One of the most common arguments made by those with a liberal approach to immigration and asylum, and one you will hear repeated at length on Question Time, is that people who come to these shores ‘are human beings, just like us.’ This mantra epitomises a certain kind of bland, shallow humanism, one which seems to think that platitudes and nobility of heart will suffice when it comes to important and consequential matters.
The problem with Polanski is that he is doubly blind. He’s not only an air-headed humanist but a third-rate Marxist
Zack Polanski is the embodiment of this simple-minded worldview, one which owes as much to Lennon as it does to Lenin. Imagine there’s no borders? That’s what much of his beatific politics boils down to. His unthinking approach to immigration was laid bare in an interview with the Times this weekend. ‘We’ve seen situations where people from Ukraine have rightly been welcomed into the country with open arms,’ he said. ‘But where is that same hospitality to the Sudanese people, Eritrean people, people from Yemen?’
This encapsulates his callow worldview, which says simply that ‘we are all the same underneath.’ Yet the problem is that this perspective underestimates the significant role played by culture. Nurture can be just as powerful as nature in shaping how we think and determining how we behave.
The Ukrainian refugees comparison doesn’t hold water. It disregards the fact that people from Ukraine, a European and historically Christian country, have far more similar mores to us than people from Arabia or the Horn of Africa. Furthermore, most of the Ukrainians who have been welcomed to this country since the Russian invasion of 2022 have been women and children. They do not consist of a vast tranche of young men.
As the drip-feed of reports this year concerning Afghan immigrants convicted of sexually assaulting girls attests, arrivals from faraway lands often have very different attitudes to women. And the emergence in earnest this year of sectarian politics in England has also made clear that a clash of cultures has wider consequences. We are seeing Britain now dividing along indisputably racial lines, with the raising of Palestinian and English flags essentially demarcating ‘Asian majority’ and ‘white majority’ territories in many urban settings. This, too, is the long-term legacy of a liberal and cavalier attitude to immigration.
The sad truth is that ghettos do emerge along the lines of race, with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in particular now living parallel lives in places like Blackburn and Bradford. On the other hand, the heavy influx of Eastern European immigrants in the 2000s has not had the same long-term consequences – quite the reverse. The inflow of Poles that decade didn’t result in the emergence of Polish enclaves in English cities. Instead, there was a steady, silent process of acculturation and integration.
As I noted on Coffee House almost ten years ago, Polish convenience stores that had sprung up in Kent to accommodate these immigrants were already starting to shut down by 2016. In places like Dover you can today witness first-hand how the Poles who came here 20 years ago have since assimilated. The Irish of my mother’s generation – that ‘community’, once so visible in places like Kilburn – has now practically vanished. It seems less likely Eritreans, Sudanese and Yemenis will integrate as seamlessly.
The problem with Polanski is that he is doubly blind. He’s not only an air-headed humanist but a third-rate Marxist, a man who thinks the proletariat have become ‘racist’ because of their poverty. ‘We shouldn’t be pitting British workers against migrants’, he says. Yet Marxists, together with free-market fundamentalists, are also oblivious to culture and custom, regarding people foremost as uniform economic units of production and consumption.
This is why Polanski thinks it would be a neat solution to our economic problems if asylum-seekers could be assigned employment in places where ‘there are lots of vacancies, both in our National Health Service, in the care sector, in the construction sector.’ That is the classic kind of short-term, culturally-ignorant thinking that has forever motivated enthusiasts for higher immigration: let’s bring more people into the country because it will be ‘good for the economy.’
Alas, we are not all units whose main purpose is to boost GDP figures. Nor are we ‘all the same’. It might be nice if we were, but how this country is governed should never be dictated by wishful thinking.
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