A proper immigration strategy sh7uld start off with three principles: Numbers matter. Culture matters even more. Leadership starts from the top. Our points-based immigration system failed on all three counts.
You cannot police, plan or provide public services if you don’t know how many people are in your nation or due to come. There’s a reason that infrastructure seems to be creaking – despite the amount we’ve spent. It’s because demand has shot up faster. A migrant can arrive with their possessions and their skills but can’t bring a new home, hospital bed or school place.
What they can bring is their culture.
Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It’s also customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid.
She is an immigrant and notes the changes since she arrived in the UK.
When I moved back to this country 30 years ago, it was impossible to communicate quickly with my family. Letters would take weeks to arrive, I had to schedule calls with the few people who had working telephones let alone mobiles.
Today’s immigrants, even those arriving on boats come with WhatsApp and Instagram. Their feet may be in the UK, but their heads and hearts are still back in their country of origin.
There’s nothing wrong with immigrants retaining affection to and links with their home countries. That’s very different from keeping and trying to impose behaviours, beliefs and practices from their home countries on their new ones where they are unacceptable and often illegal.
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One could ask if these women are doing this by choice or if they have been ordered to do it by men.
We can learn from other cultures and improve our own in the process but all cultures aren’t equal.
If people can’t leave female genital mutilation, forced marriages Sharia law, other human rights abuses, misogynistic beliefs and ethnic hostilities in their home countries they have no place in those with more enlightened cultures where human rights are upheld and valued.
All cultures are not equal, some have moved into the 21st century and governments have a right to reject people whose mores, morals and practices have not.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
'Equality' is an abstract concept. No two entities - no two people on the planet, no two institutions, whatever - are 'equal' in any empirical sense.
The observable fact that that other rather abstract concept 'culture' changes over time is incompatible with the notion of cultures being 'equal' as a culture before a major societal change cannot be 'equal' to what it was afterwards - that would negate the adaptive nature of culture.
It's amazing how quickly people can adapt their culture to new circumstances when the enticement is right. Most pre-modern cultures place great value on large families, for instance, but with economic changes that see children turning from economic assets into liabilities that value comes crashing down as a society transitions from high fertility/high mortality to low/low.
'Culture' is often presented as static phenomenon but it is in fact highly dynamic.
Douglas Murray in his book "The Strange Death of Europe" covers this ground well. I was particularly struck by his comment at page 57 ''...the agreement seems to have been reached with the general public that (mass immigration) is not such a bad deal: if there is a bit more beheading and sexual assault than there used to be in Europe, then at least we also benefit from a much wider range of cuisines".
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