The Debatable Land

Cats lie down with dogs...

And other oddities. for perhaps the first time ever, I find myself agreeing, in broad terms, with John Prescott. How did this happen and how, for the love of god, did Prezza end up besting my old pal Fraser Nelson? Ah, yes, immigration... As Fraser put it himself:

I’ve just done a BBC1 Politics Show where they introduced me as being from both The Spectator and The News of the World. As a result of this I was savaged by the Labour-supporting audience. Perhaps vengeance for my being rude to John Prescott in the middle bit, which was off-air . I have to say Prescott came out of the exchange better than I did. We had a set-to about debt figures, jobs and immigration. “How many of those 3m new jobs you were talking about are immigrants?” I asked. “I have no idea” “Two-thirds.” “Funny how these Tories are fixated with immigrants – I’m pleased Poles are getting new jobs.” I tried shouting out at him “five million on benefits” but he had the camera and the microphone and didn’t flinch. Had it been on air, it would have no doubt left me looking like a refugee from Speaker’s Corner.

Now, of course, the theory of open immigration and the idea of a world without frontiers is easier to support when you're isolated or removed from the social pressures unchecked immigration might bring to societal services in, say, parts of London. In oher words, the theory is wholesome while the practice, as matters currently stand, is more complicated, especially for poorer citizens for whom high levels of immigration may pose something of an economic as well as a cultural threat. Nontheless, the expansion of the EU to the east has been one of the most heartening developments of recent years, providing opportunities for advancement to millions of people. If it's fine for a Frenchman to move to London, why ain't it fine for a Bulgar to do so too? And if a Bulgar, then why not a Turk?

Asylum Galore! Or, Passport to the Kingsway

Good grief. This is a terrific, amazing story. Congratulations to Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant. It's almost like an Ealing comedy except, of course, you know, serious. And, I think, really rather wonderful:

At first sight, the Kingsway seems an unwelcoming place. Wind whips around the 15-storey tower blocks, the windows in the lobby doors are broken, the corridors are gloomy and bare. Remnants of police incident tape flicker from lampposts and prominent surveillance cameras add an air of menace to its pathways. There is little to dispel the sense that this is one of Britain's forgotten pockets of poverty.

But when hundreds of asylum seekers were placed there to live - often for years - while their cases were processed, they were warmly embraced. "We had been really going downhill - a lot of antisocial families were being put here. But after a year of the asylum seekers coming, the atmosphere became completely different," Donnachie says. "These people couldn't do enough for you, and I thought this was wonderful - it was like going back to when I was a child and you could leave the key in the door and if you needed help someone would come round."

The estate became home for hundreds of families escaping persecution and torture in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Uganda and Congo. Most had their request for asylum in the UK turned down, and when the Home Office began coming to the estate at 5am to remove them, Donnachie and the rest of the residents looked on in horror. "It was like watching the Gestapo - men with armour, going in to flats with battering rams. I've never seen people living in fear like it," says Donnachie. "I saw a man jump from two storeys up when they came for him and his family. I stood there and I cried, and I said to myself, 'I am not going to stand by and watch this happen again.'"

She got together with her friend Noreen and organised the residents into daily dawn patrols, looking out for immigration vans. When the vans arrived, a phone system would swing in to action, warning asylum seekers to escape.

The whole estate pitched in, gathering in large crowds in the early-morning dark to jeer at immigration officials as they entered the tower blocks. On more than one occasion, the vans left the estate empty - the people they had come for had got out in time and were hidden by the crowd. The estate kept this up for two years until forced removals stopped.

But what happened on the Kingsway is not unique. Over the past few years there has been a growing resistance to the government's attempts to deport failed asylum seekers. From Manchester, from Sheffield, from Belfast, from Bristol, the Home Office is being bombarded with requests from British people all over the country asking for asylum seekers to be given another chance.

