MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

Immigration

by Kevin Carey

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KEVIN CAREY watches Britain sink from moral superiority to degradation over the subject of immigration.

As that wily old bird, Prime Minister Harold Wilson once remarked: "A week is a long time in politics". It is fashionable nowadays to dismiss Wilson as an unprincipled schemer, above all else a pragmatist. He was reviled by the "Left" of the British Labour Party after he retired from office and since Mr. Blair's "New Labour" came in his standing has not improved, not least because, conscious or not, Mr. Blair's circle exudes moral superiority occasionally amounting to unctuousness.

Wilson's remark came to mind almost as soon as news broke that an airline on an internal flight in Afghanistan had landed in London. Those very same people who had luxuriated in their moral superiority over the fascist tendencies of Joerg Haider and, considering how far we were justified in imposing sanctions on Austria, immediately began to make some most unpleasant noises about the Afghans.

Mr. Haider, in a now familiar combination of truculence and clowning, had been honest enough to admit to his resentment of immigration into Austria from the Balkans but no sooner were all the crew and passengers safe in London than the Home Secretary, in response to a wave of tabloid press paranoia, wished them all home as soon as possible.

The accusation, bandied about by the more unpleasant of our newspapers and politicians was that all the crew and passengers were in a huge collective conspiracy to seek political exile in Britain.

There are, as far as I can see, three fundamental objections to this piece of conspiracy theory. First of all, as a fairly well informed citizen who frequently writes about politics, I have to confess that I do not understand those parts of our welfare regulations which I have ever been able to obtain. They are, of course, not secret, simply locked away in a wide variety of places and, on the off chance that a member of the public might find a few pages of them, they are impenetrable beyond even the worst computer manual. So the idea that a group of people with little or no knowledge of English and other Western languages should have somehow conducted a comparative critique of welfare regulations in a number of countries and concluded that Britain is "A soft touch" is so absurd that it should shame the journalists who peddled it.

Had they reached this conclusion the Afghans would in any case have been guilty of very poor analysis. There are a large number of countries, including Austria, that have much better welfare benefits for those seeking and obtaining political asylum.

Secondly, the Afghans who were responsible for the seizure of the plane could not have calculated that Moscow would flout international law and not prevent the plane from taking off.

Thirdly, it might be credible to assert that the crew and a number of the passengers were in cahoots - the way the crew abandoned the plane in mid-negotiation is in itself highly unorthodox - but it is surely inconceivable that the whole planeload were in on the act.

It therefore behoves the authorities to treat each case as individual; the Home Secretary should certainly not have given public vent to an apparently calculated, vindictive bout of injudicious chauvinism, lumping all the cases together in advance of a single investigation.

Within a week, then, Britain found itself not so much inveighing against immigrants - Mr. Haider's 'crime' - but actually doing violence to its own liberal tradition and not so liberal laws in order to throw these benighted wretches out as quickly as possible, regardless of the strong possibility that many of them will be judicially murdered by the Taliban on arrival. Whatever his failings, and they were many, Wilson would never have behaved so badly towards the weak.

I remember dining with him shortly after he went into opposition in 1970. I took my girlfriend who was an Orthodox Jew and we spent a good deal of the evening talking about the Jewish immigration before the Second World War, of which her family was a part, and how it had so enriched our country; and he talked with great sensitivity and feeling about the seemingly intractable problems of the Middle East and how they affected so many innocent people. To his great discredit, to which he admitted later on, Wilson went into a legislative panic over the prospect of Idi Amin expelling half a million Ugandan Asians with British passports. As it turned out, most of them did end up in Britain and added immensely to our culture and economy.

The problem for the policy makers lies in trying to draw a line between "political" and "economic" reasons for wishing to settle in a more prosperous country; the former are, in principle though not in practice, acceptable whereas the latter are not.

Those who are most virulently against immigration tend to be exactly those who are in favour of unregulated markets in everything, apparently, except labour (and, of course, the relaxation of the planning regulations which keep their dwellings safe from any dilution of amenity).

Likewise, the free marketeers are generally against development assistance to improve the lot of the poorest people in the poorest countries. It is only such assistance which can, to a very limited extent, mitigate the unstoppable tide of humanity sweeping from the East and South to the North and West; a planeload of Afghans here and there is nothing in the scale of human migration which is a directly consequential outcome of the globalising of the economy.

If our greed raises the water level and ravages the land where the poor can no longer dwell there will be an inexorable pressure on those parts of the planet that are habitable which will, in turn, put pressure on the places which are comfortable; there is no stopping this escalator effect and the bigger the ratio between the wealth of the rich and the poor the greater will be the incentive for the poor to try to escape from their misery by living in the lands of the rich. There is a wonderful internal logic of justice to this algorithm.

If, then, we refuse to be generous in helping developing countries our own wealth and comfort within our own lands will be threatened. If immigration is permitted up to a level which economies can absorb, everyone will benefit but if we resist even this our selfishness and short-sightedness will ruin us all.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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