In January, David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, kicked up a media storm when he asked if Britain was becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state. Among others, Neil Berry in Arab News accused Goodhart of being “blind to the nature of the country he inhabits” and of playing to popular anti-immigration hysteria. Here is David Goodhart’s reply.
LONDON, 29 March 2004 — Immigration involves many conflicting interests and raises tough moral and practical questions. But contrary to last month’s report from Neil Berry about rising “anti-immigration hysteria in Britain”, the country is holding a reasonably sane debate about it. That is in part thanks to a Labour government which wants to have it both ways on immigration. On the one hand it wants the economic dynamism that relatively high levels of immigration bring; on the other it is aware that the costs and benefits of immigration are unevenly distributed and that it must reassure the majority population if high levels of immigration are to be sustained.
True, in the past couple of years the issue of asylum and immigration has shot up the list of voter concerns — to second place after the National Health Service, according to some opinion polls. But this is not necessarily a sign of “hysteria”. Voter anxiety has been a response to Britain’s second big wave of migration since 1945. The first big wave in the late 1950s and 1960s consisted mainly of West Indians and Asians from former British colonies, invited to fill gaps in the labor market. They came, full of optimism, to a very homogeneous country. Many of the insiders feared and resented the outsiders and racial abuse was commonplace.
But after the initial friction of absorbing nearly one million Asians and about 500,000 West Indians over 20 years or so, Britain in the 1980s and 1990s settled down and grew accustomed to being a multiethnic society. Then in the mid-1990s net immigration rates began to rise again. From 1999 to 2002, asylum seekers alone reached almost 100,000 a year. Net immigration overall hit 150,000 a year for several years.
Britain remains in the middle of this second big wave of immigration. Hostility to this has been exacerbated by some reporting in popular newspapers, particularly over the issue of asylum seekers. However, many of those who denounce the popular press clearly do not read it — both the Daily Mirror and the Sun, the two biggest working class papers, generally project a positive image of Britain’s ethnic minorities, and the Sun is in favor of moderate levels of immigration.
So if the popular press has not invented the new anxieties, where do they come from? A high level of immigration in a certain area can create real conflicts over public services and jobs. There are also widespread fears about the failure to integrate ethnic minorities. The race riots in northern English towns in 2001, followed by the fear of radical Islam after Sept. 11, served to highlight the issue, especially for the Muslim minority.
Much is made of the rise of “Islamaphobia” in Britain. No doubt there is some, but equally it would be foolish to deny that there are extra difficulties in integrating people who have a strong commitment not just to a different religion — integration is not usually an issue with Jews or Hindus — but to a different civilization, which can appear to be in conflict with the West. This difficulty was underlined recently by a poll in the Guardian newspaper which found that only 73 percent of British Muslims are strongly opposed to attacks by Al-Qaeda — a shocking 13 percent said its attacks are justified. The bolstering of a more articulate, moderate leadership in Britain’s Muslim community and the recruitment and training of more locally based, politically mainstream imams is a priority.
Notwithstanding the doubts of most ordinary people, mass immigration still has powerful friends, which is why it is likely to continue. Among them are the government, business and the media elite. Immigration is certainly good for economic growth, although it tends to benefit the better off rather than those British citizens who compete at the lower end of the labor market. Despite low unemployment in the past few years wages have not been rising; competition from migrants may be holding wages down. This is bad for equality and runs counter to many of the pro-equality policies of the Labour government. On the positive side, immigration also helps lower the average age of the population, buying a bit more time in adjusting to an aging society.
But leaving aside the economic arguments, continuing mass immigration raises broader questions of what kind of society Britain is becoming. The majority white population has already experienced a declining sense of community in recent decades thanks to a big increase in geographical mobility and greater value and lifestyle diversity. Will continuing mass immigration further undermine a sense of local and national community? Is there a danger that we might wake up in 30 years’ time and find we have become a US-style society, with sharp ethnic divisions and a weak welfare state?
Diversity of all kinds, including ethnic diversity, almost by definition eats away at a common culture and feelings of mutual obligation. In the February issue of the magazine I edit, Prospect, I described this in an essay as the “progressive dilemma” — because people on the left want both high levels of diversity and high levels of solidarity and social cohesion. I suggested that it might be possible to have both, but only if we are careful about the speed and quantity of immigration, if we worry more about the integration of outsiders, and if we reinforce the symbolic aspects of British citizenship. (Anyone wishing to read it may go to www.prospect-magazine.co.uk)
Given that the piece was treading on some liberal taboos, I expected it to be widely denounced. Most people who responded did disagree in emphasis or detail, but most at least accepted the legitimacy of the questions I was raising. There was a small group of people, mainly from the multicultural left, who denounced me as a racist. And Neil Berry in this paper described my essay as “an elaborate attempt to distract attention from the background to the social disintegration Britain is already experiencing” — an odd way to describe one of the most successful big economies in the EU.
The response to my essay suggests that our debate in Britain about immigration has become more open. The political class now recognizes that it needs to win political legitimacy for mass immigration and cannot just impose it. How can such legitimacy be won? First, by reassuring the majority of the population that we can control our borders and thus decide who becomes a British citizen. Second, by ensuring that incomers will not be a burden on the taxpayer or use parts of the welfare state they are not entitled to. Third, by continuing to stress the importance of integration through promoting citizenship ceremonies, funding language lessons and so on. In this way the “them” can more swiftly become a part of the “us”, and the government can go on having it both ways on immigration.
