the multicultural wrecking ball at work, page-19

Lessons from the US on mass immigration

Newcomers to a country can be successfully absorbed - given the right circumstances

You could say that I am an immigrant twice over. At the turn of the last century my grandparents arrived at Ellis Island among the great wave of Jews fleeing to America from the Russian pogroms. Then, just over half way through that century, I left the United States to settle in this country and became a UK citizen (or a British subject as it was known then), which meant losing my American citizenship. So I have spent virtually my entire adult life in a country other than the one in which I was born, and have embraced my adopted nationality quite irreversibly. Given all that, I should know something about immigration – both as a human experience and a political question.

But there is, of course, a world (in every sense of the word) of difference between my grandparents’ forced decision to escape from the threat of death, and my own free choice to live in another place – which is one illustration of why it is so difficult to make generalised statements about “immigration” as if it were one identifiable thing. It would be absurd to try to draw any unified lesson even between the migrations of two generations of one family. And it is beyond absurd to suggest that the problems Britain has with immigrant communities can be solved by a wholesale adoption of the attitudes and solutions used by other cultures in other times. The most obvious example of this, as it happens, has been the suggestion that Britain become more like America in its determination to integrate immigrants more forcibly into the national identity.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I absolutely understand the intention here. As a reaction against the deeply wrong-headed philosophy of multiculturalism which actually encouraged the permanent alienation of ethnic minorities, the move towards enforcing integration (and particularly the insistence on learning the English language) was more than right – it was essential. But no one should believe that this is what happened to my grandparents’ cohort of American incomers. Most of their generation – virtually all of my elderly relatives – never spoke anything but the Yiddish and Russian dialects they arrived with. My father only began to speak English when he went to school. His generation became the translators – and the uncomfortable bridge – between their foreign parents and their fully Americanised children. The ethnic ghettoes which are causing such alarm in this country now, had their precise parallels in America: the “little Italys”, the Jewish lower East Side in New York, and the solidly Irish districts of Boston and Chicago. What broke the hold of those tribal neighbourhoods was not government diktat but the appeal of American identity disseminated through school and popular culture, and the possibility of affluence.

When Britain went in for a misguided imitation of what was thought to be the American model, it attempted to introduce “Britishness” into the education curriculum. But the example of the US, where state schooling was designed quite consciously to turn the children of wave after wave of foreign immigrants into loyal Americans, inculcating the values and principles of their new land with unflinching didacticism, was never going to wash here. For one thing, nobody could decide what Britishness was – and whatever it turned out to be, it could certainly not be taught as the specific, deliberative, constitutional body of knowledge which American pupils were taught like a religious catechism.

The impersonation of American “civics” lessons that the last Labour government encouraged became a parody of British ambivalence about national identity: it was little more than a crash course in political correctness and post-colonial guilt, from which nobody was likely to emerge an enthusiastic patriot. Hardly surprising this, since sentimental patriotism has uncomfortable connotations in old European cultures, having transmogrified in the last century into hideous forms of nationalism. And, anyway, old countries are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with idealistic aspirants: they have complex, layered histories and conflicting ideas of their own national purpose.


But it wasn’t just American flag-waving that was ruled out. Nobody seemed to be given any useful understanding of how their political system worked. Instead of being lectured on “tolerance” (whatever that means) pupils might have been taught the mechanics of parliamentary government – what are the stages by which a Bill becomes law? What is a select committee? How much power does the House of Lords really have?

In my senior year in high school, civics classes required actual participation in the democratic process: you could canvass for the party of your choice, work for your state or federal congressman, or stuff envelopes at campaign headquarters – but you had to take part somehow. As it happened, this was 1960, the year John Kennedy was running for president. So my best friend and I went out and registered Democratic voters for that historic presidential election – and I was hooked on politics for life.

So is America so very different – so “exceptional” as Alexis de Tocqueville believed – that it can provide no help at all to countries attempting to cope with mass migration? Certainly it is unique in that its very inception was as a refuge for the persecuted and oppressed: but its remedies for the lack of a shared history are of little relevance to us here. Perhaps the most useful lessons to be learnt from America are the ones which it has not resolved. First, immigrants can be successfully absorbed so long as they can find employment and have hope of economic improvement. Without that hope, the stress of displacement becomes intolerable and leads to terrible social consequences.

Second, influxes of cheap migrant labour can fuel economic growth (as Labour believed, though it would not admit it): they certainly helped to produce the original American capitalist miracle of mass prosperity. But the wealth that is created must be dispersed efficiently through the free market so that the settled population feels the benefit of it, and those who are employed cheaply must be able to escape from that low-pay trap quite quickly so that they do not become an ossified exploited class. Third, the wealth-creating momentum will founder if it has to be used to finance an expensive welfare state which, in turn, encourages further generations of migrants to become benefit dependants rather than productive participants in the economy.

Finally, what may be the most important principle: the children of even the most inward-looking communities will come to identify quite naturally with their new land if they are encouraged to do so. What first-generation Americans know is that nothing is more painful (or more dangerous) than believing that you belong nowhere.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10565253/Lessons-from-the-US-on-mass-immigration.html

A good article IMHO.

Raider