There’s no place like home

Saturday, 19th February 2005

The world is becoming less multiracial and less multicultural, says Anthony Browne. People like to live among their own kind

We have been here before: Europe stopped unloading its demographic surplus on the New World — the 19th century’s so-called golden age for migration — when it could start offering hope to all its citizens. As China hurtles towards becoming the world’s largest economy, the economic incentive to emigrate is shrinking. There is still mass poverty, but no one will escape it by paying a people-trafficker to take them to the other side of the world to pick cockles illegally in an alien culture where they don’t speak the language, if they can just take the bus to Shanghai instead. Asia, with its rapidly developing economies, powerful culture and traditional family values, is likely to stop being a major exporter of people in the near future. With their economic and population growth going in opposite directions, Africa and the Islamic world will be a source of push-migration for a long time to come, but they will be the exceptions, and not for ever.

The West too is likely to harden its attitude to multiculturalism even further than it already has. As it begins to lose its dominance to China and India, it will lose the guilt that provided the psychological drive for diversity. Instead, Westerners are likely to rediscover their historic and cultural identities they have been so busy trying to forget, as is currently happening in the UK.

Not only will migration slow, there could also be returns, as the factors that originally drove people from their homelands disappear. When Spain and Portugal stopped being impoverished tyrannies, their diaspora returned from northern Europe. Ireland, whose historic export has been its people, is now welcoming many of them back.

With startling economic growth, India is now seeing its 20-million-strong diaspora return. An Indian industrialist told me last month how he was stunned on a recent trip to the US at being mobbed by Indian professionals asking about opportunities to work in the mother country. ‘Back to India’ job fairs are spreading across the US, offering a better quality of life, and fuelling a reverse brain drain that has seen 35,000 émigrés return to Bangalore alone.

India has speeded up the process by adopting a racist policy of giving the right to live and work in India to any ‘person of Indian origin’, carefully drafting the legislation to exclude any white Britons whose family spent generations in the subcontinent. (Ghana has an even more blatantly racist policy, offering citizenship to any black person living in the West — no whites need apply.)

The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them. Not all the world will look like Hackney, just those countries that opened their borders when push-migration was at its peak.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacking multiculturalism, ‘the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities.’

Anthony Browne is Europe correspondent of the Times.