Migrants and moral denunciation

I’ve just received this chart from Chris Hart, who tells me it comes from the Institute for Public Policy Research. At a time when there’s so much public panic about being swamped by immigrants, it’s as well to be reminded that it works both ways: British people can, and lots do, make use of the provisions to live and work in other countries. Luckily for them, most of the other countries are not as hostile to foreigners as the British are.

The focus on immigrants plays a big part in the polarisation of British political discourse today. For the right, the big issues are the economy, the European Union and immigration. For the left, poverty and the quality of public services. (The most important issue of all, environmental destruction, is being squeezed out.) Increasingly left and right are talking about different things. The mass media are the main sources of information, which tragically means elections will usually be won by whoever can control them.

Some areas of the country have seen massive changes because of large numbers of immigrants, but most haven’t; so why is immigration such a hot potato? Part of the reason is that some political parties, including the Government, see it as in their interest to talk it up, but it wouldn’t work if it didn’t touch a nerve with lots of people.

To me, it works on the level of scapegoating, by moral denunciation. While statistics fly all over the place, most people’s attitudes are informed by their basic attitudes, their worldviews. These worldviews may be little more than gut instinct, or they may be well worked out philosophies. Once we have a worldview, we can pay attention to the statistics that reinforce it and ignore the rest – or explain it away.

One gut instinct, relevant to immigration, is ‘My life is a struggle and the last thing I need is somebody new turning up and making it even more of a struggle: so don’t come here. Go away.’ Everybody has probably had this feeling at some time or other. Opposition to immigration can then be invested with the force of moral denunciation.

Moral judgements are at their most constructive when we use them to decide what we ourselves should do – ‘we’ being either individuals or decision-making groups. To use moral judgements to condemn other people for what they have done is usually destructive. Its purpose is often just the psychological one of making us feel superior. Sometimes, though, it is a necessary part of working out what should be done.

So telling Romanians and Bulgarians not to enter the UK to seek employment could be part of a constructive discourse about where people should live and work. The trouble is, there is precious little sign that it is this constructive. Often, the people who complain loudest about foreigners coming here to find work are the very ones who tell the British unemployed that they should travel more widely to find jobs.

Another problem with moral denunciations is that it is all to easy to ignore circumstances. Take abortion as a parallel. Opposition to abortion gets its emotional force from a sense of shock that any pregnant woman might want to kill her child. How could anybody choose to do such a thing to their own child? The answer is that some people are living in such dreadful conditions that having the baby would be even worse than terminating the pregnancy. What makes the conditions so dreadful differs from case to case, but the desire for abortions shows that there are such conditions. Most people, however, are living in better conditions; and, of the lucky majority, some don’t have the imagination to appreciate what it must be like to be one of the unlucky ones.

Similarly with immigration. Most British people have never been in a situation where it is worth their while to abandon their family and homeland to travel hundreds of miles in search of employment. Out of that majority, some don’t have the imagination to empathise with those who are stuck in that very situation.

In the case of immigration there’s another element. Opponents of immigration, unlike opponents of abortion, may take the line ‘I really don’t care what happens to you – I don’t care if going back to your homeland means you will be killed, or starve to death – just don’t come here’.

Or, as Cain said of Abel, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That, to my mind, is really immoral. Everybody needs somewhere to live and some way of making ends meet.

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