The motives
The home secretary, Priti Patel, has said she will ask the BBC and other media to reflect on their language after the term “migrant” was used to describe people who drowned in the Channel.
It’s considered dehumanizing.
The home secretary has most recently adopted the term “economic migrants”, a label favoured by the likes of the hard-right campaigner Nigel Farage but seen by charities as an attempt to undermine the motives of those who risk their lives to cross from France.
In other words as saying they’re not fleeing persecution but seeking better conditions.
But that raises the question of why the second is frowned on. Better conditions are better, so yes people are going to try to get to them. Why wouldn’t they?
[Patel] has claimed that 70% of people who come to the UK via small boats are “single men who are effectively economic migrants” and “not genuine asylum seekers”.
The trumpies say that kind of thing too, but…yes, and? “Economic” here stands for better pay and a better life. People move to a different town or county or region for that, so some are going to try to move to a different country. There are borders and rules and barriers, but that doesn’t make the desire for better pay and a better life contemptible.
In 2015 David Cameron as prime minister was heavily criticised for speaking of a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”. He later defended his use of the term “swarm” and said he was determined to keep out people living in the Calais camps as they attempted to reach Britain, likening some of them to burglars. “They are economic migrants and they want to enter Britain illegally and the British people and I want to make sure our borders are secure and you can’t break into Britain without permission,” he said.
David Cameron has had a pretty comfortable life, I believe.
Reading through history, I am trying to figure out when borders became so sancrosanct. The history of humans is migratory, and it’s dizzying to watch all the border changes in Europe since the Roman era. It is the late 19th century, when the US started writing restrictions into law that countries began to worry who was entering the country (other than invading Legions, of course.) The late 18th century with the French Revolution?
One of the things that leads me to be branded a commie liberal is that I like the idea of the fairly open border, like the one I could jump across into Canada on the farm where my grandmother grew up. I am told that I want “open boarders,” which is not true. Open borders is closer to it.
And I certainly don’t see the value in making entry so difficult that people end up dying to live a better life, whether fleeing political danger and death, fleeing criminal gangs, or seeking a better life.
I think it mattered less (if at all) when populations were much smaller? A lot of countries actively wanted more people, including immigrants. The US was one, although of course many of the immigrants had to endure plenty of xenophobic hostility all the same.
A minor theme throughout Orwell’s writing is the terrible low rate of childbearing in the UK (or Britain or whatever he called it).
When you’re part of a dominant culture, as I am, and I suspect most of us here, it’s always more comfortable to keep things much as they are. Sure let in some ‘ethnics’. It gives us great choice in restaurants after all, but at the same time we don’t want to deal with different language, religions, restrictions on marriage or schooling. Sometimes for good reason perhaps, sometimes not.
But western centrist governments have all wanted to promote some flavour of globalism, particularly with respect to free or low barrier trade. Ask most economists and they’ll tell you there is no truely free trade without free migration. Labour is a resource, and for a free market to flourish, that resource has to be able to follow demand. Most developed countries don’t want that of course. Partly through outright racism, partly because we’ve got it very comfortable thank you. Competing against migrants hungry for a better life and willing to work for it isn’t appealing. We also don’t like to be reminded that part of the reason so many people want to come to the west is because we’ve spent most of the last few hundred years fucking over their countries to enrich ours. Roost, meet chicken.
And this theme is still prominent. I hear it all the time. We have too many people in the world, and still we moan that people aren’t bearing enough children.
Orwell would be less likely to say it now though.
[…] a comment by Rob on The […]
Yeah, Orwell probably would. I wish our current writers/pundits/politicians could figure it out. I was having a conversation with one of our former Nebraska legislators, and he pushed increasing population because our economy needed it for taxes. Here is my take from that:
1. Where do we put these new people? On currently existing farmland, making us less able to feed people, not to mention agriculture is our number one industry in Nebraska.
2. Is money a bigger consideration than protecting health and wellbeing, including that of the environment that provides the resources we depend on?
3. If we insisted that corporations pay their proper share of the taxes (and start taxing churches, but that never goes over), we might not need more people to pay taxes. When you tax the middle class and poor at higher rates than the rich, of course you need more people.
