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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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PTID, I’m not sure if you are looking for a specific number, and I do not have one in mind. i use the term to signify that I am not against any migration. Some immigration for skills and for cultural liveliness is desirable. I am not familiar with the Australian figures, but in the Uk up to 1997 immigration tended to run at around 50k people per annum. In the last fifteen years it has been around 300k per annum. The character and quality of life in the country has clearly been changed at the 300k rate. It is more crowded, housing is far more expensive, low skilled jobs have become more competitive and employers able to demand more for less, and there is less sense of deep, healthy patriotic connection to place and less sense of social solidarity etc.
If you were to insist upon a number, I’d suggest .005-.01% of the in-situ population per annum, as that is close to the historic benchmark. .01% suggests that every ten years we add 1% to our population through migration.
I would also be happy to leave the number to an advisory committee acting within guidelines touching on the above issues and subject to a hard cap set by parliament, rather as we do with the Bank of England.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| pietillidie wrote: | As someone who knows South Korea and Korean culture, society and politics at depth, has lived in culturally-contrasting countries as an adult, has travelled Asia extensively, lives in a multicultural working class suburb side-by-side with Muslims, and lives In close proximity to troubled neighbors who are mostly white, I...don't have enough the time or even motivation to comment in depth.
I would just say one's imagination of how things are elsewhere, including in sub-communities just down the street, can be extremely deceiving. It takes a concerted effort to go beyond the silly metaphors we store in our brains about ourselves, let alone the ones we store about distant others. As we saw with Iraq, it's very easy to get sucked into a whole world of fancies that don't accord with reality.
Recently, I've started to get a better sense of Muslim, Hindu, and West Indian families in my neighbourhood, among other groups. I find these folks to be warm and reassuring, reminisce of the Italian and Greek families I grew up with. I also encounter these folks in my work on a daily basis, and don't see anything unusual about them through these interactions. There's very little to see except the same old challenges of settlement, generational change and financial pressure I saw in immigrant communities as a kid, and which seem to have to turned out fine.
Last week, China was being unloaded upon in one thread. One thing I'm certain about is that everyday reality in China is nothing like the wild extrapolations we make from a few lines in the media. We don't judge Brits by Blair's invasion of Iraq, or the US by Trump's tweets, so why would we wave away the complexity of the lives of 1.4B Chinese folks on the basis of a report about Chinese government actions somewhere?
It seems to be understood that in our personal psychology we need to think optimistically and positively about things lest we fall into a destructive pit of despair. What seems less understood is that the same applies to the way we view the wider world around us. It is far too easy to whip ourselves into a paranoid frenzy by filtering in the negative about everything and everyone.
I speak with some experience on the latter. Yesterday, I lost it at the pub over the debacle which is Brexit. But the minute I bought into bitter conclusions about people who voted for Brexit, the minute I got sucked into unnecessary dark thoughts about others. That was a mistake on my part, and a waste of emotional energy best spent on something else. |
That’s a nice post. Your posts over the last year or so seem to be more generous and less polemical than they used to be. But I do believe you misunderstand the position necessarily held by those who are sceptical about the type of world you want. It isn’t about being “negative about everyone and everything” - or at least it does not have to be. I see no conflict at all between strong nation states with profound cultural particularity and a developing understanding and exchange across cultures, enabled by education and technology and multilateral institutions. I have spent plenty of time in Arab countries, in Russia and in China. I think I understand well the historical perspectives and experiences which arise in each, as far as an outsider can, and I have great respect and sympathy for them, even as I do not want their political culture and errors here, where we have very different history.
You are of course quite correct that we have little to fear from most of the individual immigrants who live legally among us, and an embracing kindliness and support is the right response. There is no civilized alternative at this point. Unfortunately, there is a world of difference between dealing with population-level questions (the subject of policy) and individuals (the subject of psychology). There is also a world of difference between the reality on the ground today, and the choices before us. I don’t think it profits us to conflate these things.[list=][/list]
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Two more flags before I die! |
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