[Hat-tip: Justin at Chicken Yoghurt]

The American-Americans

Matt Yglesias posted an interesting map the other day:

It's a map drawn from US Census bureau data on ethnicity and ancestry. According to the census, however, some 7% of Americans look puzzled when you quiz 'em about their ancestry and write American rather than "Irish" or "Polish" or Korean" or "Cuban". This map shows where those American-Americans live, leading Matt to argue, vis a vis Jim Webb's prospects for the Vice-Presidency, that "Webb's favorite ethnic group, in short, seems to be the ethnic group with the least ethnic consciousness." (I concur with Matt, incidentally, in recommending Eve Fairbanks' fine Webb profile in this week's New Republic)

Well, yes, and that's one of the reasons Webb felt compelled to write his history of the Scots-Irish in America, Born Fighting. It's precisely because he felt that his ain folk were, to borrow from Ian Fleming, "a tough, forgotten race" that Webb leapt into the fray.

Still, if you were to plot Scottish (and Ulster) immigration to the US on a map, you'd end up with something similar to the "American" map above. And that goes some way towards explaining why there's no significant Scottish political constituency in the United States. Equally, though some Scots and Ulster immigrants (the latter mainly Scots who'd been in Ulstr for a generation or two) left for the New World involuntarily, many more did not. They were leaving for a reason and had little cause to look back with sentiment.

And of course, they left a long time ago (emigrants from post-WW1 Scotland, tended to head to Canda or New Zealand) and, being for the most part practical protestants, they did not so much assimilate into America as build it in the first place. No wonder, then, that despite the St Andrews' and Caledonian Societies scattered across America there's never been much of a Scots Lobby in American politics. The SNP, of course, would love it if there were such a lobby. But there are no collection tins being passed around Appalachian churches or in the bars of Columbia or Knoxville.

Equally, it's precisely because the descendents of these immigrants from lowland Scotland, Ulster (and the counties of northern England) consider themselves unhyphenated Americans that they have harboured, I'd suggest, suspicions of those more recent arrivals who consider themselves "ethnics" or otherwise hyphenated-Americans.

Anyway, one other thought with regard to immigration: does anyone know of a study comparing assimilation rates between immigrants who left their home countries willingly and those who, for whatever reason, were compelled to leave? My suspicion - and it is only that - would be that Mexicans arriving in the United States seeking economic advancement (and planning to stay permanently) are likely to become unhyphenated-Americans more quickly than, say, those forced out of their home countries for other reasons (eg, the Cuban community in Florida). But that's just a guess...

Guatemala's Secret War on Israel

Wackiest anti-immigration argument yet (US edition): Hamas wins when Hispanics are allowed into the United States. At least I think that's what Mark Krikorian is claiming:

David Hazony at Contentions points to a new poll that incidentally illustrates an important result of assimilation. (Complete poll here, in pdf.) The survey found that 82 percent of American Christians felt they had a "moral and biblical" obligation to support Israel, including 89 percent of evangelicals, but also 76 percent of Catholics. It's this last statistic that's striking evidence of Americanization — I haven't seen comparable polls elsewhere, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that even a majority of Catholics anywhere else would agree.Christian Zionism is essentially a Protestant phenomenon, and a statistic like this suggests how thorough was the cultural (though not necessarily theological) Protestantization of American Catholics...

The policy point is this — does anyone think three-quarters of the grandchildren of today's Hispanic Catholic immigrants will be similarly pro-Israel? It's not that Latin immigrants are uniquely anti-Semitic (I suspect they're more anti-Semitic than today's Asians or yesterday's Irish and Italians, but less so than Eastern European immigrants); rather, our ability to Protestantize them (in the sense I'm using it) has declined dramatically compared to a century ago.

I'd like to consider this astonishing but, of course, it isn't really.

Department of the Wrong End of the Stick

Setting aside the issue of whether or not a House of Lords committee can accurately be considered "influential"...

Record levels of immigration have had "little or no impact" on the economic well-being of Britons, an influential House of Lords committee has said.

