UK Immigration: Fear, Mis-Information, and Nativism

The saying about learning a lot when you travel is true - at least for me. In the kind of work that I do, I have to travel fairly often. The last few years I have been working on a research project in Europe - Immigration is something you are faced with constantly if you are visiting the European Union and either watch TV news or read the papers.

As I am riding the subway to the archives or to conduct an interview with another scholar, I see people from many countries, and I think about immigration.

As soon as I walk out of the apartment I’m staying at, I see four restaurants – from Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Spain. I go to an internet café and a young man asks me if I’ll speak English to him – He has immigrated here from Southeast Asia. I see a hand painted poster that says “Pakistan’s Disaster.”

There is talk (mostly on TV) that this neighborhood is full of people who lack good hygiene (that they urinate and defecate in the street). I assume this is true; I do smell urine, kind of like what I smell when I walk around Lower East Side in Manhattan. The place has a gritty feel while it is also chic - in some ways Madrid is so New York.

There are people here from all over the world. All different colors and languages. Yet the only out of control drunks I have seen are local people (not immigrants).

There is a neighborhood initiative to clean things up - stop the crime, not use the sidewalks as restrooms, not leaving trash and beer cans around the plaza. Today I started seeing small black and white posters that are trying to discourage these behaviors.

This neighborhood initiative for safety and cleanliness brings to mind when I moved into the East End Neighborhood in Houston. People from the other side of town would ask me why would I want to live there. Some (so-called) friends made faces when they drove up to my house. My mother wanted me to build a 9 foot fence that encompassed my yard. Everyone got me so paranoid I even stopped a police officer once and asked his opinion on the barrio’s safety. He said it has some problems, but was basically ok.

The paranoia I was experiencing was not new. I believed the negative descriptions of the neighborhood that I would see on TV. It was like a dark continent for me. When I first moved there I would go to the stores and marvel at how everyone spoke Spanish all the time. It seemed so foreign.

But the decision to move there was very logical for me. The mortgage was very affordable, it was in center of the city and It was 1.4 miles to my job. I was tired of commuting. I wanted to live somewhere that I could walk to work if I needed to. People thought that was impossible in Houston – unless you are so rich you can live anywhere.

So, I found a white house with a big front porch. It had some type of artificial siding over clapboard. The deed says it was built in 1920. I think it is older.

And yes, on Sunday afternoons (and many weekend nights) there is very loud music – banda, mariachi, salsa… anything in Spanish. I got some noise reduction head phones for the days its really really loud.

Lots of people walk by everyday. I actually know many of my neighbors. We talk all the time. The gangs don’t bother me – I hear they usually only harm each other. I did get a big black Lab mix., she is a nice dog, but sometimes scares the kids when they walk home from school. One thing I did as soon as I bought the house was put a fence all around the property. I found that people respect fences, even if gates aren’t locked (the chain link fence is only 4 feet tall - most anyone can jump over it, even me). The neighbors say that a fence and a big dog make people respect your property – its a way to "mark your territory" - the boundary can be easily crossed, but that's not the point. It's about respect --- so most everybody’s house has a fence and a dog.

Nothing has been stolen from our yard. The cars haven’t been broken into. The house has remained safe. The neighborhood residents have a real sense of community. They call me "the teacher." The only people that I’m wary of are the skinny white guys who don’t work and seem to be on drugs. The immigrants basically work all the time. Their entertainment is to play loud music while they barbeque and have a beer in the back yard.

The narratives about danger and filth were imaginary… is what they say about this immigrant neighborhood in Madrid the same?

The phantom hordes
Beware scare stories of UK overpopulation: in future we may need all the people we can get

Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah
Thursday November 29, 2007
The Guardian (London)

Having already experienced unprecedented immigration in recent years, the UK should, apparently, be bracing itself for millions more in coming decades. Almost all of the coverage of the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) projections has focused on how more immigration could lead to a doubling of the UK population by 2081. But this frenzy is unwarranted and could distract us from far more fundamental challenges.

For a start, there has been little coverage of the huge range in the projections. Look carefully and the total population could be anywhere between 64 and 108 million by 2081, depending on how many children we have, how long we live and how much immigration exceeds emigration. Dig deeper, and you'll see the population could actually fall to 50 million, with no net immigration and no improvements in life expectancy.

We have no reliable way of knowing where in this range we will be in seven decades' time. In 1965, the ONS's predecessor predicted a UK population of 75 million by 2000. Given how far off this proved, we should instead be talking about how to respond to the drivers that will shape population change.

One key factor is an ageing population. The UK-born workforce actually fell last year; this year we will see more pensioners than children in the UK. If we are not careful, there will come a time where there will not be enough British workers doing British jobs to pay for public services and pensions. Even in a full-employment scenario, migrants will need to complement the domestic workforce. It is the composition, not the size, of the population that matters.

The oft-evoked image of hordes of hungry migrants clambering to get into the UK also misunderstands the future drivers of migration. The patterns show that future migrants are more likely be besuited bankers than famished farmers. Indeed, far from trying to limit immigration, there is a good chance the UK will have to compete hard with other developed countries to attract the best and brightest from around the world.

Other potential drivers - global economic inequalities, climate change and war - are unlikely to result in vast numbers coming to the UK. Instead, if improvements in border controls and technology continue, the impacts of such displacement will be felt more by the neighbours of war-torn, poor or environmentally-devastated countries. Uganda will bear the brunt of problems in Rwanda; India will pay the price of flooding in Bangladesh. The developed world, now home to only around one in five of the world's refugees, is unlikely to provide shelter.

The debate about overpopulation also ignores perhaps the most important migration trend in the UK: emigration. Last year, IPPR estimated that there were around 5.5 million British nationals living abroad - more than there are foreigners here. Countries like Australia, home to more than a million Brits, actively scour the world for new migrants. Meanwhile, many in the UK seem not to want to accept this reality.

Perhaps the most worrying assumption is that future migrants will behave like past migrants. While many of those who came to the UK in the 1960s stayed permanently, this is unlikely for today's Poles, in the vanguard of a new generation of circular migrants. In an increasingly mobile world, projections based on old assumptions may be little short of useless.

The more we obsess about how many more people will be crammed into these islands, the greater the risk of us ending up with far fewer people: lonely souls struggling to cope in a brave new world.

· Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is director of research policy at the Institute for Public Policy Research

ippr.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2218600,00.html