COVER -> DAY ONE
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There is an atmosphere of panic, a sense of losing control. Nobody knows how many immigrants are entering the European Union illegally. It is like calculating the consumption of illegal narcotics on the basis of seizures and arrests.
A crammed, rusting hulk, its willing occupants glued together by their own excrement, lurches aground within metres of some of the most expensive apartments in the world, disgorging hundreds of Kurds; nine Rumanians reach London, slung under a luxury train that has travelled at 180 MPH in sub zero temperatures; corpses are found frozen in aircraft holds, amongst the champagne and caviar.
This is not a distant tide of human flotsam on the nightly news invariably and inconsequentially described as being "Of Biblical proportions". These people are as proximate and elusive as rats except when a vaguely oriental beggar proffers a tiny child like a collecting tin. Chains of organised crime are traced across continents, knife fights of obscure provenance break out at dusk in musty market towns and so-called "Community Leaders" prophesy discord. You can always tell the colour of a crisis from the description of those supposedly responsible for defusing it; white people, no matter how fraught and fractious seem to manage to get by without community leaders but they are an obligatory appurtenance to being brown, yellow or black.
And here, I think, is the root of the problem.
We are being asked to absorb into our countries an unspecified number of people of unspecified race and origin with unspecified talents and prejudices at an unspecified cost.Having worked in more than 60 of the poorest countries in the world, I thought myself immune from prejudice about race and origin but my complacent liberalism was badly shaken when a Mullah in Bradford, England, ordered Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses to be burned.
I have now taken an even more severe knock from broadly the same quarter for, although Rushdie's book painted some extremely impious and subversive pictures of the birth of Islam, the statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan cannot be construed in any way to offend the Islamic call to religious tolerance set out in the Koran, not least because they pre-date it.
The Taliban are bound to be thrown from power by the3 tribes from Northern Afghanistan as the war front moves South before inevitably moving North again and so I had to ask myself the question:
Do I want my country to be an unwilling host to an unspecified number of people who, given the chance, would throw bricks through the stained glass windows of my parish church?Having been brought up to admire those who fought over centuries for a constitutionally liberal, tolerant society, do I really want to share my limited physical and intellectual room with people who want to subject me to an Islamic Theocracy?
I have already laid myself open to two major charges.
- The first is that I am anti-Islamic, a cross between a racist and a bigot. My answer is in two parts: the first that I am in favour of a great deal more legal immigration from poor countries than is currently allowed, not only for reasons of economic self interest but also out of principle because of our failure to make poor countries better places to live in; the second, that as an initial occupier, a host if you like, I have an entitlement to set some rules by which newcomers should abide, one of those rules being that the said newcomers may argue and cast their votes to change the rules which they found on their arrival but that some provisions for peace and security, enshrined in rights legislation are above challenge, even by a majority and one such right is freedom of religion and expression.
What critics apparently fail to notice is that such freedoms apply to me as well as to religious militants.
- The second charge against me is that while I would accord equal rights to all religions I do not accord them equal respect. To this I plead guilty. Just as my respect for Christian sects varies according to their stated purposes and beliefs, so I feel entitled to make rational judgments about the beliefs and conduct of non-Christian sects. I abhor the treatment of women by some sectors of Islam; I condemn intolerance of any sort and am genuinely frightened at the prospect that it might turn into the kind of iconoclasm which has overtaken the statues of Afghanistan.
There is, however, a further concern which it is only honest to mention. I wonder to what extent the new arrivals will enter into reciprocal relationships of trust and care with the society which attempts, no matter how unwillingly, to absorb them.
This is not an economic matter. One of the great blessings to the world of allowing immigrants to settle in rich countries is that they remit some of their cash to their former homelands; I am much more concerned about civic coherence. I am not so altruistic that I can calmly contemplate contributing to every local cause and disaster without some hope that I will be helped in my turn.
That is not to say that my fellow countrymen of long standing have been notably civic of late. Our sense of community has been transformed in half a century from a vibrant reality to futile nostalgia but, still, my equanimity requires a degree of implicit reciprocity.
One place where I might receive some valuable assistance in understanding my fears is, of course, California -- which will, by the end of this year, be the first State to have a majority of non-whites in its population.
I do not know how the terms of the Census were defined, neither do I know the proportion of the new majority who are illegal immigrants, but the statistic is surely iconic. Doubtless there will be uneasiness in many quarters, kept quiet for the time being by relative prosperity and labour shortages but how will California and the rest of us behave when there is an economic downturn or when scarcities begin to arise?
How different are we from the warring factions in Kalimantan where the traditional occupiers have been slaughtering immigrant families settled during the last 30 years?
How different will we be from the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia whose uneasy neighbourliness was transformed into raping and slaughtering hate?
Have we any right to be morally superior? Might we also need our Titos and Suhartos to keep us in order?
There is a chance of a deal in our democratic societies but we are running out of time, as well as land and water. I must abandon my glib liberalism and you your numb nostalgia. I am frightened that they will destroy what we have built but there is no home to which they can be sent back; their home is here.