Well, that's not the point. Or at least it's not the point as far as I'm concerned. What about the immigrants themselves? Couldn't we rejoice in their economic advancement and, one supposes (via remissions from immigrant workers), that of their home countries too? Couldn't that be be something to be celebrated? The world doesn't stop at the water's edge after all and in an age in which we welcome, quite properly, the free movement of goods and capitol shouldn't we also give a huzzah or two to the (admittedly still incomplete) free movement of labour? We're not the only players in this game.

Naturally the noble Lords consider all this an argument in favour of limiting immigration, whereas I'd like to think of it as reason to open the borders still further...

UPDATE: Chris Dillow has more.

Bad Korma*...

There's plenty of scaremongering about immigration these days but, even allowing for a proper degree of skepticism, this constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life:

The curry industry will die if action is not taken to address tough new immigration laws, restaurant bosses have warned the Scottish Parliament.

They claim food quality will deteriorate and up to half of the Indian restaurants currently in business could shut.

The comments came as 100 restaurateurs staged a protest at Holyrood over the changes to immigration rules.

They claim a shortage of kitchen staff has been created as a result.

Restaurant owners said legislation which came in at the end of February makes it harder for them to bring in staff from outside the European Union.

Foysol Choudhury, general secretary of the Bangladesh Samity Association in Edinburgh, criticised new rules requiring immigrants to speak English and have an academic qualification.

"Our chefs don't need to speak English. Their curry talks," he said.

*Sorry. No excuse.

Not all roads lead to London

Megan notes that there are now more than three million Britons living abroad and argues:

I assume this has something to do with the fact that it is very easy for Britons to go to wealthy, English-speaking countries, and also that there's a relative lack of migration opportunities in Britain. If you're American or Australian, you can always pick up and try another city, but in Britain, you mostly move to London or you . . . move to London. This is an exaggeration, of course, but there's nothing like the ability to say, "You know what, things aren't going so well in Boston, so I'm moving to LA." If the economy, or the job opportunities are bad in London, they're probably bad everywhere else in the UK too.

Naturally there's also the fact that Britain's a crowded island where things are very expensive; an engineer can instantly boost his standard of living quite a bit by moving this side of the pond. Standard of living is not everything of course (which is why they aren't all here), but it's something, and people who care about it will move.

Apparently "record" numbers of skilled professionals are leaving Britain. The obvious crack is to say is: who can blame them, given the miseries of the Blair/Brown years? (Not economic misery of course, but the gawd-help-us gruesomeness of New Labour...) But it's also just the continuation of long-established historical patterns: Britons have always had a penchant for escaping the confines of this misty, water-logged island. How else were Australia, Canada, New Zealand and large parts of the United States settled?  In my own family one grand-parent grew up in India while another spent 30 years working in Malaya; my own parents spent some time living in Italy before returning to the UK.

Then again it's also the case that Britain attracts an awful lot of foreign skilled workers too. So much so, in fact, that London is now one of the largest French cities on the planet. In that respect much of the UK (and London in particular) exists in a post-national, globalised environment. This seems to me to be a pretty nifty thing. (And a tribute to the EU of course.)

It's true that the grotesque Londonisation of Britain has been just as damaging as it has been rewarding. What's good for London - including its massive public subsidies - is not necessarily good for the rest of the country. Just as it would be good for the United States if one centre of political/media/economic/cultural power were located in the heartland, so it would be useful and, indeed, healthier if London were not the heart of all such efforts in Britain.

Still, it's not quite London or Bust as Megan seems to believe. Quality of life (as distinct from "standard of living" matters too) matters too. It's a small island for sure, but it's still true that there's more to it than London Town. Anecdotal evidence supports this: many of us know people who have relocated from London to either the great English provincial cities (Manchester, Leeds etc etc) or to Glasgow or, especially, Edinburgh. This includes a fair number of Scots who moved to London for work but who have returned to their native heath.

In fact there are some indicators that elements of London's hegemony are being challenged (at long last!). The BBC is, quite sensibly, relocating Radio 5 Live and other services to Manchester. Meanwhile, in the business world the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (one of the world's half dozen biggest banks) continues to thrive despite being headquartered in Edinburgh not London. Folk would have laughed at you 20 years ago if you had said that it were possible for a global financial services company to thrive without being based inside the City of London. But there you have it. RBS's success is obviously good for Edinburgh and Scotland, but it's also an inspiration.

