My first posting on the Globalization Institute’s blog is about the almost hidden but massive transfers of cash by migrants workers to their families in under-developed countries. The following quote comes from Time magazine:
Mass migration has produced a giant worldwide economy all its own, which has accelerated so fast during the past few years that the figures have astounded the experts. This year, remittances – the cash that migrants send home – is set to exceed $232 billion, nearly 60% higher than the number just four years ago, according to the World Bank, which tracks the figures. Of that, about $166.9 billion goes to poor countries, nearly double the amount in 2000. In many of those countries, the money from migrants has now overshot exports, and exceeds direct foreign aid from other governments. “The way these numbers have increased is mind-boggling,” says Dilip Ratha, a senior economist for the World Bank and co-author of a new Bank report on remittances. Ratha says he was so struck by the figures that he rechecked his research several times, wondering if he might have miscalculated. Indeed, he believes the true figure for remittances this year is probably closer to $350 billion, since migrants are estimated to send one-third of their money using unofficial methods, including taking it home by hand.
There are two things I especially like about this growing trend. One is that unlike other forms of aid (including private giving by Westerners), the money tends to be better spent, because the donor is immediately related to the recipient. The second is I think unique to migrant workers. Normally there is a dependency trap: the money coming in is for a set term and will only be renewed if the recipient pleads continuing poverty. But migrant workers who leave their families behind have a strong incentive to watch out for improving economic conditions back home. As families achieve a tolerable standard of living they tend to reduce the amount of migration. The whole bureaucracy of aid is bypassed.
Thinking about it, perhaps giving a Christmas bonus of £100 to the office cleaner from Ghana or the Ukraine does more to make the world a better place than £200 given to an aid charity. We often hear about the benefits of cutting taxes, but here’s a new one. For each pound in taxes saved by low-income migrant workers, up to 40p will be transferred to a family in the developing world. That’s got to be a better return than the government makes of our money.
One slight speck on this immaculate scheme,nuch of the money goes to pay of loans and debts incrued through the cost of emmigration.
I agree that the emigrant sending money back is good for their country and certainly beats Gov’t foreign aid. But a major problem we are having here in the states, is almost total lack of assimilation. I live close to the Mexican border in Texas, our Mexican migrants are mostly illegals. They are generally very decent and hard working folks. I know this because I ‘ve lived and worked alongside many of them for most of my life. But they have little or no reverance for education, and generally don’t aspire to be Americans at all, except for the gov’t. services they get. And an illeducated society is not a prosperous one,for anyone.
Acme Liberation Front(Link)
The US gets around 600,000 illegals a month – 6.5m a year. It is impossible to assimilate such numbers. And as soon as they drop an anchor baby, they’re legal and they qualify for endless government aid and benefits.
I work one day a week in a London office where two cleaners operate, one is Ghanean the other from the fomer USSR. Both send money home to support their families. They do not aspire to live in England (or the US) if economic conditions back home improve.
Go to a large London building site and you will see German and Polish or Russian overseers, and dozens of labourers from all corners of the earth, Australians (or very good impersonators of Aussie accents) to Uzbeks.
Verity might wish to ask them if they’re counting on getting pregnant to claim maternity benefits. I prefer to assume that their motives are more straightforward. 😉
Antoine Clarke – It’s nice that you’re a kindly spirit and “prefer to think” the best of people. Nine times out of 10, it’s not justified.
In the United States, if a family manage to get across the border and drop an anchor baby on American soil, that means the kid is an American citizen and entitled to everything that’s going, and the entire family that got in with the pregnant mother can stay and they’re suddenly legal. (BTW, “family”, not “partner”.)
Six hundred thousand of them get across the border one way or another every month and disappear into the barrios. That is why the Americans, with a 2,500 border with Mexico, are trying to get the “anchor baby” situation changed, because it subverts normal US Immigration procedures. The Americans are also building factories in Mexico to provide employment, and NAFTA is also improving the condition of Mexico. From the parking lots in some of the big supermarkets in the big cities, you would think you were in the United States. Mexico now claims to be the world’s 15th largest economy, which may be stretching it a bit and putting too much emphasis on its vast oil reserves, but it certainly getting rich.