I snorted reading that bit about “single men”. Yeah, they’re single because they are trying to establish themselves to have a family, maybe, some day, and if it were families instead of “single men” then Patel would probably be complaining about “entire families of migrants swarming across the border” or something similar.
As an aside, the hardest-working people I know here in my own city are “economic migrants” who’ve established themselves in some fashion such as starting a business, and they’re often the first to proclaim the virtues of a nation that has given them the freedom to do so in relative safety.
Here is an interesting (very short) video from an excellent channel exploring medieval and ancient European borders, touching upon the introduction of passports and more modern border controls.
We should avoid romanticising the past, kind of as a general rule, and also in this instance. Our modern notions of borders and border controls might be a relatively-recent innovation, but previous ages were not bastions of free-moving peoples; several medieval European states made a habit of expelling all of their Jews and various other minorities, for example, even though border controls did not formally exist in a way we would recognise.
And the vast majority of our migratory history was not at all peaceful — in the relatively recent antiquity of the Migration Period, for example, the Germanic tribes seeking a better life in the Roman Empire were a major source of armed conflict, with uncountable crimes against humanity they suffered and inflicted in the lands into which they migrated. Migrations over previous millennia were no less violent, even genocidal, at least since the advent of settled societies. The truth is, as with many things, nearly every aspect of migration and exchange between cultures is more peaceful and more possible today than they have ever been.
More broadly, this topic strikes at the very heart of what it means to have a country, especially to have a nation-state, in the first place. And perhaps the nation-state is an idea that has outlived its usefulness and deserves to be consigned to the history books, as we have consigned the various forms of empire.
But the truth is that the nation-state, especially a social democracy that provides a welfare state to its citizens, simply cannot survive in its modern form without a relatively strict regime of border regulation that limits the number of permanent residents which come into it in order to settle. There are literally billions of people whose relative states of depravation would justify them attempting to resettle in Europe or North America, on the argument that, on a case-by-case basis, they were seeking a better life. If you cannot wrap your mind around the obvious economic, social, and cultural problems which would immediately obtain upon a serious attempt at resettling those deprived billions en masse, I really do not know how seriously you have thought about the issue.
If you can see the economic, social, and cultural problems which would obtain with a policy of literally-open borders, then, as Mister Churchill is supposed to have said, we are no longer speaking of what you are; we are merely dickering over the price. In this context, the price in question is how many and what sort of migrants you allow into your country at any particular time, and how many migrants you allow to die in the attempt to get there. Because unless you want to admit literally everyone, there will always be people who will die trying to get across your borders, unless your country is not (or is no longer) a better place to live than literally the worst country in the world.
None other than that well-known blood-and-soil Nazi, Bernie Sanders, describes the policy of completely open borders as “a Koch Brothers plot” designed to gut the bargaining power of the working class in the United States. And whether or not he is correct in his particulars with respect to any given border (there is an interesting argument that US-Mexico seasonal migration was a common practice before the hardening of the border made the seasonal migrants “illegals” and thus subject to heightened exploitation), there is a grave danger in left-wing discourse adopting literally-open borders as a serious policy position, and in labelling any hesitancy in its adoption as something akin to fascism.
Namely, if you live in a democracy and you call your neighbours Nazis for not wanting literally-open borders, they will vote for people who don’t call them Nazis for not wanting literally-open borders. In this scenario, it is perhaps paradoxically more likely that more Nazi-adjacent politicians are elected if formerly-reasonable positions get externally Nazified. One could argue that at least part of Trump’s appeal among the so-called “deplorables” was this effect in action; among many, many other things, Trump’s crass nativism seems to have actually increased his turnout in the ever-nebulous “Hispanic community” we have recently discussed (many of whom trace their roots in Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and California back to before the United States conquered those territories from Mexico), firstly over his predecessors in 2016 and over himself in 2020 (and in particular the communities in the border areas).
In other words, ceding terms such as “economic migrant” to the likes of Nigel Farage, or people even worse than him, is perhaps a good way of getting more people like Nigel Farage — or people even worse than him — elected.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that Western social democracies cannot survive without migration, at least as long as their welfare states are based upon a scheme of unlimited population growth. And, other things being equal, the idea of a frictionless border for temporary visits or even for some kind of limited resettlement is not only morally right but also probably necessary for the furthering of average human well-being. And we must indeed re-think the perpetual-population-growth model for modern states; even in the best of all possible scenarios, where the deprivations that drive migration out of desperation are lessened to such a degree the world over that the risk of death via migration is an unthinkable one because every country has an essentially-Western standard of living, the corresponding fall in population growth would cause the welfare state to collapse under its own weight.
