2013-03-22 UK: David Goodhart: Vasemmiston eeppinen maahanmuuttovirhe

[Miniluv]

SATURDAY ESSAY: Why we on the Left made an epic mistake on immigration


Among Left-leaning 'Hampstead' liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a 'discrimination assumption' when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration.
Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice.
And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.


But for some years, this has troubled me and, gradually, I have changed my mind.
Over 18 months of touring the country to talk to people about their lives for a new book, I have discovered minority Britons thriving more than many liberals suppose possible. But I also saw the mess of division and conflict we have got ourselves into in other places.
I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly.
For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong.
I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was.


In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs.
But it has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives — notably in the northern 'mill towns' and other declining industrial regions, which in the Sixties and Seventies attracted one of the most clannish minorities of modern times, rural Kashmiri Pakistanis.
In Leicester and Bradford, almost half of the ethnic population live in what are technically ghettos (defined as areas where minorities form more than two-thirds of the population). Meanwhile, parts of white working-class Britain have been left feeling neither valued nor useful, believing that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself.
Those in the race lobby have been slow to recognise that strong collective identities are legitimate for majorities as well as minorities, for white as well as for black people.
For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must 'belong' to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297776/SATURDAY-ESSAY-Why-Left-epic-mistake-immigration.html#ixzz2OXOMHlVL
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Jotta demokraattinen valtio ylipäätään tarkoittaisi mitään, sen on "kuuluttava" kansalaisilleen. Heillä on oltava erityiset oikeudet ei-kansalaisiin verrattuna. Maahanmuuttoa on hallittava heidän etujaan katsoen. Näin ei ole tapahtunut.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297776/SATURDAY-ESSAY-Why-Left-epic-mistake-immigration.html

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite's views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: 'When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.' I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

Vika on johtajistossa, joka yrittää maksimoida globaalia, ei kansallista hyvinvointia.

[Ernst]

Aika napakasti sanottu noin vasemmistolaiselta. Kuuluu nationalistisia kaikuja, edellinen siis hyvällä sanottuna.

Kuuluu myös muunneltu Pete Seegerin ääni:

this land is my land,
this ain't your land

[törö]

Vika on johtajistossa, joka yrittää maksimoida globaalia, ei kansallista hyvinvointia.

Kannatustaan se yrittää maksimoida. Muulla ei ole niin väliä.

[juge]

Mahtava kirjoitus

"Separatist multiculturalism, in its extreme form, even turned a blind eye to practices that were the opposite of the liberalism that inspired it — forced marriage, female genital mutilation, the hounding of gays.

The root problem with separatist multiculturalism is that minority Britons are encouraged to identify first as a member of that minority and only second, if at all, as a citizen. And this has made it harder for ordinary Britons to think of some minorities, and especially Muslims, as part of the same community as them, with common experiences and interests.

The problem with mass immigration is that, without integration, it damages the internal solidarity of a country such as ours.

And if values and lifestyles become more diverse, it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of the welfare state.

Most of us are no longer asked to risk death for our country, but we are asked to pay around one third of our income into a common national pool and, in return, the state manages large bits of infrastructure for us — such as defence, transport, energy, public services, welfare and so on.

For this to work, the modern citizen is expected to conform to a thicket of rules and regulations. And in order to sustain this level of sharing and co-operation, we need at least some sense of 'emotional citizenship', the belief that, despite many different interests, we're also part of the same team.

I fear that large-scale, poorly managed immigration is endangering this social contract.

Britain is a welfare democracy. Existing citizens have rights of national ownership. Extending the idea of equal citizenship to millions of outsiders raises the problem of how to reconcile the special rights of existing citizens with those of new ones.

It is a problem we ignore at our peril.

[Whomanoid]

Hyvä katumusharjoitus, mutta on absurdia ja epärehellistä väittää, että asioiden nykytila briteissä olisi vain "tapahtunut" tosiasia ja että kukaan ei olisi sitä halunnut. Poliittiset päättäjät ovat  vastuussa tekemistään päätöksistä.

[ämpee]

Briteissä näytetään havahtuneen laajemmallakin rintamalla:

"Britannian pääministeri David Cameron haluaisi maahanmuuttajien ansaitsevan rahansa, ei vain saavan tukia, kertoo uutistoimisto Reuters."

Ei tietenkään koske Suomea, meillä ei tehdä niitä virheitä...

[Ink Visitor]

Kannatustaan se yrittää maksimoida. Muulla ei ole niin väliä.

Tätähän tuo on. Tilanne Briteissä on päässyt niin pahaksi, että sitä ei korjata millään pienillä korjausliikkeillä.
Kansa on melkoisen kypsynyt tilanteeseen ja poliitikot yrittävät nyt keräillä suosiota näennäisnuivilla puheilla...