Excessive Immigration
Page 20
Gary Younge (2017a), is a black British journalist sponsored by The Guardian newspaper since he was 24 years old; his single Barbadian mother had raised him and two siblings in England. He now argues for a borderless world, showing no interest in related practicalities or research, and citing Martin Luther King’s dream speech as support for his emotional utopianism. In a much publicised interview with the American white ethno-nationalist Richard Spencer, Younge understandably reacted emotionally to Spencer’s claim that American blacks are better off than most black Africans, but Spencer failed (I think) to make it clear that it is present-day American blacks who are better off than both their enslaved ancestors and most present-day Africans, so the interview was a confused and wasteful mess, which Younge ended abruptly with an affronted, almost genteel put-down of Spencer (Younge, 2017b). Yet Younge’s SJW supporters claim he was masterful, eloquent, restrained, and so on. He was not. He did not and could not listen to Spencer. Spencer is not the genius he may think he is, his use of the ‘Hail’ address at conferences is ridiculous, and I seriously doubt that the aspiration for a white ethno-state as a safe space can be compared with Israel. But there were topics here that should be discussed intelligently and analytically.
Younge can of course argue for a borderless world, and he can pontificate about the nature of identity (Younge, 2011), a topic covered much more rigorously by Huntington (2004). But since he is a lucky beneficiary of sponsorship and has an international lifestyle few can dream of, this fortuitous elevation separates Younge from the majority of workaday blacks and whites. Along with his high-achieving media brother Pat, Gary Younge is an ironic embodiment of British meritocracy and/or good fortune, their grandmother having been a sugarcane-cutting slave in Barbados. And they must occasionally wonder what their material fortunes would have been in Barbados or Africa. In the USA, still ahead of the UK in terms of balanced views on race, Jason Hill (2018), a Jamaican-heritage immigrant, fully acknowledges the opportunities afforded him, and questions shrill black victimhood. It is fine but dangerous to constantly complain about a host country, to advocate for a borderless world and a transnational identity, and it is fine and also dangerous to advocate for a white ethno-state and white supremacy. Younge and Spencer are two sides of the same adversarial coin, and both enjoy privileged middle-class lives, but when people perceive the world in such diametrically opposite ways, mutual deafness reigns and trouble surely looms. The flip side of arrogant white supremacy is the unquestioning moral supremacy of black SJWs.
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Anecdotes and Examples
A Muslim taxi driver rams into the back of a car on a large roundabout, the driver of which is technically at fault for entering the roundabout before his lane was completely clear. An insurance claim is made for a small scratch on the taxi and for an alleged but highly unlikely whiplash injury, and the driver subsequently loses his no claims bonus. He hears that it is a practice of some Muslim taxi drivers in the area to get up to these tricks. It isn’t until years later that he reads an article about ‘crash-for-cash hotspots’ where deliberate rear-end shunts are caused to effect false insurance claims (Hull, 2017) and he realises that he lives in one of the 30 most affected postcode areas, among which Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Oldham are especially highlighted.
A white man recalls his schooldays at a large comprehensive school. He remembers being bullied often by a big Somalian boy who sat behind him. Neither he nor others could oppose the Somalian boy, and they realised that if they spoke out they would risk accusations of racism and recriminations.
A manager at a large supermarket, a young white woman who hates any overt racism against blacks, tells her friends that the most common thieves at the supermarket are East Europeans who often practise organised theft involving a thief, a look-out, a waiting driver and planned escape route. She also says that one of their favourite ruses is to put petrol in their car, then pretend to have forgotten their credit card and other papers, knowing that the petrol salesman will simply rely on their verbal statement of (false) name and address.
A university lecturer worries about poor standards of written English among her foreign-born students. She and others spend a lot of time trying to help them improve their English but progress is extremely slow, indeed negligible. Consequently, she often passes assignments that probably shouldn’t pass and feels she can’t raise this officially in case it appears racist, and anyway she is very sympathetic to their situation. Farron (2014) cites statistics in the American context suggesting that grade inflation in the service of affirmative action is commonplace.
A man who works in renal dialysis in the NHS says that quite a few people from other countries present with urgent medical conditions that NHS staff must treat, and some people know that dialysis, which is too expensive in their own country, will be provided indefinitely. This NHS worker is a Labour voter married to a black woman. He has no racist axe to grind, he is simply reporting an observation about ‘health tourism’ as part of possible reasons for the poor state of NHS finances.