In fact Scotland - despite it's often depressing politics - continues to do pretty well. More than 50,000 people relocated here from other parts of the UK last year. That's equivalent to roughly 1% of the Scottish population. By some estimates there are nearly than 500,000 English people living in Scotland. They're our biggest "minority". They're not coming here for the climate, I guess.

So an awful lot of them are coming because Edinburgh (and Glasgow) is just a nicer place to live than London and the crowded south-east of England. This is obviously especially true if they've got children and are looking for somewhere affordable to live. London's crippling expense is Scotland's opportunity (also an opportunity for the north of England). Though internal migration may not happen at US levels, it's more common in the UK than people think. If it were ever true that it's London or Abroad that's less true, in many sectors, than it was.

London's a great international city of course. But it can't provide everything. People looking for a better quality of life, even at the expense of a nominal pay-cut can still find plenty of opportunities elsewhere in the UK and especially outside the clogged, claustorphobic south-east of England. (As for the idea that if the London economy is poor then so is the economy elsewhere: not so; in the early 1990s there was no recession in manufacturing or in Scotland until the need to cool the over-heating London economy put the rest of the country into recession. We were last in, last out - one reason for favouring whatever independence means these days...)

So, sure, lots of people want to leave London because, for all its treasures and dynamism, it's an often ghastly, impossible place to live. But that's fine. It creates opportunities for "livable" cities such as Edinburgh or Manchester to take advantage.

From Colombia to Queen's

A classic, touching American story by my friend Nancy Trejos in the Washington Post's magazine:

SAT ON THE AVIANCA FLIGHT FROM BOGOTA TO PEREIRA, my forehead pressed against the window, staring out into the clouds. It was September 11, 2007, and I was flying over Colombia, my father's homeland. I had been there only once before, at 13, when I accompanied my father to visit my grandparents and other relatives in Pereira, his home town. They hadn't seen my dad since he left for the United States 25 years earlier. They welcomed him back as a hero then because, unlike them, he had made it to America and created a life for himself there.

Seventeen years later, I decided to go back alone. This time, I was in Colombia to meet a relative I had not known about the first time. This time, I was there to meet my half brother -- a brother I had never seen before, not even in photographs.

His name is Humberto Trejos. He is the product of my father's first marriage in Colombia, the marriage he never spoke of. He is the son my father left behind.

You can read it all here.

Taxi drivers prepare to flood America. Or, further evidence for Huckabee's buffoonery.

Via Andrew, here's Huckabee on Benazir Bhutto's murder:

"We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country. We just need to be very, very thorough in looking at every aspect of our own security internally because, again, we live in a very, very dangerous time," Huckabee said during a news conference Thursday night in West Des Moines.

Over Christmas lunch a friend warned me not to be quite so dismissive of Huckabee. He's not just a hick I was told. And perhaps he isn't: this answer cannily ties security (whatever that is) to immigration after all, shoring up Huckabee's weakness on that front. Personally I find the suggestion that you have to choose between security and immigrants to be pretty distasteful but then again I'm an elitist, east-coast inhabiting foreigner. So I would, wouldn't I?

Just here for the job: Question of the Day

Part of Megan McArdle's response to Kerry Howley's excellent guest-worker article:

But mostly, I worry about having a large number of people in the country who are, definitionally, not planning to stay here. There's something corrosive about transience: witness the way college students treat their neighborhoods. (And don't tell me they're young; they're prime guest-worker age.) Civic bonds can withstand culture clash, but I'm not sure they can withstand pockets of people who are just there for the job.

To what extent - if any - does life in Washington DC support Megan's theory? What lessons, if any, might be extrapolated from Washington's experience with what amounts to a sort-of-kind-of guest worker programme? Discuss.

Tired, huddled masses too tired, too huddled for own/our good?

