![\"Schroedingers_immigrant\"](\"http:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Schroedingers_immigrant-198x300.jpg\")
It sounds very familiar: in the UK the proponents of Brexit are pushing an anti-immigration case to \u201ctake back control of our borders\u201d while Liberal Democrats are tending to point out the value of immigrants. In narrowly-financial terms, the awkward reality is that immigrants to the UK contribute substantially more in taxes than they take out of the system in benefits. Even the argument to restrict benefits to new arrivals is questionable: if someone comes to the UK, claims benefits while they settle, starts earning and starts paying tax and more-than pays back what they received, then the \u201cbenefit\u201d payments look like a prudent investment. The idea\u2019s been pithily summed up in the idea of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s immigrant: simultaneously stealing our jobs and too lazy to work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anxieties over immigration are widespread in the EU. Proponents of Brexit who behave as if only Britain has this problem and needs to \u201cdefend itself\u201d are well out of touch with European reality.<\/p>\n
This is the crucial point. Many of our big problems are shared with our European neighbours. The days when nation states could solve major issues in isolation are gone. That is a part of globalisation \u2014 it goes with the ease of international travel, the rise of global trade and the internet. It is essential to be working closely with other nations, and doing that as part of a democratically-regulate European single market is essential.<\/p>\n
Part of the single market is a single labour market, so that people can travel to work as well as sell the fruits of their work across the EU. Scare stories about EU migrants taking British jobs need to be heard in the same breath as NHS hospitals solving staff shortages by recruiting outside the UK.<\/p>\n
With a nasty civil war in Syria we do face the problem of lots of people needing to leave their country. Jordan and Turkey are bearing the brunt of that humanitarian crisis. \u201cFortress Europe\u201d could pull up the drawbridge. That is hardly civilised behaviour. It is also not in our long-term interest: the crisis won\u2019t go on for ever, and treating people well when they need our help will pay dividends in the future.<\/p>\n
One of the Europe-wide problems we face is the rise of the far right. Seeking to leave the EU is a British response to a pan-European problem in the rise of the far right.<\/p>\n
One of the chilling experiences of the 2015 general election was canvassing in an almost-exclusively white, medium-income area and having people express discomfort at austerity in terms of fears of immigrants, which meant they were wanting to vote Conservative to cut down on migration \u2014 and therefore vote for the Conservatives who were (and are) pushing for needlessly-deep cuts. A scary example of an irrational \u201cfear of migrants\u201d leading people to vote for the austerity that was hurting them.<\/p>\n
The film Look who\u2019s back<\/em> has the ruse of imaging Hitler turning up today. When it was revised as a radio play for broadcast in the UK it was chilling because it was credible \u2014 both for explaining what happened around Hitler\u2019s rise in Germany, and how that could happen in the UK today, with a less-than-sane Hitler mobilising people\u2019s primitive fears to act against their own best interests. It is all too convenient to act as if Nazism was a uniqely German problem: Mosley\u2019s black-shirts, anti-semitism in the 1930s and the fact that we British pioneered concentration camps in the Boer war are reminders that we too have a capacity to head in that direction. Mark Mazower’s book Dark Continent<\/em> traces this as a Europe-wide danger. One of the reasons for forming the EU in the first place was to protect us all against lurches in that direction.<\/p>\n It\u2019s really important that a panic reaction to the reality of people needing to leave Syria, and an emotional reaction to fears of migrants, don\u2019t lead Britain to fall out of the EU and discover the hard way that the fears of migration are mis-placed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Concern over migration is shaping up to be a EU-wide issue \u2014 it is frustrating that it is an issue in the referendum debate as if this is not something we share with our EU partners. Last weekend\u2019s elections in Germany have sent shockwaves because of the progress of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland … Continue reading “The EU-wide migrant problem”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_wpscppro_dont_share_socialmedia":false,"_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"","_twitter_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type":"","_pinterest_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"","_medium_share_type":"","_threads_share_type":"","_google_business_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[],"_wpsp_enable_custom_social_template":false,"_wpsp_social_scheduling":{"enabled":false,"datetime":null,"platforms":[],"status":"template_only","dateOption":"today","timeOption":"now","customDays":"","customHours":"","customDate":"","customTime":"","schedulingType":"absolute"},"_wpsp_active_default_template":true},"categories":[89,2],"tags":[6,19,17,18],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-migrants","category-politics","tag-eu","tag-facism","tag-migrants","tag-referendum"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}