With Brexit and election of Donald Trump in the USA there has been a lot of focus on immigration. If you ask a lot of people ‘what is the biggest problem with this country’ they will often say it is ‘immigration’ or ‘people on the dole not willing to work’.
However as we explain below immigrants are of net benefit to this country and the ‘problem’ of the unemployment is very small compared to other financial burdens1.
The tactic of ‘divide and rule’ is being used to get as fighting amongst ourselves to stop us from realising what the real problems are.
Economics
It is important to realise that there are not a fixed number of jobs that ‘other’ people take. When someone gets a job they spend money on goods and services. This creates increased demand for goods and services which means more jobs are created. The people in these jobs spend their money on goods and services which creates more jobs. This results in economic growth – i.e. the country gets a lot richer, tax revenues go up and we should have more money to spend on things such as the NHS.
Between 2001 and 2011, the overall contributions to the UK from immigrants from countries that recently joined the EU amounted to almost £5 billion, other recently arrived European immigrants contributed £15 billion, and recent non-European immigrants contributed £5 billion2.
If the economy is growing why haven’t your wages/pensions/benefits gone up? Why are you still struggling to pay off debts and the gas bill? Why is the NHS struggling.
The problem is that this wealth has mainly gone to those who are already wealthy. For example in 2013 when we were suffering under austerity the richest 100 people in the UK saw their wealth increase by £1,272 per second3.Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world4.
Unlike poorer people the rich spend a much smaller percentage on goods and services. Instead they invest in hedge funds, the stock market and property which leads to housing, stock bubbles and banking crises.
Divide And Rule
One of the ways that such inequality is maintained is that we are told that the problem is other people who are in the same position that we are – its ‘the blacks’, ‘the immigrants’, ‘the Jews’ . Who tells us this? Billionaire media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers5 and rich politicians such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson who described the £250,000 a year he gets from writing for the Daily Telegraph as ‘chicken feed’6.
Who Do You Have More In Common With?
When we are told that we ‘must look after our own’ it is important to ask who is our own? Should we continue to look after the billionaires or should we join together and fight for our share of the cake which we create.
1 Unemployment Benefit: Getting Things Into Perspective, Peter Lux, February 2017 (http://www.plux.co.uk/unemployment-benefit-getting-things-into-perspective/)
2 The Fiscal Effects Of Immigration To The Uk, Christian Dustmann and Tommaso Frattini, The Economic Journal, 2014 (http://www.cream-migration.org/files/FiscalEJ.pdf)
3 Wealth Tracker 2014, The Equality Trust, 2014 (https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/TET%20Wealth%20Report%202014.pdf)
4 An Economy for the 99%, Oxfam, January 2017 (http://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/oxfam/bitstream/10546/620170/1/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf)
5 Five reasons why there is not a free and independent press in the UK, Som Tribune, December 2016 (https://www.somtribune.com/five-reasons-not-free-independent-press-uk/)
6 Johnson condemned for describing £250,000 deal as ‘chicken feed’, Guardian, 14 July 2014 (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/14/boris-johnson-telegraph-chicken-feed)
Holocaust Memorial Day was established to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
We can easily adapt to situations we think we cannot change. So although we might be troubled by an image of a Syrian toddler washed up on a beach, we get used to it and assimilate the knowledge that migrants are drowning regularly as inevitable. The fact that some of them are fleeing from bombs paid for by our taxes feels like it has little to do with us, and the inequality that drives people to leave their own country to come here for a better life is not our problem.
We also have an immense capacity to empathise with other people and understand their difficulties. We get emotional on other peoples behalf and sympathise with their problems. We can even genuinely grieve for people we have never met.
It is easy for people in power to exploit this anger. Through control of the media. They frame the arguments and choose what to highlight as a problem. We are bombarded with the message that the difficulties finding jobs, lack of housing, and access to health care is the fault of the people who are not like us – as if it would be OK to be poor or homeless or unemployed if the people ‘taking’ the housing, jobs or doctors appointments were from our town or our county or country – would it feel better to know you couldn’t get a job because a person who is just like you took it rather than a person with a different accent or colour or religion?
Lowestoft has a long history of welcoming migrants. The tales of the Scots fishing girls who followed the herring are ingrained in our history. The way they dressed and the language they spoke was as alien to Lowestoft people as the Polish, Portuguese and eastern European languages we hear today. But the story that was told about the Scots fisher girls – that they brought life and colour and industry to the town is very different to the way that the rhetoric about immigrants is framed now.
The election of Donald Trump in the US and the growth of anti-migrant and Islamophobic scapegoating in Britain and elsewhere have left millions of people fearful of the growth of racism.
On the 20th of January 2017 Donald Trump will become the President of the USA. In his campaign he has gone after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and also mocked the disabled1. This tactic of divide and rule distracts us from tackling the real problems that face our society.
Lowestoft Stand Up To Racism 