Just when Euro 2024 and the Olympics have demonstrated how much stronger our national sport teams are as a result of migration, anti-immigration riots have erupted across the UK.
If not sports, we could look at the NHS. How many doctors and nurses are migrants? The NHS would be in a much worse predicament without them.
Or else, we could look at politics. Many of our top politicians are migrants or descendants of migrants. Doesn’t this demonstrate that migrants often integrate, and that immigration is beneficial to our country?
Sadly, both here and in the US, we have senseless crimes like the Southport killing of children. In the US they are often gun crimes, whereas here in the UK we have seen an increase in knife crimes.
The perpetrator of the Southport killings is neither an asylum seeker nor a Muslim, neither does he seem to be part of a terrorist plot. What was his motivation? The police investigation and the court trial may eventually cast some light on this.
Senseless crimes are sometimes due to mental health problems. This was the case in the Nottingham killings, when a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia killed two university students and a 65 year old worker. However, drug or alcohol misuse are actually more common causes of crimes.
The Southport killings have been followed by a campaign of misinformation and by violent demonstrations often directed at mosques, Muslim communities and asylum seekers.
The root cause
Far-right activists are responsible for the riots, the vandalism and the assaults on the police, but the root cause is the misinformation spread by various social media influencers. Elon Musk carries some responsibility for allowing extremists like Tommy Robinson to use his social media platform X, from which Robinson had been previously excluded.
Farage has his own share of responsibility. The violent demonstrators have embraced his long-standing anti-migration rhetoric and were chanting Farage’s former slogan: “We want our country back”.
During the recent general elections Farage blamed everything on migrants and claimed that Muslims do not share British values. Farage’s party fielded a number of totally unsuitable candidates: one candidate stated that we shouldn’t have fought Hitler, while another had claimed that “Many of the powerful groups agitating for the mass import into England of Muslims from the Third World are Jewish.”
A few more Reform UK candidates had to be dropped because of various distasteful comments.
After the Southport killings Farage questioned whether the “truth is being withheld from us” – former Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood accused Farage of “deliberately inflaming tensions”.
Migration has made us stronger
There is nothing new about migration. Britons are the descendants of various ethnic groups who moved into the British Isles at different times: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, French protestants escaping persecution. Scottish migration followed the unification with Scotland and was followed, in modern times, by the migration of Jews, escaping persecutions, and by migration flows from Ireland, Europe and from Commonwealth countries.
Migration has made us a stronger and richer nation, and not just in monetary terms. Eating out would be a more boring experience without fish and chips (whose creation is attributable to Jewish immigrants), curries, kebabs or pizzas.
The British people have been part of the big migration movements, as there are far more people of British descent living abroad than in the British Isles. British emigrants mostly moved to the US, Australia and Canada, but there are significant numbers also in South Africa, Europe and Argentina.
The American motto “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one) originally referred to the fact that the US was born out of the union of 13 separate colonial states. Subsequently, though, this motto has been reinterpreted to mean that people from various ethnicities and traditions migrated to the US and formed a new cohesive and powerful nation.
We do not need anti-migration riots or Farage’s divisiveness. To be a successful nation we need to reject racial prejudice, promote integration and take advantage of the contribution of different cultures.
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