Anti-immigration attitudes are not just prevalent among white folks in Arizona. Settled immigrants in Britain may swing the vote in the upcoming election as they respond negatively to the newest immigrants. This should not be terribly surprising. After all, the white folks in Arizona are newcomers compared to their neighbors, whose ancestors were born in the territory when it was part of Mexico. Pretty much everyone in the US and Canada descends from immigrants except the native Americans/First Nations. And each wave of immigrants, once settled and assimilated, has tended to want to close the door to the next generation.
That Muslim, black and Asian immigrants in the UK may want to keep the European Union's workers from flowing to the UK is hardly surprising. It also suggests that not all anti-immigration feelings are about race. Sometimes they are (as the affiliations of various Arizona xenophobes indicate), but not always. Instead, the motivation is economic--the newest immigrants may compete for jobs with the slightly less new ones.
Given the tight campaign in the UK, this issue may very well swing the election. While the growth of the British population does pose significant challenges, in the grand scheme of things, pointing at immigrants probably means that politicians will be able to avoid accounting for their own failures. And the public will be able to escape responsibility for their own demands of more services and less taxes (if I am guessing right about the UK).
Would you rather compete with new immigrants for jobs in your own country, or compete with them with folks off in other countries, such as India and China? I'd rather compete in my own country, because the immigrant labor force increases business opportunities, creates more jobs, improves the economy of my country, and immigrants statistically always end up providing more resources than they take (not counting general issues about population growth, environmentalism, etc. that are obviously always an issue.)
ReplyDeleteWhereas outsourcing hurts the economy, loses jobs, and makes the poor use up more resources while the outsourcing countries benefit from growth. That's not an entirely bad thing as more countries doing well together is usually a more desirable situation for a host of problems. But for individuals in a country, having immigrants tends to be better than having outsourcing.