Daniel Trilling (New Statesman assistant editor) states this morning: "My grandmother was an immigration offender. She came here on a false work permit in 1939. Governments rely on people having short memories".
Mr Trilling should ponder the irony of his remark.
No-one would dispute the urgency of the situation in 1939, and no-one I hope would retrospectively wish that Daniel Trilling's grandmother had not been able to escape from continental Europe at that time.
However Germany (or France or the Netherlands etc) have been free and open societies since at least 1950 (and Poland since 1989) and yet the Trilling family have made no attempt to return to their country of origin.
There will be, of course, hundreds of reasons why they should not return.
But Mr Trilling has unwittingly demonstrated a general truth - whatever reasons given by asylum seekers why they should enter the United Kingdom, almost none of them will ever leave. With asylum seekers we are being asked to make not just a lifetime commitment but a commitment to their descendants many decades into the future. Surely Mr Trilling can see (even if just in those candid moments of internal dialogue when he is communing with himself) that not everyone is enthusiastic about this open-ended commitment.
Dare I say it, almost no-one outside of the hard left is enthusiastic about it.
It would be a different matter if asylum seekers were allowed temporary leave to remain and when their country of origin was declared safe (perhaps by an impartial body such as the United Nations) they would go home to help rebuild their shattered communities.
But this process whereby asylum seekers become permanent (and voting) citizens who then start agitating to change society - this is not an immigration model that has widespread support.
And is it not despicable of Daniel Trilling to use the trauma of his own grandmother and to trivialise the tragedy of the holocaust in Twitter-based political point-scoring on the issue of illegal immigration?
You are not a holocaust survivor Mr Trilling. So far as I am aware you are not even the child of holocaust survivors. You have no right to co-opt the holocaust to bolster your highly partisan arguments.
Mr Trilling should ponder the irony of his remark.
No-one would dispute the urgency of the situation in 1939, and no-one I hope would retrospectively wish that Daniel Trilling's grandmother had not been able to escape from continental Europe at that time.
However Germany (or France or the Netherlands etc) have been free and open societies since at least 1950 (and Poland since 1989) and yet the Trilling family have made no attempt to return to their country of origin.
There will be, of course, hundreds of reasons why they should not return.
But Mr Trilling has unwittingly demonstrated a general truth - whatever reasons given by asylum seekers why they should enter the United Kingdom, almost none of them will ever leave. With asylum seekers we are being asked to make not just a lifetime commitment but a commitment to their descendants many decades into the future. Surely Mr Trilling can see (even if just in those candid moments of internal dialogue when he is communing with himself) that not everyone is enthusiastic about this open-ended commitment.
Dare I say it, almost no-one outside of the hard left is enthusiastic about it.
It would be a different matter if asylum seekers were allowed temporary leave to remain and when their country of origin was declared safe (perhaps by an impartial body such as the United Nations) they would go home to help rebuild their shattered communities.
But this process whereby asylum seekers become permanent (and voting) citizens who then start agitating to change society - this is not an immigration model that has widespread support.
And is it not despicable of Daniel Trilling to use the trauma of his own grandmother and to trivialise the tragedy of the holocaust in Twitter-based political point-scoring on the issue of illegal immigration?
You are not a holocaust survivor Mr Trilling. So far as I am aware you are not even the child of holocaust survivors. You have no right to co-opt the holocaust to bolster your highly partisan arguments.
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