Bloody Immigrants!

The UK has recently been informed that Eastern Europeans are sneaking into the UK, picking tomatoes, working in factories, our pubs and hotels, founding plumbing companies, and generally making us look a tad lazy. Apparently this behaviour has been going on for some time; it’s really surprising that no one noticed before now. (There are two Bosnian Ph.D. students in the Hospital where I work, I’m surprised they have time to take the jobs of hard-working British Apple-pickers, since no matter what hour I go to the hospital they’re at A&E waiting for the next delivery.

From an economic point of view, this means that Eastern Europeans who would have been possibly assembling parts for Japanese companies in Warsaw are now assembling them in places like Swindon. More of their products will be stamped "Made In GB," lowering their perceived reliability, maybe!

Those Awful Immigrants! Or Is It Us?

We instinctively fear and hate "the outsider"… even though Brits now come from every place on Earth, and few people apart from Nick Griffin suggest that any ethnic group be forcibly returned (except for those lazy, Brit afro Caribbean’s). Also, in modern times our fear of those outside the tribe is a little misplaced. No roving nomad can actually come and take your tribe’s favourite patch without paying for it… with the exception of any large developer who pays your city council to use eminent domain and turn your patch into a commercial development. But those large developers are rarely illegal immigrants.

From the very political structured beginning of the UK, British politicians have made emotional political capital out of the fear of foreign devils. In recent history, the 1700s, it was those irresponsible French and Spanish who would threaten our "essentially English" culture (presumably from their excessive lavish fashion, multiple relationships and thrift). After the Irish had become our second-largest ethnicity, worry turned to the aforementioned lazy, Caribbean’s. The Irish in turn having become so popular that more people claim to be Irish than really are, other groups replaced them as the menace o’ the day. The social services hugging Asians, the un-Christian Jews, the too-Catholic Italians, even latterly the obscure Croatians; all this teeming refuse and more deluged our shores. In 1910, 26.7 percent of UK residents were foreign born, much higher than today’s 18 percent or so.

Thankfully, not all the European Jews were kept from escaping to the UK before WWII. Though many thousands kept out by immigration restrictions went to unnecessary deaths in the Holocaust, at least most of the nuclear physicists managed to escape involuntary employment under Hitler. Jingoists should think really hard about an alternate WWII where Germany had not only the best jet aircraft, the most advanced cruise and ballistic missiles, but nuclear bombs as well.

When the best and brightest people can flee to the most peaceful and freest nations, the whole world is safer isn’t it?