Very silly report from British Future puzzling about why areas that have relatively low levels of immigration seem to register high levels of concern about on-going mass migrations of people.
Katwala: What’s driving immigration concern?:
http://www.britishfuture.org/blog/katwala-whats-driving-immigration-concern/
If British Future bothered to do surveys professionally (ie ask the same question a number of different times in different formats instead of just recording the first answer they are given) they would understand that "white flight" (to use a crude and imprecise expression) will be radicalising the areas that the "fleeing" people move into.
Anyone who has lived through an episode of mass migration will not easily forget the experience. This often entails finding that within a few years the area you might have been born in, lived in all your life and call home (in the most meaningful sense of that word) has become a completely strange environment, sometimes resembling a location in a deprived part of the developing world. Friends and family move away, local services and amenities no longer work properly, house prices fall (and for working class families a house is probably their one asset that they have almost killed themselves to obtain).
For elderly working class people who cannot move this experience is exceptionally cruel.
Of course, for middle class people it's delightful to have in the next suburb cheapo servants (I'm thinking Baroness Scotland here), exotic restaurants, somewhere to go slumming so that they can prove how liberal and diverse they are.
And the Labour party is ecstatic when mass migration happens as it means yet more safe wards where the community elders will deliver a bloc vote.
But for the people who have been crowded out of their settled homes the experience is not so nice, and they are hardly likely to forget or forgive what happened.
Which is why BME and Eastern European community leaders should apologise for mass migration.
Katwala: What’s driving immigration concern?:
http://www.britishfuture.org/blog/katwala-whats-driving-immigration-concern/
If British Future bothered to do surveys professionally (ie ask the same question a number of different times in different formats instead of just recording the first answer they are given) they would understand that "white flight" (to use a crude and imprecise expression) will be radicalising the areas that the "fleeing" people move into.
Anyone who has lived through an episode of mass migration will not easily forget the experience. This often entails finding that within a few years the area you might have been born in, lived in all your life and call home (in the most meaningful sense of that word) has become a completely strange environment, sometimes resembling a location in a deprived part of the developing world. Friends and family move away, local services and amenities no longer work properly, house prices fall (and for working class families a house is probably their one asset that they have almost killed themselves to obtain).
For elderly working class people who cannot move this experience is exceptionally cruel.
Of course, for middle class people it's delightful to have in the next suburb cheapo servants (I'm thinking Baroness Scotland here), exotic restaurants, somewhere to go slumming so that they can prove how liberal and diverse they are.
And the Labour party is ecstatic when mass migration happens as it means yet more safe wards where the community elders will deliver a bloc vote.
But for the people who have been crowded out of their settled homes the experience is not so nice, and they are hardly likely to forget or forgive what happened.
Which is why BME and Eastern European community leaders should apologise for mass migration.
2 comments:
Dear Andrew
Your explanation could work for some areas, but not for others, and is a weak explanation of migration being the top concern of 17-20% across 6/9 regions. There simply isn't enough geographical internal mobility for that explanation to work.
- For example, most people in Wales have always lived in Wales, and the north-east. There is no way that very large proportions of people in these areas represent "white flight" from, say London or the West Midlands. Yet immigration is the top concern of one in five, in terms of issues affecting their current local area, the same as for London.
- It would be intuitively more plausible for the south-east of England. "White flight" is associated with movements from, say, London to Kent and Essex. However, the south-east has similar and lower migration concerns than both higher and lower migration areas.
I would put the national concern down to
- concern that the immigration system doesn't work effectively or do what it is meant to, as all reports into UKBA show
- a concern that national identity and national cohesion matters. People think this will be affected by large-scale immigration, especially in the absence of integration, as is understandable.
There are better explanations from those who have studied this across a range of studies.
- Higher migration areas have contact. So there will be pressures and anxieties, but these are mitigated by contact. (People do treat migrants they know differently to "migrants" as a group). Areas adjacent to high migration areas, but which are not high migration, may experience anxiety about difference, and there is no reduction of unfamiliarity or contact. These tend, across countries, to be the areas of high anxiety - not the high migration areas, nor the more distant low migration areas. Your "white flight" explanation forms part of this dynamic.
Dear Mr Katwala,
I think you underestimate what you have termed "geographical internal mobility".
To take the example you quote of North Wales, are there not a large number of working class people in this area who have retired from central Liverpool?
Or to take another example, my own family. I was born in Kentish Town but my family could not stay there due to the population change - and indeed I can never go back there to live (if you Google the road I was born in, it was the scene of a horrific murder in the street). I don't wish to overstate this, but my "home" has gone and is now effectively part of the third world.
We moved to Luton which was the only area within a fifty mile radius of London where we could find affordable property. Again due to population change the area (Dallow Ward) became unsafe (and completely alien to us) and as my father was very ill he could not leave my mother in such an area.
We then moved to a very rural county 150 miles from London and once again history is repeating itself - uncontrolled surges of foreigners moving into the area.
My experience is very far from unique - almost all my schoolfriends I knew in Luton have had similar experiences, as did my sister and her family (Kentish Town to Luton Limbury to a location outside Bedford); my grandparents (East End to the Watling Council estate in north London to coastal Dorset); my cousins (from Bellingham to Herefordshire).
Although I do not complain about my present circumstances, I think all of us would have preferred to have stayed in our own home areas.
Migration policy in the United Kingdom is decided by the elite and yet the burdens fall almost exclusively on the poor and the old.
To say I am angry about this is an understatement. I think you will find that my anger is shared by the majority of the British population.
Post a Comment