Today's reading assignment: Kerry Howley's* excellent Reason cover story on immigration, what the United States could learn from Singapore's guest-worker programme and how liberals are as confused as nativists:

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean. Perhaps American egalitarianism, like a dress too precious to be worn, is a value too dear to expose to the real world. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, has written, “Americans prefer unknowing.”

*Yes, yes, Kerry's a friend who, like me, is relaxed about open borders but resigned to their remaining shut. We take what we can. But I'd recommend her fine piece even if we'd never met. It's all good.

As America Welcomes Jihadists With Open Arms...

Of course, it is too late for Tom Tancredo's presidential ambitions. And yes, he's a loon. But still, this advertisement he aired in Iowa repays watching. This sort of thing is terribly unpopular - and vulgar - in Washington, but there are plenty of people who will agree with the guts of what Tancredo has to say here. And not all of them are Republicans. [Thanks to Garance for the spot].

Department of Road Safety and Demagoguery

If one were to compile a list of all the issues in which elite - and, er, libertarian - opinion is most completely out of touch with "ordinary" people's concerns, there's a more than decent chance immigration would be at the top of the list. As Garance reports from Iowa, it may also be the last issue with which Republicans can credibly thrash Democrats. People (like me) in Washington are relaxed about immigration - including illegal immigration - but that's not true in the mid-west, to say nothing of the south or parts of the south-west.

Which is why the question of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants is a topic that is not likely to go away any time soon. It doesn't take much imagination to consider how popular it will be with talk radio. At a basic level - as Chris Dodd pointed out - there's a question of what people perceive as "fairness" and "privilege".

Still, Eliot Spitzer's scheme to warrant illegal aliens seemed sensible to me (then again, it would wouldn't it?. If illegal immigrants drive unlicensed or are compelled/choose to seek alternative means of getting on the road then we may expect to see the problems highlighted in this Readers' Digest* piece become more and more widespread, making a bad situation much, much worse:

The Armstrong family never knew what hit them. Edward was behind the wheel of their car with his wife, Melissa, next to him and ten-year-old daughter and six-year-old son in the backseat. Traffic was choked to a near standstill on the stretch of Interstate 81 in Tennessee. But one driver apparently didn't notice the approaching snarl.

Nasko Nazov, an illegal immigrant from Macedonia, didn't hit the brakes in time and his tractor-trailer plowed into two idling vehicles, one of them the Armstrongs' car. No one in the family survived the horrible crash.

Adding to the senselessness of the tragedy, officials soon learned that Nazov had been driving his truck with a bogus commercial driver's license (CDL). The suburban Chicago resident had obtained false documents claiming he was a resident of Wisconsin (where he took his driver's test) and had gotten help from a translator on the answers to a written exam. In 2006, Nazov was sentenced to four years in prison.

In recent years, 32 states have reported cases of commercial license fraud, with busts ranging everywhere from Florida to Ohio to Colorado. A 2006 report from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) identified about 15,000 "suspect" license holders in 27 states, over a third of whom ultimately had their CDLs taken away or voluntarily gave them up.

In Macon, Georgia, according to an investigative report by the Chicago Tribune, one truck-driving school paid private "third party" testers to falsify the exams of 623 students. When Georgia officials uncovered the racket and had all those students retake the test, only 142 qualified.

According to safety advocates, there are probably tens of thousands of truckers on the road with sham licenses.

...In Illinois, state officials sold hundreds of phony licenses to unskilled drivers, including immigrants who couldn't read or speak English and people who flattened orange pylons in driving tests.

The fraud came to light after a driver who knew little English failed to understand radio warnings from passing truckers that part of his tailpipe assembly was loose. The pieces flew off and were run over by a van, piercing the vehicle's gas tank. The van exploded into flames, killing six children of a Chicago minister. Investigators determined the trucker had bought a sham license from the state. So had another driver who killed ten people in a 2004 Texas highway crash.

*Sure, Readers' Digest wants to terrify you, but the point stands nonetheless.