Immigration: trying to make sense of it all....

Whether politicians like it or not,  immigration is now well up the political agenda.

Let’s try and make sense of it all, because there sure is a lot of nonsense about.

Britain is a creature of immigration

In time out of mind people have come to these shores from somewhere else, perhaps even when there was  a land bridge with the European mainland.

In recorded history we have had a constant succession of intruders, mostly with malice aforethought; the Romans who civilised us; the Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen over 1000 years, and then the Normans who tried a bit of ethnic cleansing and scorched earth, destroyed the superior civilisation of the English, and tried but failed to turn us into French. We turned them into English instead.

The French have been trying a repeat process for centuries, and still are.

We had the first influx of Jews and then expelled them.

Due to the perfidiousness of the French in abrogating the Treaty of Nantes and their relentless persecution of Protestants, we began to receive a huge influx of Huguenots after Charles II granted them ‘denizenship’. They were as welcome as the flowers in spring. They represented all that was best in craftsmanship and enterprise. The English churches raised money to relieve their poverty. House-to-house collections raised £40,000, millions in today’s money

They were an incalculable asset to England. They brought a whole raft of new skills and technologies.

They brought new wool-dying techniques to Barnstaple that would make it famous. They became tapestry weavers, spinners, woodcarvers, and calico workers. They created whole new industries – leatherwork, fans, girdles, needles, soap, vinegar, and revolutionised the silk industry. They transformed the manufacture of paper. From a zero start, they created 200 paper mills; they produced all the bank-notepaper for the new Bank of England, and they started the first newspaper press. . Several became the first directors of the Bank of England. Their contribution to the British economy was enormous, but this early example of off-shoring was disastrous for the French

Is estimated that 7%% of us have Huguenot blood.

The trend continued unabated during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. We acquired people of genius, like Brunel (the father of Isambard Kingdom, the engineer). He was the first to devise mass production and the production line for the manufacture of pulley blocks at the naval workshops in Portsmouth, the largest factory in the world in Nelson’s time.

We became home to Herschel, the mathematician and astronomer of genius (his sister became the first woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in the early 19^th Century).

And many others.

After Cromwell gave qualified permission for the Jews to return we had the next  of many influxes, first Sephardi and then Ashkenazi as a result of pogroms all over Europe. There was another wave in the late 19^th C and it is ironic to read in the contemporary press the kind of shrill comments that we hear now about the dirty, diseased, ignorant, non-English speaking foreigners coming here to inflict Lord knows what on the indigenous. What is remarkable is the within a very short space of time they had integrated so unobtrusively that  their presence went generally unremarked upon. And they certainly produced some big hitters – Ricardo, the Sassoons, the Rothschilds and so on. They also helped finance the upper classes by their daughters marrying into aristocratic families.

The last big arrival of Jews was the Nazi ethnic cleansing which over the years has produced to this day a disproportionately high number of top politicians.

At the end of WW2, we took in DPs (displaced persons for all over Europe), large numbers of Italians, and then – and this is where the plot changes – Caribbeans.

The latter were welcomed especially into the NHS and transport services where there was a serious manpower shortage, but this was the point at which race and culture became serious issues.

I now put my head into the lion’s den by reflecting on which groups of immigrants make a positive contribution to contemporary Britain.

A good place to start perhaps is educational achievement

From memory, the league table goes something like this.

1.   Chinese and SE Asians. It is reported that in schools having a large minority of Chinese kids they raise the standards of the whole school on the basis that ‘a rising tide floats all boats’.

2.   Indians. Both groups seem to have an astonishing capacity for mathematics.

3.   White English and Caribbeans equal. I am not quite sure what to make of this. Are the Caribbean getting better or the English getting worse?

4.   Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The only common feature between them is religion. Is Islam a fetter on learning?  And if so, how come it doesn’t apply to Ismaili Muslims?

My purely empirical impression, not backed up by evidence, is that Group 1 are hard-working, mostly law  abiding (Chinese crime seems to occur within the Chinese community from what I have read) and keep themselves to themselves.

Indians are ambitious, middle class, integrate (and inter-marry) more or less effortlessly into the native population. Their contribution to the UK economy is massive. (And to our first-class cricket teams!).

And then there’s the Europeans. Under current EU rules we can’t do anything about migration from the EU, but how valid are the complaints about Polish plumbers and the rest?

So where did it all go tits-up?

Originally throughout our history immigration has been driven by the economic imperative.

Then somewhere in the late 20^th Century, it was hi-jacked by the race relations industry, the Guardianistas, the bleeding hearts and in later years by NuLab determined to open the floodgates and create a client electorate.

We now have a ‘benefits’ imperative that encourages people to come here because a month of state benefits will be more than annual earnings where they come from.

So it would seem that a solution is to ensure a ‘benefits’ regime in which none are paid until immigrants have contributed to the national pot for a period of years

And immigration policy should embrace a total exclusion on people who come from countries that have no cultural, historic, linguistic or other ties to the UK, and who have little to contribute to the national economy. I include Somalis, Yemenis, Ethiopians, and others of that ilk. Why are they here?

But with the little LibDem tail wagging the big Tory dog, don’t hold your breath that anything will change soon.