Migration - Leading the Debate

Quite rightly, the Greens have a liberal policy on migration. You would expect nothing else and it fits with our ethics and our global outlook. We can point to a truly internationalist perspective on this issue, but here in Britain we continue to suffer because of media scaremongering.

I have to highlight this excellent piece from Liberal Conspiracy. Look at the coverage from the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph about “immigration”. It is no surprise that their readerships will be concerned about the issue.

Is Britain a culturally richer and better place today because of migration? Yes. There isn’t a debate on this. We need leadership to challenge the current framing of the media coverage of migration, and as usual it will be up to the Greens to show how it is done. We have an internationalist outlook for climate, for trade and for sport, so why does a section of our international media obsess with a narrow and nationalist view of migration?

You have international cuisine competing with the best of traditional British food. Our steak and ale pies are not under threat because of Mongolian barbeques or vegetable korma. Where do the BNP stand on bananas? I think we need to know. These yellow fruits have been coming to our land for hundreds of years.

This is a business reality, it is international trade, and how those bananas end up on our shelves is an international story. It is often a story of exploitation and misery, with producers unable to afford to send their children to school when international prices drop.

As a Green I’ll argue for Fair Trade ahead of unfettered free marketeering, which records its wealth only in terms of balance sheets, and ignores the human costs of the transactions. We do have to recognise the reality of international trade – people are going to continue to eat bananas. What we must advocate is a respect for all people involved in the supply chain, from producer to consumer, not a narrow nationalism that demands we have the lowest possible cost to British consumers, but screw the consequences for people elsewhere in the world.

We can’t implement global legislation to demand Fair Trade. What we can do is level the playing field a little, in giving European consumers the real story behind the goods they buy. Given the choice, more people will pay a little extra for goods that were not produced in sweat shop conditions. If you really start to think about it, if all that is on offer in the rest of the world is sweat shop working conditions, people will then be more likely to try to migrate to countries with better terms and conditions. The dots join up if you take the time to look at them.

I’ll bring sport as another example. In the English football leagues in the 1970s and 1980s, international players were unusual. A lot of the migrating talent was from Scotland, Wales and Ireland. A brief look at the dominant (and all White) Liverpool side of the early 1980s is revealing:

Clemence, Kennedy, Hansen (S), Lawrenson (I), Neal, Kennedy, Lee, Souness (S), McDermott, Dalgleish (S), Rush (W)

Within a decade, the Liverpool team includes Craig Johnson (Australia) and a Black player, John Barnes.

Fast forward thirty years, and you have a multi ethnic dominant Manchester United team at the end of the 2009 season, with the following internationals:

Van der Saar (Dutch), O’Shea (Ireland), Ferdinand (England), Vidic (Serbia), Park (Korea), Giggs (Wales), Carrick (England), Ronaldo (Portugal), Rooney (England), Berbatov (Bulgaria), Tevez (Argentina)

Does this mean that the English national team is under threat, or that England has somehow been lost? No. We fully accept international player transfers. The Bosman ruling has tipped the scales in favour of bigger and longer contracts for the top players. I’m as appalled as anyone by the huge disparity in wealth between the footballing elite and the working class supporters, but in terms of communicating an alternative to “immigration is bad” attitude that prevails, sport has a key role to play.

The key to understanding migration and challenging the attitudes on the doorstep is connecting with people in terms they understand. During the 2009 European Election campaign on a busy high street, one of our activists was surrounded by five young lads, all first time voters, who were going to vote BNP. I stepped in to talk with them.

The language used by these young men was racist. They said they were voting BNP because of all the “pakis” that walked round their town acting as if they owned it, and the fact that white English people couldn’t get jobs because of all the people coming into the country. I wasn’t going to get a vote out of this conversation, nor would I want to given the language they used, which I challenged each time.

It would have been wrong not to try to at least get some movement or small change to their thinking and let them walk away without something to give them pause for thought. My question to them was a simple one, “Is Amir Khan British?” Even these young men, despite their clearly racist attitudes, would not go as far as the BNP. They said, yes, Amir Khan is British, because he picks up the union flag and fights for Britain.

Their attitude to Asian British people living in their area is not unusual. Communities are often divided, with schools and geography reinforcing those divisions, not breaking them down. These men felt they had something in common with Amir Khan, someone they had never met, because of the way he conducts himself and reaches across racial barriers. But their racist attitudes and pro-BNP views come from what they perceive as injustice against their community.

If you visit Derry in Northern Ireland, you can see the logical conclusion of divided and segregated communities by walking around the city walls. Enclaves of unionist and nationalist communities still exist, divided by huge fences. We don’t want that to ever be repeated in Britain. We cannot allow the hatred and the bitterness that divided communities in Northern Ireland for generations to become a reality in England. The divisions in Northern Ireland are better described as sectarian, rather than racist, but the root causes are the same – a sense of injustice.

So at a root level, challenging and tackling racism means challenging and tackling this sense of injustice. It means that the facts are given about what it means to be Asian, Black or White in terms of your job prospects. It means Green councillors being willing to challenge assertions that one or other community is getting preferential treatment. At the same time we need sporting role models such as Amir Khan, Joleon Lescott or Rio Ferdinand to be there in the public debate to challenge the lies that the BNP peddle about who is or isn’t British.

At a national level, the debate must be moved on. Whenever we talk about “immigration” to Britain, we must do so in the context of global population movements. How many thousands are being forced off land in Bangladesh, how many ten of thousands are fleeing from extremists in Pakistan and how many hundreds of thousands are escaping from genocide in Darfur? We need a global picture of population movements, and we need global stability as a solution to what has so far been painted as an “immigration” problem.

Without a truly international perspective, addressing human rights, environmental degradation and extreme poverty, humans will continue to be pushed around the globe in ever increasing numbers. And without Green leadership on this debate, we are going to be forced to endure ever increasing knee jerk coverage.

Today’s Guardian reports that globally 42 million people had been forced to uproot and move last year. How many more are on the move because of poverty or to escape persecution? How much longer will our national media ignore the reality of the debate on migration and pretend this is an issue that can be stopped at the British border?