Politics without ideology is another way of defining populism. Rather than winning the electorate over to your position through reasoned, supported argument, you immediately react to their prejudice and the popular opinion becomes policy.
In the case of immigration, not only does this approach give validity to people’s xenophobia and racism - as we have seen with the Brexit campaign and the wave of racist violence that came in its wake - it also ultimately damages those people who have been exploited in this way. In Brexit, the very people that carried the vote will be the first to suffer from increasing prices, loss of jobs, the destruction of the welfare state, NHS and social care. Similarly, with controls on immigration, the net contribution that migrant workers and their families bring to our communities and the economy will be lost. In an aging population, there will not be enough people of a working age to fund pensions and social care, let alone service a spiraling national debt. [...]
The myth of ‘mass migration’ is based in these beliefs. The simple fact is that the UK is not subject to mass migration of any kind - most migrants and refugees are not coming here. The number of migrants per head of population puts the UK somewhere around 40th in the world ranking. Despite one of the strictest and most expensive points-based visa systems in the world, 60% of immigrants still come from outside the EU. This is a part of our true post-imperial legacy, as the majority of these people are from commonwealth countries, joining well-established communities and family in the UK. Yet this mass migration myth was directly exploited by the Brexit campaign and never debunked effectively by the Remainers.
No comments:
Post a Comment