Feb 3 2014

Farage is right – it’s not just the economy, stupid!

By Michael Skey 

And so it goes on. The seemingly endless debate about immigration continues apace fuelled by data from the latest BSA survey which shows that over three-quarters of the British population now want immigration cut, with around a half wanting it cut by ‘a lot’. Time for news editors to wheel out, on the one hand, the arguments about the contribution that migrants make in terms of the taxes they pay, the jobs they create and the crap yet necessary work they undertake that nobody else will do, and on the other, the jobs, benefits and housing they take. See, it’s still all about the economy, stupid; only in this case it isn’t.

Whatever else one may think of Nigel Farage, leader of UK Independence Party, the point he made recently concerning the ‘social’ impact of immigration needs to be addressed. And by addressed, I don’t mean that his often ludicrous views are unconditionally supported but this broader point is raised, considered and debated in a clear and thoughtful manner. For while the debate around immigration continues to be dominated by economic considerations, which do of course matter, much of the research (Mann & Fenton, 2009, Skey, 2010, Garner, 2010, Mann, 2011, Leddy-Owen, 2012, Kenny, 2012) on people’s attitudes towards immigration shows that they are primarily concerned about social issues and, in particular, how everyday environments are changing in ways that they find problematic.

For instance, many people I spoke to were generally quite willing to acknowledge the contribution that migrants made to the economy, with the exception of those who worked in industries where they were in direct competition with more recent arrivals, the building trade being the most obvious example. They also raised concerns about public services, taking part in lively debates about whether Britain was a ‘soft touch’ and who should be entitled to jobs, housing and so on. By far and away the biggest issues for them, however, was the changing face of British society and how they no longer felt ‘at home’ in what they considered to be ‘their’ country.

The problem with addressing these debates openly and seriously is two-fold. First, it’s much harder to quantify these issues when compared with jobs or housing or benefits, which can be defined, however imperfectly, in numerical or monetary terms. Secondly, they revolve around questions of belonging, which have been and continue to be often defined in terms of race.

There is no doubt that hierarchies of belonging (which people are seen to belong more than others) in Britain are still partly predicated on racial differences. Members of the white ethnic majority continue to position themselves as the group that belongs without question and, therefore, claim to be the ‘natural’ arbiters of national territory and culture. Likewise, ethnic minorities continue to suffer from high levels of exclusion and opprobrium when dealing with or being confronted by established British institutions; the education system, media, police, parliament, courts and so on.

However, as the BBC political editor Nick Robinson argued only this week, the terms of the debate around immigration are changing because it can no longer be defined as a simple issue of black and white due to the recent influx of migrants from Eastern Europe. That is, the distinction between non-whites as the interlopers, whites as the hosts is beginning to unravel. Furthermore, attitudes among both ethnic majority and minority Briton’s are also shifting. In the former case, younger generations, in particular, are much more tolerant of ethnic diversity and more willing to recognise non-whites as British. In the latter case, there is growing anecdotal evidence that second and third generation ethnic minorities are increasingly willing to assert their own sense of belonging and entitlement in relation to more recent arrivals. In other words, they increasingly view Britain as ‘their’ country and as a result lay claim to the benefits (economic and social) that flow from this.

Acknowledging these hierarchies of belonging and the way they shift over time is vital. However, what also needs to be taken into account when addressing these wider debates is the fact that they point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to people’s sense of self, community and place in an era where the nation has been dismissed as an anachronism by many (see Jamie Mackay’s OurKingdom series for an interesting counterview). After all, immigration can only be defined as a problem if you place some sort of value on a world defined in terms of identifiable territories. Without (national) borders, migration isn’t an issue. This might seem rather obvious but it then begs the question, why are so many people getting so worked up about the breaching of these borders? For those living in the more democratic and more prosperous parts of this world, this is partly about maintaining access to benefits that the majority of humanity does not enjoy. But, just as importantly, it’s also about ensuring that the place that offers a key sense of belonging, in an increasingly complex and sometimes threatening world, remains familiar, secure, comfortable and homely.

In relation to this second issue it’s worth noting that when people discuss these issues, they often use everyday examples culled from local settings – hearing foreign voices in the supermarket, signs in languages other than English, shops largely catering to migrant groups, unfamiliar dress and religious observance. These instances are rarely defined, however, as a challenge to the neighbourhood, the village, the city or the region. Instead, they are seen to be, and often passionately discussed, as a threat to the nation. Therefore it is the nation that is understood as the salient reference point when making sense of these issues.

This isn’t to argue that nations are the panacea to all humanity’s ills. Furthermore, there are numerous other ways in which people define who they are and build connections – and identify – with others. The key challenge for those who would like to see a move beyond national forms of allegiance and organisation is that the most obvious alternatives tend to appeal to relatively small numbers. Take Europe for example. Those who want to see the development of an integrated European entity can point to the fact that Europe is becoming an increasingly significant presence in people’s everyday lives, whether through the actions of political institutions, increased interactions between some of its population, shared cultural activities (food, sport, tourism) and that increasing numbers do define themselves as European. The problem though is that these people remain a pretty narrow sub-set of the population so that it remains for substantial numbers a top-down imposition that has little democratic legitimacy.

