News that Britain has been asked for an extra £1.7 billion [Dh10bn] by the European Union (EU) – and that this amount should be paid by December 1 – is just the latest intervention by the unelected officials of an institution that seems unable to see its foot without wanting to shoot it.
British prime minister David Cameron is already fighting a constant battle against Eurosceptics within his own party and from those in the increasingly confident United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). He will only be more convinced of the need to protect himself by appealing to this constituency – and that means we can expect further talk of “red lines” on immigration.
It is true that left-liberal elites in Britain have often attempted to shut down debate on immigration by immediately crying racism whenever the subject is raised. What is worse, however, is the spinelessness of mainstream political leaders who have allowed the centre of gravity to be dictated by those who warn of foreign hordes taking jobs and much worse besides.
Even Labour leader Ed Miliband, himself the son of immigrants, has called for “stronger controls” on people coming to the UK and said that the EU’s rule that allows for freedom of movement within the union needs to be reformed.
Rare indeed in Britain, in the EU and in America – where “softness” on immigration is deemed a very serious flaw by the right – are voices who unambiguously speak up for welcoming others. This is curious, given that the US, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, is nothing if not a nation of immigrants.
Indeed, to take a very long view, the whole of humanity’s history can be seen as one of emigration, with homo sapiens spreading out across the continents and populating the world.
Many countries, notably Britain, owe their ethnic status and culture to immigration.
The Magyars who make up 98 per cent of Hungary’s population today, meanwhile, may be regarded as having been 10th century benefits tourists of a particularly aggressive variety, successfully invading the Transdanubian basin in 900 and enslaving most of the hapless Slavs who were already living there.
Rather than having a damaging effect, the evidence from study after study is that immigration benefits countries. A 2013 paper published by the Manhattan Institute, for instance, concluded that “immigrants make the economy more efficient and raise the wages of native-born Americans”.
The thousands of children who have illegally crossed over the southern border of the US – children who Hillary Clinton has said she wants “sent back” – are part of a group of people who, as grown ups, are statistically more likely to take jobs that Americans don’t want to do, start businesses (44 per cent of Silicon Valley companies had at least one immigrant founder) and increase innovation. The study noted that “over one third of US Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine between 1901 and 2012 were foreign-born”.
In Britain earlier this year, Robert Chote, chairman of the Office of Budget Responsibility, told members of parliament that immigrant workers were “more likely to be working age, they’re more likely to be paying taxes and less likely to have relatively large sums of money spent on them for education, for long-term care, for health care, for pension expenditure”.
That report emerged a few months after a study by University College London found that since the year 2000 immigrants had made a “substantial” contribution to the British public purse. The irony, as The Economist noted this week, is that some regions where concern about immigration is felt strongest are those least likely to be affected. The north-east of England is one such region.
It is not surprising that it has “hardly seen any” immigrants, as the magazine put it, because it contains some of the most deprived towns in the country. Why would anyone want to move to places where there are no jobs?
The real concern there and in populist discourse is one of culture – and one should not dismiss that worry out of hand. It is not unnatural for a degree of trepidation to arise in cohesive communities if they see the abrupt arrival of large numbers of obviously “different” people.
Explanation and understanding are necessary, as are policies ensuring newcomers are protected and learn the laws and customs of their new homes.
But here the countries of the Arabian Gulf provide an example. Expatriates make up the majority of those living in both the UAE and Qatar, and yet one does not see Emiratis or Qataris suddenly discarding their kanduras and abayas or forgoing their majlises. If the citizens of these countries can retain their own cultures while being in the somewhat extraordinary situation of being minorities in their own homelands, surely western countries can cope with influxes that are tiny by comparison – especially when all the evidence is that they will benefit their hosts.
Or are they so lacking in confidence in their own values and traditions that a handful of men and women with different customs, beliefs or languages are enough to threaten what are still some of the mightiest nations on Earth?
Sholto Byrnes is a Doha-based commentator and consultant