A young white man is leaving a city-centre club on a Saturday night when a group of young black men start shouting at him. He swears back at them and is then physically attacked but manages to extricate himself by throwing a couple of punches. Nearby police step in and one of them (white) tells him he would have done the same. Two Asian police officers, however, become verbally aggressive towards him and threaten arrest until he defends himself articulately and they apologise. Luckily, he is a big guy and able to defend himself, and luckily his assailants have no knives.
An ageing British white man feels that the female Muslim doctor he sees is a little dismissive of his minor skin complaint. An Indian doctor he sees at another time seems aloof and uninterested in what he has to say, and he cannot easily understand his accent. But he experiences no problems with his Asian dentist, or his Muslim optician and pharmacist. He asks himself if he is unintentionally racist or just encountering individual differences between overburdened health professionals who happen to be non-white.
A mature woman attends a Magistrates Court for her part (as a Crown Prosecution witness) in a case brought by the Crown Prosecution Service against a man accused of threatening her. The CPS solicitor arrives at the last minute with very little time to meet her client to discuss some case details. The witness is struck by the solicitor’s flustered state, poor grasp of the details and apparent inability to take in accurately what she is telling her now. The witness feels troubled and lacks confidence in her solicitor. The witness is white and the solicitor is black, and the witness checks herself for possible racist misperceptions. While some parts of the British criminal justice system are said to be under-representative of the BAME population, the CPS has a 19% component. Responding to accusations that the criminal justice system is institutionally racist, Holbrook (2017) argues that ‘racism is a spent force’ in the UK, and that some crimes committed by BAME individuals are even overlooked ‘due to racial sensitivities’.
A middle class black man has a meeting with a middle class white man. In the initial small talk about getting to the venue, the former says, ‘I’m always very punctual, unlike most Caribbean men’ [and after a short, slightly embarrassed pause] — ‘not wishing to stereotype’. It is difficult to know if he meant this, or was making an ironic joke, or creating class solidarity, or indeed if it is true or not that most Caribbean men are not punctual, although it is a well-known stereotype. In Kenya, punctuality is sometimes referred to as ‘mzungu time’ (or white, or European time).
A white man notices a young black man spitting in the street, and as well as instinctive disgust, he realises that he is angrier with this black man, this ‘rude guest’ in his country, than he might be at a white man. Another time, he is in an underground train and there is a powerful, sickeningly bad smell. Since there are few people in the train, it becomes clear that the smell emanates from a black man sitting alone. This memory stays with him for years. Of course, some wh
ite people smell bad too, but this ‘racist’ link is hard to shrug off. Braun (1990) recalls hearing a long, deep, disturbing sound like a wild animal, and realises it is a black male neighbour having sex. Such visceral associations are strong and can persist in memory at an unconscious level; and they are no doubt experienced by people of all ethnicities.
Academics hate subjectivity and ‘anecdotal evidence’ of this kind, and usually dismiss or belittle it, but these are actual everyday experiences people have that inform their views of immigration; they are negative vignettes but they are not untrue. This is only a tiny fragment of examples, and clearly many incidents could be cited that chime with or contradict such cases. Judah’s (2016) reportage on diverse immigrants in London, from street beggars and frontline workers to professionals, shows many pitiful lives, interethnic observations, and nuanced views on our superdiverse metropolis, including the Nigerian-heritage policeman who observes that ‘the English are dying. The English are declining and they are declining fast’. The stories people tell us of course depend on who we are and who we know, and how open we are to stories that may contradict our expectations. I hear from a friend of a friend, a university student, that some of her female Chinese student friends have been insulted and mugged by local, young white males. I know nothing about the details but feel these despicable young men probably know deep down and enviously that they are intellectually inferior, and their targets are smarter and richer than them. I hear from another friend that a member of his family, a dual heritage, Anglo-Asian young woman, was beaten up on an underground train by a young black woman, and now she hates all blacks. Again, I do not know the details but assume some interethnic envy and anger was in play. I am sure that all of us, from every side of the ethnic spectrum, hear such stories and are confirmed in our prejudices or made to question ourselves accordingly.
Consider too the daily fare in newspapers. Below is a small selection.
‘Nigerian crime wave sweeps through Britain’ (The Independent, 2 February 1998). This article told us that large-scale fraud, drug dealing and illegal immigration operations were being perpetrated by Nigerians in the UK. The intelligence services were investigating the presence within government departments like tax offices, the Department of Social Security and the Metropolitan Police itself, of organised Nigerian crime rings. In 2006 it was found that five illegal Nigerian immigrants worked as cleaners at the Home Office (Daily Mail, 19 May, 2006). Shamsu Iqbal, a Home Office employee, together with three lawyers, was charged with conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration, involving the falsification of documents in up to 437 cases of identity fraud concerning illegal immigrants (Mail Online, 14 January, 2018).
