Immigration and British patriotism - 2

Firstly to the concern about the declining 'indigenous' British population: who exactly is an indigenous Brit? It surely isn't the Britons or early Celts, who were all but wiped out. They may be the Romans, the Angles, the Saxons, the Normans or the Vikings who many would hope to trace their ancestry back to. The irony of the nativity of these early immigrants is fairly obvious. Are the Jews who came along with Normans in 1066 native Brits? What about those who migrated here during Cromwell's rule? The BNP seem fairly confident that the line is drawn in 1945, obviously to leave out the Caribbean immigration that began soon after the war. This arbitrary distinction between earlier and later immigration only highlights how Britain has always been a nation of immigration and that despair over a declining native population is largely irrational.

This issue is then purely racial, the far right is not worried about native Brits, but white Brits, the worry is that whites will become a minority. I must confess that personally the idea of Britain as a minority-majority (where people of 'minority' races make up the majority of the population, such as Hispanics in California and Texas and African-Americans in Washington DC) nation is at least somewhat disconcerting, but if you were to ask me to justify why I feel this I could give you no decent argument, it’s odd, irrational prejudice that goes against my better judgment. If Britain is to become a nation of immigrants then it is keeping with ancient British tradition, and we can take comfort in the research that people loose their prejudice very easily when they meet a person of the ethnicity/religion/sexuality that they fear and see that we’re all just people.

If the racial issue has no solid base, what of the cultural impact? The first thing is for the Left to realise it does them no favors to advocate anything other than universal fluency in English (ignoring the rather separate issue of Welsh and Scottish Gaelic). There are many arguments that British children should learn more foreign languages and that immigrant languages enrich our cultural lives: they should and they do but this does not change the fact that a society functions far better when we’re all speaking the same language and nothing fosters intolerance more than the feeling of not being understood. What is the ideal relationship between immigrant and native culture? To the Americans it is the relationship of the ‘melting pot’. Immigrants come into America and ‘melt’ into American society, becoming American citizens with an American culture. This theory of a uniform American culture is not supported by the reality of the fiercely proud Mexican-Americans, Korea-Americans, Irish-Americans etc. Britain officially supports the relationship of ‘multi-culturalism’, whereby immigrants bring their own culture and live by it. This is needlessly divisive and is not conductive to social harmony. As is often the case, it seems the Canadians have it right with their ‘mosaic theory’, or as I like to put it ‘the stew theory’. In this, immigrants bring their own cultural flavor, like meat or vegetables in a stew, this flavor spreads into wider society and they also absorb the culture of the country and other immigrant communities. Essentially that immigrants should bring a bit of culture and take a bit of culture.

Here I would also make some definitions when we talk about ‘British culture’, I would draw a distinction between ‘cultural values’ and ‘cultural phenomena’ (don’t let it be said that I’m not a mite pretentious~). Cultural values are things like the British love of privacy, self deprecation, sense of humor, one could include welcoming of guests, tolerance of differences, and respect for democracy and the rule of law (though it would be the height of arrogance to proclaim these as especially British virtues) and every person in the country, regardless of their background could well incorporate these values into their lives.

Cultural phenomena are things like architecture, food, music and literature. In this sense British culture includes the heritage of William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, The Beatles and Blur. Though these topics have a place on school syllabuses, and are a part of the British experience, an Indian immigrant would not be a better Brit for giving up Bollywood for James Bond, the Japanese immigrant would be no better for giving up sushi for fish and chips (though they would be larger). If immigrant cultural phenomena fuse with the British in the big cities, creating the vibrant art, music and fashion you see in London and Manchester, traditional British culture tracing its roots to an earlier Britain can flourish in the countryside and there need not be any tension between the two.

I want to finish on a note on the psychology of the debate. As I have hopefully demonstrated there are decent arguments on both sides of the debate. The problem is that too many people are not concerned with the arguments themselves as they are with confirming their own pre decided position. Some people fear outsiders and will argue whatever they can to keep people out. Others empathise with immigrants and do what they can to help their cause, even if in doing so they alienate people and foster resentment towards these immigrants. I hope in this blog I have made an argument for continuing immigration that benefits and enriches society rather than divides it.