When I was growing up in London, my parents said they would always vote for the Labour political party because they were kinder to immigrants and that the opposing Conservative party had racist tendencies.
Britain was under Labour leadership for 12 long years until very recently and prime ministers Blair and Brown’s party certainly let in lots of immigrants. Perhaps too many, and that is leading to a great deal of tension within the UK, which is in the middle of a fierce recession.
In recessions, many people lose their jobs and those whose jobs remain have to work doubly hard and live in constant fear of unemployment. In these circumstances, people look around to see who has work. Because of economic motivations, immigrants in any country are willing to work harder and for less than natives. And so the natives quickly “blame” immigrants for “taking all the jobs,” no matter the fact that is how a capitalist free market should run.
This reminds me of a story in one of London’s famous black taxis from a few years ago. As I sat in the back seat, I listened to the radio, which reported on excess immigration. After a while, the taxi driver started talking to me:
“I don't know what this country is coming to. All these bloody immigrants, they are like leeches. They are parasites, I tell you. Come into my country, steal all our jobs, take all our benefits.”
I could feel my blood begin to boil – the audacity of this taxi driver to insult me like this whilst I was his customer. I was just about to launch into a bitter rage when he looked around at me and said:
“You know, it’s not like people like you and me. We are born here, we work hard, we contribute, but the bloody Eastern Europeans, I can’t stand them.”
I didn’t know quite what to say except it quickly dawned on me that this taxi driver included us brown-skinned folks as genuine British people!
When UK joined the European Union (EU), it did so agreeing to many regulations. Hidden in these included many loopholes for European freedom of movement and right to employment.
Put simply, the huge invasion of immigrants to the UK in the past decade has not been brown-skinned people from South Asia, but fair-skinned Caucasians from countries like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. It’s estimated that over 350,000 people from these countries are planning to arrive in the UK by the end of 2013, and have the legal right to do so.
UK citizens have experienced seismic shifts in the cultural identity of their towns and cities. Areas like Mile End in London were once heavily south Asian with many Indians and Bangladeshi immigrant residents. But if one goes there today, one will see the area has gone from having lots of brown faces to being full of eastern European Caucasian faces. It’s as through many parts of the UK are being turned Caucasian again!
However the bulge in new immigrants is massively affecting state-run services like schools, where class sizes are swelling to record highs, and hospitals, where waiting lists get longer and longer. So yes, it’s “the bloody immigrants” who are taking all the jobs and using up all the state services during this tough recession.
“Immigration” has become a top political issue, to the extent that right wing nationalist parties like UKIP are gaining increasing traction.
And so we come to this decision. Seen in the context of the above, the current government has come up with a cute policy stating it will dramatically reduce immigration by stopping illegal immigrants from entering the UK. But, as already established, the problem is not brown immigrants but Caucasian ones. This policy is at best a disingenuous method to try and avert the public’s eye from the real issue of out of control eastern European immigration.
The Conservative government hopes that this policy sounds like they have policies to curb illegal immigration, when in fact they have done nothing of the sort. Instead, they target India, a country with whom they also desperately need to develop closer economic ties, the country that provides all the doctors and engineers, and Bangladesh, the country who provides the UK with many of its clothing and cooks its favourite food. Frankly, the policy is a disgrace and deeply offensive. Indians and Bangladeshi immigrants, legal or otherwise, have contributed to British culture and its economy in profound ways.
Right now, it looks as if my parents were right about the conservative party. I hope all resident NRI's, NRB's and those British-born of desi origin campaign effectively to have this exposed for what it is.