Single male Mexican illegal immigrants do eventually return home to their families, though. But something else about all this foreign labour currently working in Britain “temporarily” … people from Third World countries get used to the good life and become reluctant to return to their own countries and stay on illegally.
“and generally don’t aspire to be Americans at all,”
Good thing too. That way they can head home once they get their feet under them. But when they do, they will be more American that you think. They will have improved their English, and if they are from the southern states, they will prefer Englsih to Spanish as their second language, they will have seen a country where there are public services that function a lot of the time, where the police do not have to live off of corruption, where people have some say in their schools, some say, and all the rest. There are whole towns in Mexico that have pavement on the streets and their own schools now , all paid with remittances, and independent of the central government.
“The US gets around 600,000 illegals a month – 6.5m a year.” And that may be a conservative number. But a lot of that is commute traffic. Deportations spike just before Christmas, because people come in to turn themselves in to get the trip back for free. Then at the end of January or whenever they head north again. This is so regular that they may even go back to the same enmployers in a habitual relationship.
I don’t see how it is a “speck” on this to have to pay smugglers. The smugglers provide a service the migrants need and they deserve their pay. The speck is that the smuglers are necessary at all. The US government could so steal that market – consulates in every provincial town for quick work visas with a travel office attached. The drug cartels that control the coyote networks would fit that tooth and nail. Two birds.
After Huricane Mitch the US government didn’t send aid; they just stopped deporting Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Sals for a while, saying that remittances were not only much better focused and resistant to siphoning, but would dwarf any possible aid package.
Jim – Police in the big cities (don’t know about podunk places) don’t live off corruption any more. They have salaries, medical benefits and a pension. Maybe, if you got stopped for speeding and had the nerve, a traffic cop would accept a bribe to let you off, but maybe not. Also, they don’t chase tickets in Mexico the way the British police do.
A woman I know – I’m going to say she is probably around 70 – got hit by a city truck that ran a stop sign, totalling her car. The truck driver was very upset and immediately admitted liability to the police. But unfortunately, this lady had held off renewing her insurance for some reason, so she was taken to the police station, along with the driver of the city truck. There she had to take a breathalyser test and give a urine test. Only after both had tested clean was she allowed to call a friend to pick her up.
It’s very different from what it was 20 years ago. Now they’ve got social security. And I’ve even seen Mexicans paying for their groceries with food stamps.
Very interesting article. I think that some people who send back loads of money back home are not necessarily treating the country in which they live as a temporary place but do assimilate over time. It is certainly true that many of them may do more for their countries of origin than all the overseas aid.
I am sorry to dispute you Verity, Mexico has no Social Security, the food stamps are from the U.S. And No one I know that lives here on the border in Texas or in Mexico has ever seen the honest Federales you speak of, and the local cops are even worse. I don’t know if you have heard or not , but all along the border we are having cartel shootouts, especially in Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juarez and these regularly spill over into Texas.
Well, a lady who works for Social Security (in Mexico) told me they do have Social Security, and as that is where she seems to think she draws her salary, I have to give her credence.
Yes, I’ve heard you can get some really good deals on condos in Nuevo Laredo right now. Best stay inside them, though, and keep your ass low, below window level.
I know nothing about the Federales (other than that I wouldn’t care to encounter one on the highway), but the ordinary cops in the cities I’ve visited seem quite normal. Being a city cop is now a real career, whereas before it was a last ditch chance for graft. I’ve seen them out training – running in formation in 100F, being chivvied to keep up – and it is serious.
I will call this lady at Social Security, though, and ask her what the deal is with the food stamps.
Another line the “immigrants are evil” crowd like to peddle here in the US is that the remittances are bad themselves, because the evil immigrants will supposedly suck all the money out of the US economy or some such nonsense.
It just isn’t true that Hispanics “aren’t assimilating.” They are, just not as fast as some would like. It’s a matter of generations, just like it was with the Italians and Irish.
On balance I think the remittances are a good thing. The only downside to them that I see is that it reduces the incentives to reform the government at home (this seems to be the case in the Phillipines at any rate).
Just to put a few facts straight.
A baby born in the US only gets citizenship if the mother is there legally on a resident visa.
Parents and siblings of a US citizen do not get legal residency solely on that basis.
