I could post almost half a dozen links illustrating how this issue is hardly limited to Quebec or Francophones, in places like the U.S., Ireland and the UK, but this one is pretty straightforward:$1:
Immigration wavelet catches Britain with its prejudices showing
By Araminta Wordsworth
Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: The way British politicians tell it, their country is being overwhelmed by shiftless Romanians and Bulgarians who are joining the shiftless Poles already there.
This scary rhetoric isn’t just coming from far-rightists like Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party. It’s also in the mouths of people who should know better — Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.
The reason for their alarm? From January 1, the 29 million residents of Bulgaria and Romania have been able to move to fellow European Union member Britain.
But despite the dire predictions, only about a dozen Romanians immigrated in the first two weeks; charter airlines and bus companies also report they are carrying fewer passengers to Britain.
In addition, the government’s economic advisors say immigrants contribute more than they get in benefits. Last week, Robert Chote, chairman of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, told MPs,
"Because they’re more likely to be working age, they’re more likely to be paying taxes and less likely to have relatively large sums of money spent on them for education, for long-term care, for healthcare, for pension expenditure."
Which is not to say Britons don’t have a problem. Many feel their Britishness is being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of new arrivals. These hit a peak of 250,000 a year in 2010, government figures show, before falling to 180,000 in 2013. Cameron says he wants to reduce arrivals to below 100,000 a year.
Typical of the xenophobes is Leo McKinistry, a columnist in the Daily Express, who claims immigrants have been running at more than 500,000 a year — a number unsupported by statistics.
"In several of our urban conurbations, such as Leicester, Slough and Luton, white British people are significantly in a minority. It is no wonder that many ordinary Britons now feel like aliens in their own land.
What is so sickening is that we never voted for this upheaval. Mass immigration and the creation of a multi-cultural society have all been imposed without a shred of democratic consent. Opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of the public want tighter border controls."
In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, A.M. Bakalar, a Pole living in London, says he understands Cameron’s dilemma though he thinks the PM’s reaction misguided.
"With the British economy still striving for recovery, the complex issue of immigration for such a small island will inevitably worry many. If I were the prime minister, I would be concerned, too. It’s no secret that Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party faces a tough fight before the 2015 general election. The surge of support for the right-wing populist U.K. Independence Party is surely on Mr. Cameron’s mind. What better way to win back lost voters than to demonize immigrants — even if that means conveniently putting aside the facts …
British politicians channeling Enoch Powell in appeals to xenophobesOf course, every country has its right to control its borders and the flow of immigration. But inciting fear about immigrants is a cheap, and scary, practice. Mr. Cameron should beware the damage it will do to Britain and its international standing."
"For Harry Leslie Smith in The Guardian it’s déjà vu all over again – back to the “rivers of blood” predictions of Enoch Powell and before that the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Oswald Mosley."
Rightwing politicians along with their compliant corporate media chorus have pummelled negative perceptions into the minds of working- and middle-class Britain about legitimate migrants from Bulgaria and Romania, rather than discuss the true benefits or costs of belonging to the EU.
In the end, these machinations are all about the politics of fear, which is used to hoodwink the voting population into thinking that all their societal and economic problems stem from an alleged open border and a mythical generosity of benefits for the feckless. It is understandable that in times of economic turmoil many of us revert to a factory default setting that causes us to fear that immigrants who are hungry to make a new start in life might cause us unwarranted financial burdens.
And for the record, a surprising number of Canadians outside Quebec support that province's proposed Charter of Values.
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