In short, then, the nation matters not only because it is used to define, and justify, who gets what in terms of material benefits, notably those provided by the state. It matters because it provides significant numbers with an important sense of who they are, where they belong and what they have in common with people around them. And, while, this may sound rather wishy-washy compared with jobs and houses and healthcare, this ‘need to belong’ is also fundamental to our wellbeing. Again, to reiterate, this view should not be seen as a form of advocacy for UKIP or any other group that argues for anti-immigration measures. But dismissing people’s concerns around immigration and the sometimes profound changes they are witnessing in their everyday lives doesn’t get us very far in building constructive polices or engaging them in the democratic process. This is a particular issue for those on the centre-left who have tended to use immigration as a big stick with which to beat people, rather than thinking more seriously about what these broader anxieties are telling us about the way people view the world and their place in it.

This article was originally published in the independent online magazine www.opendemocracy.net

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Dr. Michael Skey is a Lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of East Anglia. His monograph entitled ‘National Belonging and Everyday Life’ (published in 2011 by Palgrave) was joint winner of the 2012 BSA/Phillip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog, nor of the London School of Economics

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5 Responses to Farage is right – it’s not just the economy, stupid!

  1. Pingback: Pegida shouldn’t be dismissed that easily | Euro Crisis in the Press

  2. John thatcher says:

    On one side every race needs to learn to live together for many reasons this is a must for the future of man kind.
    However over population and the magnetic effect of the rich countries to poor people is having major problematic effects.
    My last point is the failure of undesirable people and cultures to enrich the country and become nothing more than a problem.This is found in many muslim populations where they leave backward poor quality corrupt countries only to reproduce what they have left in there new countries.
    Many migrants have enriched and even beaten the original Brits in there own countries but many have been nothing more than a waste of space .

  3. Pingback: Britain and Euroscepticism: Understanding the Fit | Euro Crisis in the Press

  4. Philip says:

    What most people simply dont understand is that the issue is mostly about numbers.
    I hear people saying that Farage just tries to scare people and that its good to have different cultures. This is the kind of liberal wishy washy nonsense thinking that got us in this mess. Its fine to have different people mixing, no problem with that, but when the trains,buses, doctors surgeries, hospitals and roads are already full, why on earth would anyone be so stupid as to think that unlimited immigration is good. Do these pro-EU people really want literally millions of new houses built everywhere, bigger traffic jams, bigger queues in the shops, everywhere ? What about the quality of life for the 70 million that aleady live in the UK ? Mass immigration affects everyone. Its the main reason I left the UK because I could see life quality getting worse and worse. Maybe I am fussy, but I dont want to wait 30 minutes just to find a car park space to go shopping, I dont want to stand on the train, and if I am ill, I dont want to wait 2 weeks to see a doctor. Why does noone really talk about basic life quality ? Isnt that also important ? Controlled immigration, what can possibly be wrong with that ? Thats not saying noone can come in, just that the number is managed. Anyone who really really wants unlimited people entering the UK obviously are not thinking very deeply about the effects. Also, people, rightly or wrongly feel uneasy about being outnumbered by other nationalities. Forget poltical correctness, lets consign that to the distbin where it belongs, lets talk staight. Its simply common sense not to flood UK cities with so many people that the infrastructure cannot cope. If you create this level of tension, dont be too suprised if things boil over. Why take the risk ?

  5. Bill Walker says:

    The problem with the argument about the “social impact” of immigration is that it’s usually used as a way to intellectualise the fact that some people simply don’t like foreigners living in their community.

    The economic argument is largely a lost cause for the likes of Farage, so he tends to speak about immigration as if there’s a tacit assumption that it’s a “bad thing” (e.g. discussing rising immigration figures as a problem, without any reason given for why that’s a problem) or he uses unquantifiable language that’s difficult to falsify (the “social impact”, the “concerns of ordinary people”, and whatever else). This makes it appear as though there’s some tangible practical reasoning behind it, when in reality we’re discussing something much more emotional and psychological.

    What seems to have been erased completely from the debate is the obvious fact that many people have an entirely irrational dislike of foreigners. It’s a quirk of human psychology which has been with us throughout all of recorded human history and which is present in every single country in the world, yet it seems to now be impermissible to mention it because you’ll immediately be written off with the stock “everyone who is anti-immigration is a racist” line.

    So let’s be clear, people are perfectly entitled to advocate reducing immigration – contrary to what we keep being told, you don’t get immediately carted off to a police cell for making that argument. However by the same token it’s ridiculous to assume that irrational, anti-foreigner sentiment doesn’t make up a sizeable chunk of the anti-immigration vote. Dressing that up in intellectual language as a concern for the “social impact” caused by immigration – as if Nick Griffin is out on the streets every night with a clipboard dispassionately assessing the make up of our communities – is just a way of avoiding the reality about where much of the anti-immigration vote comes from.

    There is a social impact to immigration, just as there are reasonable arguments for reducing it, but generalising those isolated points to the entirety of the anti-immigration vote is a nonsense in my view, and it’s about time we called a spade a spade.

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