Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, Love your neighbour as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
THE LETTER OF SAINT PAUL TO THE ROMANS
Be excellent to each other.
TED THEODORE LOGAN AND BILL S. PRESTON, ESQUIRE, BILL AND TEDS EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
Contents
Introduction
This may not be among the best ideas Ive ever come up with. To suggest, even tentatively, that constant conversations about immigration and the problems it purportedly provides might be a much, much more profound social problem than the issue itself will, in the current climate, seem to many to be an act of reckless provocation.
The same result, with a lot less effort, could no doubt be achieved by painting a target on my backside and inviting all comers to take pot shots at my posterior until I take back the ludicrous assertion that our country would be a happier, healthier, more harmonious place if we stopped the immigration conversation altogether.
Neither will my cause be helped much by offering a long-forgotten 1990s craze for optical illusions as our starting point but it is, at least, better than no starting point at all. Just.
The Magic Eye illustrations, by which the nation was briefly but comprehensively seduced in about 1991, left an indelible impression on me. The idea was simple: stare at an apparently random series of squiggles and scrawls for long enough, unfocus your eyes from what was on the page and instead concentrate on what was behind it, and a full, detailed drawing of anything from an ocean liner to a lions head would somehow swim into your vision. Blink and it would be gone again.
I never once achieved satisfaction. Despite looking at hundreds of them, hoping that this time the meaningless scribbles would coalesce into something recognisable, there never came the vaguest hint of the artists hidden intention. If it wasnt for the fact that just about everybody else on the planet managed to get the hang of it, it would have been tempting to chalk the whole thing up as a lucrative con.
There is something about immigration debates at the moment that puts me in mind of those Magic Eyes. It is a sense that if we stare for long enough at the thoughts of people whose positions are angry, critical and fearful then we might unlock what it is they see and somehow help them to a happier, more peaceful place.
And vice versa, if it is actually true that deep reservations about and objections to immigration can be fostered in breasts untainted by racism or xenophobia, then staring at the squiggles or listening to the radio broadcasts of someone like me might help assuage all that unnecessary fear, soothe that unquenchable anger.
It may seem a strange analogy, never mind a strange ambition, but two things are certain in this arena: facts offer no meaningful opposition to feelings, and conversations involving opposing attitudes to the ebb and flow of people across our borders rarely, if ever, leave interlocutors feeling better, happier, more at one with the world than they did at the discussions beginning. Ordinarily, we all feel considerably worse.
If you are married to the notion that your country is heading hellwards in a handcart because of the presence in it of too many people from foreign climes, you will be enraged and often offended at even the suggestion that youre wrong. Conversely, if you believe that most of the arguments against immigration are bogus and most of the more prominent arguers are, at best, self-serving charlatans and, at worst, fomenters of racial hatred, then you will be left depressed at the ease with which so many people who deserve neither of these criticisms have been persuaded into the same school of thought.
What, plausibly, do you think would happen if we never talked about immigration again? If we treated a persons geographical origins with the same insouciance we currently apply to their star sign? If, in other words, we no more considered immigrants to be responsible for our societys perceived flaws than we do families with more than two children or people who choose to work harder than their colleagues?
Its not easy. Youre staring at my squiggles now but theres probably no hint of a cogent image behind them. Sadly, I dont have a Rosetta stone to unlock what seems obvious to some but downright treacherous to others: that the real enemies of a countrys happiness and health are not the people who come to it in search of improved existences, but the people who insist that they shouldnt.
But imagine if the demagogues and scaremongers of immigration were to transfer their ire to other targets and just see how absurd their assertions would appear. It has, for example, become popular in Europe recently for far-right politicians to conjure up images of unbearable national futures by detailing in suitably apocalyptic terms what is statistically possible but (they never add) wholly and laughably implausible.
There is, one of them might say, nothing to prevent 400 gazillion people currently resident in other EU member states from moving to France/Germany/Britain etc. tomorrow. This is demonstrably true. No matter that there is nothing to stop every resident of France/Germany/Britain moving elsewhere either; the siege mentality is served by describing barbarians at the gate, not by pointing out that open gates admit two-way traffic. You might take issue with the use of gazillion here, but it represents the total number of people currently alive in the relevant area and so theoretically entitled to up sticks tomorrow.
They put leaflets through your letterbox in which Unless we change our laws 400 gazillion Romanians/Bulgarians/Frenchmen could move to your town/country/street tomorrow! is picked out in bolder, bigger type than anything else on the page and they sow a seed of suspicion in a heartbreakingly high number of minds that this deluge could conceivably occur. It wont, of course, but by the time tomorrow comes it doesnt matter. The politician, the columnist, the pundit has already established herself as someone who understands, nay, champions the fears of people worried about the imminent possible arrival of 400 gazillion foreign folk. Intellectually, you might as well be promising to slay dragons. Emotionally, youre in clover, a veritable champion of the fearful and misled.
Here, then, are some other equally true assertions about the relationship between population, peace and prosperity: Unless we forcibly sterilise every woman in this country of child-bearing age, the total population could be 400 gazillion by the Christmas after next! Or: There is literally nothing to stop every man, woman and child in your country moving to Norwich/Nantes/Nuremberg tomorrow! and finally: Unless we change our laws, every adult in the country could spend the rest of their lives drunk. There would be nobody sober to teach your children or treat your illnesses.
Pick a favourite, they all serve the same purpose: to highlight how absurd it would be in almost any other imaginable scenario to allow something that could theoretically happen to be escalated into a warning that it certainly will. Who benefits from this escalation? Well, find me a politician, columnist or pundit that isnt either paid handsomely for fostering these fears or articulating their own ugly prejudices or, more usually, both, and I will eat my sandals. They benefit handsomely. We dont. We end up frightened and angry if we buy their snake oil; depressed and despairing if we dont. Compared to the people who are actually the targets of this fraudulent and divisive rhetoric, though, compared to immigrants or people who look like immigrants or people who might be immigrants, we are both getting off lightly.