The law may have been different in the past but I have current personal experience in this – the concept of an anchor baby does not now work.
Robert Alderson – Since when? It was working a couple of weeks ago, which is why there are people working on getting it negated.
Verity,
My experience was in 2000. I had been working legally in the US and we had had a child there who had US citizenship. In the maternity hospital we were given some paperwork for a Social Security Number for our child (not in itself proof of citizenship) but had to take our immigration paperwork to the Social Security office before they would issue our child with a number. When applying for a US passport for our child we again had to prove our immigration status.
My job came to an end and I wanted to stay but couldn’t because the visa was job specific. The lawyer was quite clear that having a child with US citizenship gave us absolutely no legal avenue to apply for another visa or any adjustment of status. She did explain that in a few cases where there are citizen children who have been in school for a long time and don’t speak the language of the country to which the parents would be deported the INS might grant some form of exception but that this was very rare and in no way guaranteed.
Before finally getting my green card I did very thorough research and the only possible way to leverage my child’s US citizen status to help me would have been for the child to sponsor me – which would require the child to prove that he could support the whole family.
This article points out the enormous economic importance of the movement of labour in the global economy. The restrictions on such movement has surely been extremely damaging and should be eased for the benefit of all. Although “free trade” is now recognised as an important means of increasing wealth in developing countries, the far greater potential posed by “free labour movement” is not.
I’m surprised to see there are people who would post viewpoints against more open immigration on this site. Some have suggested that immigrants absorb more than their share of aid and benefits. The work of the late economist Julian Simon showed that, in fact, overall the opposite is true. Migrant workers, being mostly of working age, tend to contribute more in taxes relative to services received than the local population and are thus net contributors to government coffers. I am yet to see any economic analysis that denies this. In any case, even ignoring this it would be better to campaign for easier entry of foreign labour without benefits than to limit entry for the sake of reducing benefits extended to the population.
As to whether migrants learn local languages or culture, of what relevance is this in a libertarian viewpoint?
Surely the overriding consideration is the massive economic growth which more open immigration would stimulate. Both the country where the labour is performed and the migrant’s country which receives remittances stand to gain from a freer trade in labour. Instead, restricted immigration has meant that vast swathes of economic activity have simply failed to come into existence. There are people who want to work and people who want to employ them but this has in many cases not been allowed to happen.
Is illegal immigration not simply another form of consensual crime?
One of the most important factors in the remittance flows is their predictability. Several years ago I worked as part of an investment banking team that developed investment-grade bonds backed by remittance flows, to be issued by banks in Mexico and El Salvador that received and processed these remittance flows from the United States. The rating agencies agreed that the flows of remittances were so steady that they could be used as collateral, and were therefore prepared to award the issuing banks a higher credit rating than if they had been unsecured debt. As part of our due diligence we spent weeks in the processing banks, examining their procedures for handling the incoming flows. It was completely clear to us that the remittance business provided a major, reliable stream of low-level, non-official foreign support to the poorest residents of these countries, separate from government involvement and having a minimum of bureaucratic process.
Robert Alderson – I believe anchor babies is an arrangement with Mexico. Only Mexicans qualify. It may be something to do with NAFTA, or it may be a safety valve to stop a head of steam building up south of the border. But definitely, anchor babies are a reality today for Mexicans and there are US legislators and lobbying groups trying to get it stopped.
Anchor babies, which is absurd, should be outlawed. America is doing plenty to take the pressure off the border. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of American factories in Mexico. I buy Whiskas and Purina for my cats, and it is manufactured in Mexico. Campbell’s soups are made here, too. Soap powders. Lots of things with American brand names are manufactured in Mexico and are on the shelves competing with Mexican products. There is a lot of car assembly here, too. God knows, America is trying to help Mexico get fully industrialised. To be fair, President Fox has been a very intelligent and forward-thinking chief executive. Unfortunately, his second term is coming to an end and he can’t stand again. (T Bliar, plse note. This how democracies work.)
Anyway, anchor babies. I am betting the lefties win. If you think the concept of anchor babies is an outrageous abuse of the American taxpayer and the American immigration system, you are a r-a-a-a-a-cist. Just be glad, Robert Alderson, that your child has an American passport – an escape hatch for later.
