In my original post about New Year’s resolutions for the People In Power (PIP), one of my theses was that I would like to see them defending the values of the people who put them in power.
One area where it seems to me that they fall down on this issue is on the question of immigration. The phrase “white man speak with forked tongue” springs to mind, for the attitude of the PIP is cloven, to say the least. In theory they are all for it, because it sounds good to all except, perhaps the extreme right-wing parties. But when it comes to actually converting talk into action, they either drag their feet or act in a way that the general public experiences as contrary to what is acceptable, at least here in Sweden.
Hardly a week goes by without a report in the television news of the immigration authority’s attempt to repatriate asylum-seekers to regions of the world that everyone acknowledges to be war-zones, or where people of the same religious or ethnic origin as the asylum-seekers are persecuted even to death. Everyone, that is, except the PIP at the foreign office or the migration authority, who follow the directions of their masters in Washington or Stockholm and refuse to name the region as being a war-zone. If they do that, even the laws of the land will not allow repatriation. And yet…
There is a generally accepted view amongst PIP that “we need more people in this country”. The principal reason for this need is apparently to maintain economic growth. But I have some questions, which I believe I share with many people. Which “we” is it that needs more people? That is, who is it who sees the population of a country as being a resource, an input into some process? In a country with a serious level of unemployment, which most countries have as I write, it seems to the majority of people that what we need is not more people, but fewer. However, if you live in a world steered by the laws of supply and demand, it is apparent that more people means cheaper labour. Which perhaps gives a clue to the identity of “we”.
A great many people – far too many, unfortunately – see this, and act on the principle of their own insecurity. They do not rank very highly in the society of which they are members. They are used to being by-passed in decisions concerning them, and treated as objects without hopes or dreams. They do not want more people, but for the wrong reason. They are afraid that more people will increase competition for the limited number of employment opportunities, which they see reducing before their eyes as production units are moved overseas to where labour is cheaper. Perhaps if we stopped talking of labour, of human resources, and began talking about people, it would be a little bit more difficult to put people out of work. One of the most disgraceful examples of this kind of thinking came from a former Prime Minister of Sweden, Göran Persson, who, to his shame, talked of his fear of social tourism when the European Union passed laws requiring countries to grant to citizens of other European countries the same social security that they grant to their own. Naturally no such social tourism resulted.
If one turns to the green parties, they are definitely opposed to this thesis that “we need more people”, especially if the reason is economic growth. They would like to see, if not economic contraction, at least no more growth as traditionally defined. The greens may not yet be a majority, but they are a big – and growing – minority.
There are nearly seven billion people on this planet, which is estimated to be able to support one billion to the standard in the US, and between one and a half and two billion to the standard in Europe. Assuming for the moment the validity of the unproven thesis that “we need more people” does it not make more sense to take, say, a million poor farmers from China or India and move them to wherever “we” are, rather than procreate a million more home-grown babies? The million farmers and their families are already mature. They would perhaps need re-education in the ways of the West, but they can work and provide for themselves immediately. A new born child is not going to contribute to the well-being of more than a very few for twenty or twenty-five years.
And even worse…
If you travel by taxi in one of our bigger cities, the chances are your chauffeur will be of foreign extraction, quite probably a first-generation immigrant. If you get talking to them, and ask what they did in their home country, very often you will find that they had a position of some responsibility. They were teachers, at all levels from junior school to university level, they were doctors, they were machine engineers. Most of them are educated people, who are always the first targets of repressive regimes. None of them I have met have been janitors, refuse collectors, or taxi drivers in their home countries. If “we” really need more “people” (read productive units or resources) does it not make more sense to make use of these people who are already here and already trained, rather than giving birth to babies who will not become resources for twenty or more years?
The problem is that allowing people into a country, even if one has an immigration authority which acts in direct opposition to the sense of justice of the average person and thus has more of a function of keeping them out, is only half of the problem. You have to take care of them when they are in. You have to integrate them into the community, rather than allowing them to form ghettos of their own where everyone speaks the same language, which is not the language of your country, and where even the shop signs are in a foreign language. You have to accept that even the often unjustly suspect education of a developing country will have given them some part of the education required to meet local standards, find their level of experience, pay them at that level, and train them up to the post they had in their homeland as quickly as possible. For many people their status in the community is a factor of their status in their career. If one has been a doctor, one does not want to remain too long as a medical orderly in one’s new country.
So what do we want from the PIP? Change the law so that one pays attention to the actual situation in a country when deciding whether or not to repatriate asylum-seekers. Start an education campaign explaining to the citizens whether, and if so, how much the population of the country needs to be increased, and why, so that people are not reacting out of fear and uncertainty, and open for immigration to meet those targets. Spend a bit of money on integrating the immigrants better – that will be repaid manyfold from the taxes paid by the immigrants when they start working and stop being a burden on the social system. Start looking again at the immigrants who are already here, and utilise their capabilities as much as possible. They will be as grateful as the rest of us. And most importantly, stop treating the citizens of your country as cattle to be bred up in good times and slaughtered in bad. Remember that it is those citizens who put you there, and who pay your wages.