But, in any case, the root cause of migrants’ desperation will not be solved by playing word games with the term “migrant”; this is another topic completely, and yet another symptom of the didactic meltdown currently in progress in every other aspect of elite institutional life, where young activists believe policing the language of their peers is a worthy exercise, perhaps even a worthier one than lifting a finger to help alleviate material deprivation.
It’s not romanticising the past to point out that there was a time when some countries wanted lots of immigrants, it’s just a fact claim.
Yes, there was a time when some countries wanted lots of immigrants; that time was today. 14% of the UK’s population wasn’t born in the UK; that number is nearly 16% for Germany, just over 15% for the USA, over 20% for Canada, and 30% for Australia. Western Europe has very few countries below 10% foreign-born residents, most of whom are from poorer Eastern European countries or are refugees from America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
In relative and in absolute numbers, there have never been as many non-Westerners peacefully settled in Western countries as there are today, and there will be more tomorrow, and even more the next day. Yes, people are literally dying to get here; Belarus is flying migrants in specifically to send to the EU as an act of undeclared war, using human beings as weapons in asymmetric warfare as a proxy of Vladimir Putin in order to try and destabilise the EU.
It is a tragedy when migrants die on the search for a more peaceful and richer life in the West, and it should happen less often. Migrants should also not be cynically co-opted into weapons by nihilistic thugs who run gangster states.
Parsing whether or not to refer to them as migrants, or believing that there was some mythic time in the recent past where the United States or any other Western country was open to all comers, does nothing to improve the material conditions of migrants today.
I didn’t say I was doing anything to improve the material conditions of migrants today. Of course I don’t think saying things here is going to improve the material conditions of migrants today, nor did I say there was some mythic time in the recent past where the United States or any other Western country was open to all comers. I simply said that there was a time when some countries wanted lots of immigrants.
Ophelia, I understand this is your comment section and you get to react to commenters however you wish, but I must admit I am baffled by your responses to me in this thread. To be clear, I am not playing a game; I am simply trying to participate in a conversation and offer a different perspective.
Firstly, though I did not refer to him by name, it should be clear that the majority of my first comment was inspired by that of Michael Haubrich (whose was the only comment that existed in my browser while I was composing mine) and only tangentially related to your exchange with him (which I therefore did not even see as I was writing my initial comment); since your original post does not mention anything about the history of immigration, it is impossible that I was referring to those not-yet-extant remarks in my first comment. I initially considered naming him but decided against it as my own thoughts evolved enough that I judged them an independent commentary on the topic at hand.
Secondly, and I must tread somewhat lightly here, saying “I didn’t romanticise the past, I just made a fact claim that there was a time when some countries wanted lots of immigrants” implies that there was some point in the past where these unnamed countries were more welcoming to immigrants than those countries are today. You can deny that implication, of course, and say that you were making a bald claim of fact with no bearing upon the very topic of this thread, but you and I both know that you would condemn such a rhetorical trick if it were employed by someone you were having a loose discussion with.
Thirdly, the article itself — especially the portions you quoted — heavily implies that playing word games over how we refer to migrants has a political valence which can be counted in human lives lost or saved. Whether or not you said anything on this implication, it is not unreasonable to expect someone else reading the article or your excerpts of it to comment upon that implication. Responding to such a comment with “I didn’t say that” is an irrelevancy; whether or not you said it, it forms the very foundation upon which the discussion is taking place. And if I were inclined to play the same rhetorical trick you have done twice now, I could point out that I didn’t say you said you were doing anything to improve the material conditions of migrants today, and you could come back with how you never said I said that, and we could get stuck in an ever-more-tedious back-and-forth. I would like to avoid that without you blocking me, if possible.
Like I said, I understand that this is your rodeo. I happen to like this particular rodeo of yours; it helps me to clarify my thinking on topics I find important, and I find writing among people a bit more engaging than writing in solitude. But I have noticed that you have a tendency to take quite personally at least some comments which do not affirm the point you are trying to make, even if those comments are not personally directed at you either by name or by implication. Couple this with my tendency to beat a topic into the ground without being able to anticipate all of the ways you may take my remarks personally, and we have a recipe for just the sort of exchange we have had here. Indeed, it is not the first time such a thing has happened.