Verity,
The situation in the major cities, whether in relation to police or anything else, doesn’t aply to most migrants from Mexico. Along the West Coast the majority of migrants come from Michoacan, Guerrero and Oaxaca. We see very few ferom the DF or thenorthern States, aside form Sinaloa, maybe. Along the Southwest Border most people come from the northern states. In fact, major cities such as Monterrey are themselves destinations for migrants from the southern states.
Jim – and Mexico itself is a destination for illegal Guatemalans, who see it as the land of milk and honey.
OK, I need to clear up somethings. I am a mexican studying in the US (legally) and had a baby here. My baby is a U.S. citizen but this does not give me the legal right to stay here. That is, the anchor baby idea does not work for mexicans either.
Social Security is a whole different thing in Mexico. Social Security in Mexico is the public health system. It also used to be in charge of pensions, but the system was reformed around 1995 and we now have a system similar to what Bush was proposing for the US.
rolva – You say you had a baby in the US. I assume you are a man. Is your wife a Mexican citizen as well?
Thank you for clearing up the Social Security issue. It definitely exists in Mexico, although I don’t believe it’s just for health. And I assure you, I have seen people paying in a low level supermarket with what I assumed were food stamps, as they weren’t peso bills.
What does it mean for our western economies when they are being bled by the very people our liberal elite deem to be “doing us a favour ” when they come to our countries and do crappy jobs for low wages.
Well it means that the crappy jobs get done, and the low wages get paid, but the bottom line is they are not spending it here, they are sending it abroad to 1$ a day economies where their leaching dependents can live like kings.
Frankly this is not what goes around comes around Keynsianism, this just skips the rest of us entirely, and puts our money instantly offshore , and for the benefit of other peoples.
And still we give them aid? Well no, aid is generally bribes to governments, pure and simple.
At least the personal touch hits the right spot. You send money to your cousin, you know how he will spend it. You send money to a dictator, and you know how he will spend it too. Hah but never as wisely as your cousin!
So let’s just say no to all aid and go with proper grown up free trade eh?
RAB – I’m all for that. Cut out the middleman – the government oxygen thieves sending funds to dictators.
The only problem is, once they’ve lived in Britain for a few years, they get “rights”. Meaning rights to bring these village people to whom they’ve been sending money, to Britain. As members of “the family”.
I would say this should be disallowed, but Britain is not allowed to make its own laws these days, other than opening times for pubs and the justice of allowing 12-yr old little girls to have abortions without informing their parents. And even this may have been imposed by the faceless, unelected nomenklatura in Brussels.
Verity, you seem to feel that restrictions on immigration are sometimes a good thing. To me, and I believe others, such restrictions are economically damaging to both sides and unfair and immoral. Typically comment on this site tends to prefer less government control of the individual. Can you explain why you feel more control is beneficial in this case? I’d really like to know.
RAB,
Leaching dependants? You can’t be sure of this in any, let alone most cases. Case in point, my Filipina friend working a low paid job here in Korea, ilegally for the last 10 years I may add. Her elderly farmer parents get to eat and her brother and sister now attend college. Without that her sybilings would be working in the fields and her mother and father, unable to continue work would starve. Its their money to do what they see fit with and probably gets put to better targeted uses than some of the frivolous wastes some of us indulge in. Not that it’s anyone’s business but our own. I just think phrases like that build prejudice against a bunch of people who are very hard working and a neccessary part of most modern economies.
Simon Cranshaw. Britain is full up. Public services, like water and the health service and housing are overladen with the three million or illegal immigrants (“asylum seekers” manqué). These people aren’t needed.
Yes, they’ll do jobs that the British “won’t do”. Except, rather than encouraging the great mass of unemployed and “disability benefit” recipients to live like fussy nobility, their stipends should be cut off after a given period – two months, say – and they should be required to work or starve. There should be no category of work “the British won’t do”.
Free movement of labour among countries that have roughly the same standards of education and behaviour, fine. I understand something like 200 French Telecoms engineers got hired in California three or four years ago. Good for them! They brought a skill California was short of at that time. There will not be 200 educated, literate Americans travelling in the opposite direction. What is pouring into France is not civilised to Western standards, cleaves to an alien, primitive religion, brings with it primitive habits like polygamy and has many other unsavoury habits.
