you then suffer any form of discrimination.
When a lot of people tell you something does not exist and then it happens to you, it can be a tricky one to process. If racist abuse does not happen, then why did it happen? Is it something special about me?[3]
I asked about the statistical work he had done to control for the conclusions he was making. He spoke a lot about bogey-areas around London and levels of migration, immigration, employment engagement etc. in order to show how immigration had affected those areas. I simply asked him what he had done to control for the fact that urban areas will often be home to a younger, more mobile population and that in order to isolate the effects of one cause, you should isolate the others as much as possible. I wanted to know how much less integrated and successful were these immigrants than other people with the same level of income, savings, educational attainment etc etc. As he was an ex-journalist for the Financial Times, I did expect some level of numeracy and understanding of raw data.
As he dealt with the answers in groups, he ignored the substance of my question and spoke of other statistics. It was really frustrating.
I found the disregard for the difficulties that immigrants, and the children of immigrants faced to be quite disheartening actually, as if the fact that they were inconvenienced by having worse outcomes, suffering racist abuse and discrimination was not a problem.
To be fair to him, he took more questions than he had to (extending the time) and also came to the pub afterwards to talk (and even offered me a drink). In all honesty though, his viewpoint was fixed which is understandable as he has done the research and looked into it with the methodologies he believes in (I don't agree with the methodology but the raw data is fine).
What some people always say is "the public wants less immigration so it is not a party political point - democracy has spoken".
I think this is a little disingenuous.
Firstly, democracy is not the simple matter of counting votes and doing what more people want. This is the simplistic way that it is initially taught so that people can conceptually understand but democracy is also about enfranchising people - recognising them so that they can effectively be part of that democracy. That is why you have minority rights in democratic nations and those minorities are treated equally (to a greater or lesser extent) to allow them to be empowered and involved. Democracy only works if everyone is given a voice before the vote.
Secondly, what anyone wants is based on what they know - or more accurately, what they think are the facts on the ground. It is a simple (input - process - output) loop but if the inputs are false, it is difficult to see how you would get the right output (except by pure chance). What the population think is the case and what actually is the case can be vastly, vastly different to each other. [link] So they want less immigration than what they think is happening. Which is what we have right now - significantly less immigration than they think is happening..
What does that mean? Should we ignore the concerns of people who see one thing happening which they associate with something else? I think this is the real question of democracy in the modern age actually.
I don't know how widely thought of the concept of "materiality" is but basically, deal with the big problems first. And don't guess at the problems, actually find out what they are.
If there is a problem with housing, it probably isn't immigration that is causing it (it might be a factor but you need to look into the causes), it is probably housing policy.
If there is a problem with education, it probably isn't immigration that is causing it (it might be a factor but you need to look into the causes), it is probably education policy.
If there is a problem with employment, it probably isn't immigration that is causing it (it might be a factor but you need to look into the causes), it is probably employment policy.
1. It may not have been racist had it been targeted in areas other than those with large brown-skinned communities exclusively. And had translation services for languages other than Indic ones. It was, and it didn't.↩
2. This type of census data is quite weak anyway (it may be higher than 138k - or lower) as it is self-assessment... The global economic situation should have taught you to be wary of self-assessment and self-regulation. When I lived abroad, I'd have said that I was unable to speak the language were I asked in a form - but they could have asked me that question in that language and I would have understood.↩
3. I have been fortunate about direct racial abuse and can only remember one instance in recent years in the UK that was directly at me and I was flabbergasted. But part of the reason for that is that you do not have a defence mechanism and it is all the more shocking for that. I have not been particularly affected by it and the vast majority of people are entirely liberal about it.
I don't know how successfully I have "integrated" into British society but I have tried and it is not made any easier by that feeling of anxiety and discomfort that some of this chat engenders in me. I'm not an idiot, I know I am treated a little differently but it is offensive to suggest otherwise, frankly. Victim-blaming is an all too common occurrence at the moment and it needs to be checked.↩
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