Immigration. Immigration. Immigration. The central issue of our times. It’s been a neuralgic stopping point in conversations for as long as we can remember. Now, as unprecedented waves of people travel globe in search of a better life, it has become acute. Its almost mystic power to provoke the most passionate feelings, its ability to divide, to elicit fear, rage and compassion in equal measures is like nothing else, not economics, not football…certainly not our pet peeves about climate change and antibiotic resistance!
But don’t worry, you are not reading the wrong blog. Because at least we have always recognised the issue. What’s more, we have even urged that the causes of it are addressed. And what are those causes? That people will move from places from where life is unpleasant to where it is more pleasant. Obeying economic laws the way charged ions in an electric field obey the laws of physics.
Tonight Channel 4 will take six people with strong views and try to suggest the causes of the problem. That is quite something. It runs the gauntlet of two well-entrenched and aggressive mind sets. On the one hand an odd alliance of Free Market Fundamentalists and Left wing bien-pensants who try to pretend that all is well, and there can be no problem. On the other, a group of existentially frightened people who take refuge in facile nostrums like sending tiny planeloads of undesirables to Rwanda, or Rouen or Rutland, or wherever it was. We do not pretend this programme will solve everything overnight. We do not expect sudden overflows of compassion or understanding, for we always distrust strong emotions and sudden conversions. However we do expect that the problem has for the first time entered public discourse in a dispassionate and rational way. That we think is a beginning. Support them by watching, please.
#channel 4 #go back to where you came from #immigation #economics
Learning, Science and Society 