Like unto like, no problem. But turning W Europe into a refugee camp is perverted. Omar Bakri has 12 children and is getting £2,000 a week in benefits off the backs of people who get up in the morning and go to work.
You miss my economic point Aaron.
We are hemmoraging money in two ways.
One by our immigrants looking after their own back home by sending them money. Hooray if their relations get a college education out of it, but that isn’t benefiting us . We have lost that money that could have been spent in our own economy, and which frankly just encourages the lucky relatives to come to Britain and join in the gravy train.
Two we are bunging billions about in government aid.
Of the two I prefer the personal touch via the relatives, cos as I said earlier this ends up in the hands of dictators and get’s no closer to where it may do some good than a Swiss Bank account or a Cayman island hideaway.
Britain is full, I agree with Verity there. If jobs are uncongenial to the current unemployed then raise the wages or scrap the benefits before we import more and more incompatible people but continue to call it a society.
tsk, would you substitute AID for THIS in the first line of the last paragraph.
RAB – I don’t think it matters whether jobs are uncongenial or not. After a certain time – two months, or maybe three months – unemployment benefit should cease. People would have the choice of taking an uncongenial job to support themselves while continuing to look for a job they really want, or living off their friends and family, or starving. Continuing to live off the taxpayer should not be on offer.
The taxpayer shouldn’t be required to support people who are too dainty to take a temporary job as a hospital cleaner or shelf stacker.
Verity, thank you for your reply. There are still some points that aren’t clear to me though. What makes you say that Britain is “full up”? On an international scale the UK’s population density is not especially high. Current population is 60M, but if we allowed density to rise to that of Belgium or Japan, we could take on an addition 23M people. If we could accept the density of Taiwan, we could more than double the population. Considering this, I wonder what makes you say that Britain is full. Is there some concrete evidence or is it just a feeling? RAB also feel free to answer, since you feel the same way.
As to whether public services are overladen by the demands of migrant workers, I strongly believe this not to be the case. The link I gave previously was evidence regarding this in the US, but I don’t see why the situation should be different in the UK. This evidence is perhaps anecdotal but I could refer you to a documentary Let ‘Em All In where this was addressed. The presenter Kenan Malik visited a hospital, where he did indeed find a lot of migrant workers. However, they were working as doctors, nurses and especially cleaners. They were not significantly in evidence as patients. My brother works as a doctor in the NHS and what I’ve heard from him also supports this view. In fact it seems that rather than overburdening the system, migrant workers are helping to support it.
But even if what you say is true, surely the thing to change is the welfare state rather than the immigration policy. I’m all in favour of fully dismantling the welfare state and not providing benefits to anyone. But even in this case, would you support a policy of more open immigration?
Simon
Agreed the UK population density is not especially high, but that of England is. There are vast areas in Scotland and Wales that are almost empty, because they can’t support farming or industry, and we all tend to live where we can work. I do not accept that ever increasing population is desirable, even if it does mitigate the effect of Brown’s raids on pension savings; there is a quality of life issue here, where we have to ask how far from London should we have to drive before seeing open spaces? On a recent train journey from London (Paddington) to Oxford there was no part of the journey when I couldn’t see a house from the train.
There is also a valid question as to why we should accept overcrowding just because others do; some countries have accepted (however reluctantly) the imposition of murderous totalitarian dictatorships, but I’m sure you’re not suggesting the British should follow their example?
Well put “Big Tent”.
Britain is full up because there are too many forigners here, who look upon the place as a cash cow. They have no interest in intergration, our ways , customs or history.
But they know their rights, and are encouraged by Zanulab to fill their boots both legally and fiscally.
Britain has become HOTEL UK. PLC.COM.
Don’t you mind about the bangs, smells and screams coming out of the room nextdoor; It’s thier culture.
They have a right to genitally mutilate , excorsise children, indulge in honour killings, sell their children to the highest bidder via prostitution rackets etc etc.
Money isn’t everything. I want a sane and coherant society that largely knows what it is about.
In Britain today we just dont have that. We have pockets of difference moving in parallel but not nessessarily in the same direction.
