MIGRATION IS NOT A CRIME

There are various sides to migration and the distinction between them is often lost amongst emotive political discourse. Firstly there are asylum seekers whom most people would never refuse right of entry to, I imagine – people who are in danger in their home country and need to move to a different country for safety. During the Second World War, Great Britain was the perfect example of a hospitable host nation to thousands upon thousands of asylum seekers. Recently asylum seekers have been unfairly portrayed in the British media as benefit dependents who come to this country purely to live for free. What is often missed is the actual story – the difficulty of being forced out of your homeland to a strange country and being faced with widespread hostility not to mention an unjust legal system. In detention centres up and down the country legitimate asylum seekers are refused medical attention, legal aid and translators – their rights in this country are often abused because they themselves are not aware of or do not have the means to uphold them.

Then there is economic migration. I think this can be grouped with non-economic migration, i.e. moving countries not to work but just for experimentation. Perhaps one day I would like to go and live in India or Cuba or Spain. Clearly I don’t have any intention of turning these countries into versions of England and make them unrecognisable compared with previous generations. Yet workers or visitors from all round the world are seen as diluting the British way of life. What is forgotten is how over centuries the British actively exported their way of life all over the world and it is still apparent in countries such as India. But a few foreign accents or Polish markets and everyone freaks out to the extent that Morrissey claims that “If you walk through Knightsbridge you'll hear every accent apart from an English accent”... which everyone knows is pure hyperbole coming from someone who does not live in England anyway. Besides, choosing one particular area and complaining of its loss of British identity does nothing to prove this is the case on a national level. Talk of diluting British culture is used over and over and is supported by no actual evidence or fact.

In the United Kingdom, emigration is almost completely ignored compared with immigration. You can do as many surveys as you like and come up with statistics on how many people leave the country compared with how many arrive each year, but from what I have read any net influx of people is negligible (what is really causing housing shortages is people having lots and lots of kids). It is obvious however that immigration takes up a disproportionate amount of column space.

Like Paddington Bear, aspects of immigration soon blend into British culture and form part of the British identity, often so subtly that no one notices. Look at tea drinking – a quintessentially English tradition that has its origins in India and China. Migration is not a crime, it is a freedom that should be maintained as much as is humanly possible.