I have already said, more than once, that I advocate the free movement of people across the globe. That would not be acceptable to the UK electorate, I grant.
Pangaea passports for all. I won’t discuss why many would find this unacceptable until later.
In the event that we wish to continue to have immigration, and we absolutely need to, then we need systems that can cope. To properly fund health, education, transport, and housing will require huge economic change - we have to move to a higher wage society, stopping the requirement to additionally support workers, and we have to be able to generate tax revenues from that employment.
You said a mouthful there, so let’s address that seemingly non-immigration issue first.
In a world where you have high wages, what happens if you open the borders to all comers? What are the basics of supply and demand in a market-based economy? In a centralized economy, where prices of all things are set, including labor, and they only go up, then open borders can work for a minute…until you have too much stuff to sell at the prices you’re paying to make it. Then what?
At the same time, we need a continent-wide strategy to deal with tax avoidance. It is estimated that there is currently £32tn of hidden wealth in the British territories and the UK government allows one in four major UK companies to pay zero tax. The Conservative Party actually had a stall for the Cayman Islands at its party conference!
Pangaea it is!
Obviously, as the Panama Papers and common knowledge attest, wealth seeks its lowest tax base, in order to both maintain and grow wealth. This is not a uniquely British issue, but isn’t really a solution to the problem under discussion, is it?
Unless you impose confiscatory taxes on any such monies before anyone has the chance to manage their affairs, it will simply lead to those people and companies all becoming like Formula 1 drivers and living in Monaco.
That cannot be right at a time when the UK has the lowest state pension in Europe, collapsing social care, a 159% increase in homelessness, and zero new homes built despite a government promise to have 200,000 built by 2020.
What you are quoting is an imported American conservative idea called “Starve the Beast!”
As conservative sought to hollow out government institutions that ACTUALLY made America great in the 20th century, they starved funding to and of government institutions and turned over large swaths of the economy to market forces they knew would crush the individual. Those things that cannot be killed are starved, via lower than market growth, stagnation (which mean losing to inflation), and outright lowering of funding. All of this is done under the guise of belt tightening and “responsible government” as they seek to “manage exploding debt,” while also seeking to lower taxes, reduce govt interference in the market and leave the individual to the vagaries and might of the market created by the oligopolies those same govt officials helped create.
In the UK, the past generation of conservatism has helped Americanize the British social system, with only the NHS barely hanging on.
However, not much to do with immigration.
If you had an expanding business, of your own design, you would not close your door because you had too many customers, you would look at ways to invest so that you could properly meet the demands of your clients. Unfortunately, the nation does not only see an expanding nation as, in my opinion, it is cloaked in the specter of racism and prejudice and that means short-term, populist decision making that is simply bound to fail.
You commingled two disparate ideas there, so let me unpack them one at a time.
The first, the “nation state as business,” is a very conservative take on the notion of the function of the state, and actually harms your defence, in my opinion. Rather than seeking to create the high wage, high tax, high service society you craved earlier in your piece, it turns that on its head into the lowest cost, lowest tax, highest internal rate of return entity possible for those with a vested interest…which is clearly not the “poor huddled masses” of the global migration routes.
The second part is the notion that racism and prejudice create short term decision making, when in fact racism and prejudice are the oldest game in town, pre-dating any modern government policies, and have created most of the ones under which we still toil. Accordingly, they rely on our basest, some might say basic, instincts of self survival, and our personal prosperity, even at the expense of others, if necessary. Indeed, even our most basic trade policies are designed to take work from from our trading partners and give it to our own. This is the lasting legacy of global trade, specialization, and velocity of the market. You snooze, you lose in this global market place, and no one is going to sit around while we “remake our society” into a Utopian society for all comers!
We are, sadly, human animals. Scratch our thin veneer and the animal beneath becomes clearly visible.
That understanding has kept nations at arms length until it creates the conflicts that prove the point. At that point, we go back to what we know and understand, which is familiarity and safety. Therein lies a lesson for immigration policy, if anyone wants to learn it.
Migration, especially the acceptance of forced immigration, is a tough nut to crack in a species where our natural tendency, like birds, is to flock together by likeness. Throw color, language, religion, other basic belief structures into that mix and then ask for some level of homogenization and assimilation, and the road ahead is full of pot holes before you even discuss work ethic, beliefs on who can and cannot work, and when, and even what you can and cannot say to each other, and those pot holes can open fissures unless dealt with.
Multi-culturalism is all fine and dandy until one of those cultures feels like their unique desires are being oppressed. Without a complete understanding of where the boundaries of multi-culturalism begin and, more importantly, end, fissures are to be expected. Today, we call those fissures ignorance, racism and prejudice, but we would do well to understand their roots before idly dismissing them as ignorance.
Immigration, especially of global asylum seekers, is a lot to unpack.
I, for one, am glad some of you have been willing to help unpack some of it today.
Thank you for your thoughts.