So I stipulate that you never said anything that implies migrating in the past was somehow safer or easier or more common than it is today, and I further stipulate that you made no claim whatsoever about improving the material conditions of migrants one way or another. My comments do not require you to have done so. And if my comments are not welcome here, at least when they do not support the thesis of the day, I will simply refrain from commenting whenever I sense you might take my comments personally in the way you have done here.
It wasn’t a rhetorical trick. It wasn’t step one of an argument, it didn’t contain an invisible therefore, it was just a factual observation.
As far as that goes, then, I believe it is wrong, at least not without many unstated caveats. We can take that disagreement as read.
Why? Britain actively encouraged immigration from Commonwealth countries after WW2 to cite one example. What is there to disagree with?
The focus on “single men” is a dogwhistle. What she really wants to say is “potential terrorists”
I’m not sure we have a handle on what is being disputed here. I shall do my best to briefly recapitulate. At first, Michael raised a question of when borders became so firmly-defended; as a starting point for a longer comment, I linked to a short video exploring the concept of borders in the medieval and ancient Roman periods, and I then went on to add my own commentary about not romanticising this aspect of the past (as one portion of a longer exploration of the issue of migration). In the meantime, you and a few others had made some comments that I hadn’t seen. You then responded to my comment with, and I quote,
Now, again, I could play your trick here and say “I never said it was romanticising the past to point out that there was a time when some countries wanted lots of immigrants”, which I did not (again, I had not even seen your follow-up to Michael when I wrote that), and have that be the end of the discussion. And if that’s where you want to leave it, that’s fair enough.
But I am interested in actually having a discussion, so I will continue. And ah, hell, I see I’ve blown my wad of brevity.
In the context of the article and your intervening comment that speculated on Michael’s question about when borders became so important with “A lot of countries actively wanted more people, including immigrants. The US was one[…]” — which, one more time, I did not see until after I had posted the comment to which the above block quote was a reply. Once I read the block quote and this comment, however, I responded to it by disputing its implication, which exists regardless of whether you intended it or not.
The obvious implication of this statement is that the “time” when “some countries wanted lots of immigrants” is in the past, and is no longer. Saying such a thing makes no sense in a discussion over the situation of migration today, unless it is said in order to contrast with that situation. Even if you did not intend the implication, it is simply inescapable unless one reads your reply to me and literally nothing else in this thread. Insisting that this implication does not exist is asking the reader to ignore every instinct of the English language, or at least to read your own words narrowly and with no regard for context. I respect you too much to do that, though I suspect you may not think so, given how many words I have devoted to this already.
Anyway, yes, there is nothing to dispute over the banal observation that Western countries such as the US and the UK at some point in the past allowed large numbers of migrants to permanently settle within them. The inescapable implication that this is no longer the case because some migrants are willing to die in order to get to these countries is what I disagree with, because it is simply empirically false.
The time when the Western nations have been the most open to migration is right now, in spite of the hardness of the borders.
As for Britain specifically, this section and the one immediately following of the Wikipedia article shows the percentages of foreign-born UK residents as a percentage of population, firstly from 1951 to 2011 and then from 1851 to 2011. There are more charts and figures elsewhere in the article, covering other time periods and other facets of the question. They all show that, both in absolute and proportional terms, the number of foreign-born UK residents has gone up nearly every decade for a hundred a seventy years (with the notable exceptions being the decade between the outbreak of WW1 and the resolution of WW2). Analyses of other major Western nations would yield similar results.
Yes, Western nations once welcomed immigrants. They continue to do so, even more so today than at any time in the past. The golden age of peaceful human migration, within and into the Western world, is happening as we speak.
Again: I’m not “playing” any “tricks.”
Fair enough. And I can see why you would think my refrain to not romanticise the past could have been a response to your comment immediately following Michael’s; it wasn’t, as I have said multiple times now. I suppose I should have understood that misapprehension and dispensed with it in the beginning in my second comment (and first direct reply to you), but instead I took it as another point of departure to continue a discussion.
Anyway, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have any kind of productive discussion beyond that misapprehension, so let’s move on.