What Cummings Knew

Political science will spend the next few years working out what Dominic Cummings already knew in 2016.

Here, for example, is Rob Ford, a pretty good political scientist, talking about immigration since the Brexit vote. In a nutshell, the data show that overall immigration levels have not changed much, although the composition of net immigration has changed (more from outside the EU and less from inside), but nonetheless popular concern about immigration has massively reduced.

How do we account for that combination of facts? Quite obviously by reference to the answer Cummings and Vote Leave gave back in 2016: British people aren't racist and don't necessarily object to immigration or immigrants, but they do want the British government to control it.

Ford himself spots this: "I've long thought the issue with Free Movement is not mainly the numbers who come, but premise of the policy as a very broad right for people to come to Britain. Many people just don't accept the legitimacy of such a right, and I don't think a case was ever made for it." Well, quite. And even if you do accept the legitimacy of such a right, it shouldn't be too hard to see the point of view of someone who doesn't: the reason I would object to the Government having the right to send inspectors to watch me in the shower without my consent is not out of concern for the number of inspectors who would come.

Ford also says this: "some have lately been making the argument that the ethnic mix of migrants matters to voters - that they find migrants who are more different to "us" more problematic/threatening. Yet migration has shifted from EU to non-EU but concern has fallen".

This is presented as a paradox, but it's not. Why would you think that non-EU migrants are more different from "us" than EU ones? Is it, to paraphrase Ali G, because they have different skin colours from EU ones? Why would you think that that is an important consideration? What is going on in your head that makes that pop up as an explanation? (Not Ford's head, I hasten to say: it's not his argument and he's only quoting others.)

In any event, don't British people also have a range of different skin colours? (Perhaps a wider range than that found in the most popular sources of EU migrants.) Aren't the new migrants more like "us" than the EU ones? Again, why do you think they are not?

Here's another angle on this issue. The impact of immigration is often most directly felt by people who were themselves recently immigrants: new immigrants are, by and large, coming to live in the the same places that the earlier ones live and do the same jobs that the earlier ones came to do. That's precisely what is being illustrated by that the famous story of the Huguenot chapel that became a synagogue and is now Brick Lane mosque or stories of New York taxi drivers who don't speak English.

One of the arguments that had some appeal during the referendum campaign was that leaving the EU would allow the UK to end the discrimination against non-EU immigrants. If you are being crude about it, this argument was, in part, an appeal to the recently naturalised to vote Brexit so that future immigration would consist of more people like "us", from the Commonwealth, and fewer Eastern Europeans.

More fundamentally, let's link together a couple of my recent posts, on English language popular culture and on the culture of diversity. For a generation, Britons have been taught that they ought to value people regardless of the colour of their skin or their adherence to a non-Christian religion, and that they can rightly take pride in living in a country in which that is (to the extent it is) the dominant and shared ideology. That is our country, we have been told: it is a tolerant, multi-ethnic community as seen in Harry Potter, James Bond, Bend it Like Beckham, etc. And if that isn't our country then shame on us.

All of this is quite right too, but it has had the consequence that we have been trained to see nothing immediately in common between us and those in other EU states who "share our European heritage" (a phrase which, it strikes me as a write it, sounds like a racist dog-whistle, even though it is, presumably, at the heart of the EU's emotional appeal), and we have also been trained to look beyond any superficial differences there might be between "us" and people from any other part of the world. I repeat: that is as it should be. But it doesn't tend to make us think of EU-immigrants as particularly 'like us'.