I have just spent the best part of a month going up and down to London sorting out the death of an old relative. Let’s just say that I agree with MarkE. I get clausrophobic, even though there are many parks and open spaces, it feels like you’re indoors even when you’re outdoors. Nothing but buildings and crawling traffic(does anyone else get this in London, or have I inadvertantly increased the dosage again?)
If London were to become the template for Great Britain that Prescott would like it to be, I will be out of here in a shot.
Japan is filled up with native Japanese. They are monocultural, and people can get on within their own cultures. There is a depth of understanding, born of thousands of years of habits, customs and points of view.
Vast wadges of immigrants are not assimilable, especially if they are from a primitive culture and cleave to a violent religion that militates against the religion that shaped our country. And – inexplicably – consider themselves to be superior to the indigenes. (Judaism, Buddhism and Sikkhism are not inimicable to the beliefs on which our Western society is built.)
Your brother in law or whoever obviously works in a nice district. There are places in Britain where few patients have Western faces or Western habits. I read a survey yesterday that stated that around 80% of businesses have decided not to put up Christmas trees this year in case “they offend other religions”.
I’m sorry to say, the British are very easily cowed.
Thank you for all the interesting points. If I may, I’ll address them by turn. It’s true as you point out that England’s population density is higher than the UK overall. Still it remains far less than Taiwan or South Korea. I’m not suggesting that because these countries have accepted such densities that we should. My point is that these countries are not generally considered to have a problem of overcrowding. There are crowded cities and quiet areas of countryside in both and I think it would be hard to notice the high population density without seeing the survey figures.
As to London, I certainly sympathise with RAB. It can be a claustrophobic place. I feel the same way and am not so fond of the place. I can’t say I’ve ever been bothered by the view of houses on the train journey to Oxford but I can understand that you might prefer a more rural picture to pass the time. Still, surely these issues are to be addressed, if at all, by policies of urban planning. Are our preferences of scenery really to determine immigration policy?
Finally culture. Well… Culture Shmulture. Let me come clean. I am an economic migrant. Born in the UK, I now earn my living in Tokyo. I don’t know if I’ve bothered the locals with my noise or my smell. Perhaps I have. Do I have interest in integration, local ways, customs or history? Maybe some, but I don’t think this should be relevant to my visa application. I get the impression that people have had bad experiences and formed negative impressions of immigrants and that’s a shame. But such personal feelings though can surely not be a basis for a policy decision. If people commit crimes, like “honour” killings, certainly they should be tried and punished for that. I don’t see that it’s a reason to make a policy against all people from that culture.
I’m sorry to hear of the passing of your relative RAB. Part of my reason for getting involved in this discussion was my own experience with an aging relative. Although this post is getting a little long I hope you’ll forgive me explaining. My relative lives alone and, with a weakening memory, amongst other troubles is starting to fall prey to unscrupulous door-to-door salesmen. My first thought was that I would like to send a Philippina maid to help take care of him. I have a maid here and she has worked hard and reliably for me for many years. (Incidentally she remits a significant amount of her income to send her daughters to University in Manila.) Many Philippinas are keen to work in such a capacity and I would be able to afford employing one for my relative. However, upon researching visa availability, I discovered that there would be no way to send her to work in the UK. My plan was effectively blocked by UK’s regulations. So my relative continues to live alone. Can anyone explain to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do this?
I can understand that you might prefer a more rural picture to pass the time.
You misunderstood RAB’s post in your eagerness to prove him wrong. He used the fact that between London and Oxford – on the train, just to spike any pedanticism – is indicative of an overall urban creep that leaves few place of isolation and silence for spiritual renewal or just plain escape.
Are our preferences of scenery really to determine immigration policy? Well, uh, yes. The quality of life in our country, which includes wild, isolated, unbuilt upon areas, is what counts to the people who own the country.
If people commit crimes, like “honour” killings, certainly they should be tried and punished for that. Yeah. They certainly should.
I don’t see that it’s a reason to make a policy against all people from that culture. I think it’s a good reason to make a policy against all people who bring vile habits like “honour” killings, clitorectomies, suicide exploders, marriage to first cousins, forced marriages, etc into a civilised country. There may be some highly intelligent, cultivated people in Pakistan, although I doubt that you would find many. When you are brought up in a culture – especially such a controlling, unforgiving culture – it is very hard to shed it.
Maybe get David Blunket to look into the Fipilippina (spelled thusly) maid’s visa. Why don’t you just call the local council and they will send people round to your relative on a daily basis. Live in is better, of course. You could go through the proper procedures to get a Filippina maid into Britain. There is an entire industry of agencies that will do it for you.
Simon, I remember an American correspondent, talking on the Beeb around the time of 9/11.
He was talking about living in Japan for 30 years and his asking one of his Japanese friends whether he thought that he was Japanese by now? Well he spoke tha language fluently, paid the taxes, understood the religions and customs…
The Japanese friend laughed and said “No”
“We love you dearly but you are (whatever the Japanese is for everybody else), and always will be!”
There’s a people who know who they are.
When are you planning to come “home ” Simon?
Some interesting points have been raised again so I’ll address them in turn. Firstly, assimilation. So do we really need to assimilate? It’s true what RAB says about the Japanese. The Japanese know who they are and I will always be a foreigner here. That said I don’t really have a problem with that. It’s kind to ask when I’m coming home but I feel that here is my home now, despite being an alien. I am an individual and feel no need to belong to any group. I know some people might prefer a more unified society, but equally others, including myself, might prefer a diverse and heterogenous society. If such assimilation is just a question of personal preference, and not all people even feel the same way, can it really be a justification for public policy? When you make something a crime, it should be because it prevents the harm of one individual by another. Coming to another country to work does not fulfill this requirement. Being a migrant worker is, in fact, the opposite. It is doing something of benefit to others. When you restrict immigration, this has a cost and in my view, it is a very high one. People’s lives are damaged. I wish Blunkett could help me to bring a live in maid to the UK. Sadly, it is just not possible. The agencies that were mentioned are active in arranging the import of nurses to help fill the ranks of the NHS. They would not help in my case. So I and others do suffer from these laws.
Secondly, the urban planning issue. I still don’t really understand how this is linked to immigration. The quality of life in our country, which includes wild, isolated, unbuilt upon areas, is what counts to the people who own the country. But this is surely very difficult to measure. Probably there were many people in London who would have preferred that it hadn’t grown so big. Should legislation have prevented the sprawl of London many years ago? I guess the many that have benefitted from London’s growth since would say no. But my main problem with this argument is that even if you are right that development should be restricted, the solution does not directly link to immigration. Even if all immigration ceased, the UK’s native population could continue to develop new areas of land. Likewise, if there are areas that need protecting from development, legislation which did just that could be effective whether there were increased numbers of immigrants or not.
The West is living off money borrowed by East Asia, to pay for non essentail services which go out of the West as remittances. Furthermore, the East will want that money back as commodity prices continue to increase.
There is no way the West should be allowing in large numbers of foreign workers to do jobs like gardening and cleaning. This is decadent stupidity.
At best we should only be letting in small numbers of third world immigrants to work in productive industries such as farming and manufacturing, where it can be proven therei aren’t enough westerners to do the work.
This is what the East Asians do. Unfortunately, we lack the long tern vision of the East Asians.
Oh dear oh dear, a ‘conservative’ who has a Marxist view of how economics work. Your views are clearly based on the ‘fixed quantity of wealth fallacy (i.e. the economy is a pie and if more Third World people come ‘here’ and get a slice, there is less for the indigenous workers)… if Third World gardeners and cleaners are allowed in, then there most be less work for for First World gardeners and cleaners, right? Wrong. To start with it is very hard indeed to find First World people who want to be gardeners and cleaners because the work is hard and the pays sucks.
So by allowing in people, who are quite happy to do that work, you do not change how the pie gets sliced, you actually make the pie grow larger. People who want gardeners and cleaners can now find people willing to work at a price they can afford, allowing them to use their time doing things they value more highly than gardening and cleaning, thereby creating a larger market that was there before… it is called WEALTH CREATION and is the basic reason why Marxist economics make no sense whatsoever.
Your remarks also suggest you hold to another economic fallacy… only ‘physical’ economy (farming and manufacturing) are ‘real’ and ‘productive’. Wrong. Services are just as real and productive. For a conservative, you notions of economics are rather, well, Soviet.