When he was 18, Arnold Mballe Sube left Cameroon to live in Paris, where he worked, saved, met his wife Jeanne, and became a French citizen, getting married in 2006. In 2012 they moved to Luton in England, where they and their eight children at first lived in private rented accommodation. Then when their funds ran low, they had to move into social housing via accommodation in an expensive hotel paid for by the council. They have lived on ample housing and welfare benefits for some years, and Mr Sube gained a bursary of £29,000 from the NHS to study for a degree in mental health at Bedfordshire University, after which he became a psychiatric nurse. The Subes complained about several offers of housing they rejected because they considered them too small or unsuitable. Eventually they were found a detached five-bedroom house at an expensive rent paid for by the local council. The Subes were still only 34 and admitted that they might well have further children. Mr Sube appeared to have no sense of either responsibility or gratitude. Like some fellow Christians he is anti-abortion and anti-gay. Cameroon was for many years primarily a receiver of immigrants from neighbouring countries, but is now ranked as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Some might say good luck to Sube, or regard his situation as comeuppance for Europe’s colonial past. The EU facility of free movement obviously helped his family and the no borders anarchists would celebrate his case. Meanwhile a majority of white Britons probably feel less charitable about his case (Daily Mail, 10 September, 2016).
Orashia Edwards, a Jamaican man, had his asylum application denied in 2013. He had claimed to be bisexual and in danger of persecution, murder or imprisonment in Jamaica, where homosexuality is illegal and subject to sentences of up to ten years. He was turned down due to having been married and having had a daughter, and was disbelieved by Home Office officials. The decision was however overturned in 2016 with assistance from LGBT activists and Leeds No Borders (The Guardian, 23 January, 2016). Such cases highlight the problem that any asylum seeker from ‘homophobic’ countries can claim to be gay or bisexual and therefore at risk, and with precedents like Edwards’ will no doubt push against Britain’s weak borders.
Three Sikh men, Daljit Kapoor, Harmit Kapoor, and Davinder Chawla, were sentenced to a total of 19 years imprisonment in 2017 for illegally lending or supplying British passports to lookalikes, making £620,000 over a period of some years (Daily Mail, 14 July 2017). A television investigation revealed that stolen British passports were being sold in Greece for £500 each, a large drop in price from the previous £2,000. Purchasers were told that the lookalike ploy was better than fake passports, and were also advised on which UK airports had weaker security (Daily Mail, 7 September, 2017).
Mohammed Sangak was sentenced to ten years in prison for leading an operation smuggling 87 illegal immigrants (from different countries) into the UK. These were hidden in vanloads of furniture, Sangak was also involved in insurance fraud, as well as fraud involving passports, driving licences and MOT certificates, and had previous convictions for battery and drug possession. He had been an asylum seeker from Iraq in 2001, having come to the UK alone at the age of 14 (Mail Online, 4 January, 2018).
A group of migrants attacked a lorry driver in Calais in July 2017, leaving him for dead while they drove his lorry towards the port (Daily Express, 25 July 2017). An African man died after stowing away in the landing gear of a flight from Angola and then falling to his death near Heathrow Airport (The Guardian, 25 April, 2013). These examples show criminally violent determination and unbelievably desperate, suicidal foolishness.
A Travellers’ temporary site in south east London was deserted in July 2017 and 250 tonnes of rubbish left behind which will cost the local council £100,000 to clear (Daily Express, 23 July 2017). As many pondered how so much waste could be accumulated by these nomadic people in such a short time, it was speculated that the Travellers concerned had made cash from householders for ‘clearing’ rubbish from their properties, but had then simply dumped it. But to thus criticise Travellers (or Gypsies) is now invariably deemed racist. Well, again The Guardian (Bindel, 2011) in commenting on the TV series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, admitted that there are indeed some problems among the UK’s 300,000 Travellers, who are officially an ethnic group protected under the Race Relations Act. It is reckoned that Roma numbers are between 10 and 12 million across Europe (McGarry, 207). And they now benefit from their own PC-designated identity terms, the ‘GRT community’ and the designated terms Romaphobia, antiziganism and antigypsyism. A Traveller woman ‘Kathleen, who lives with her six children in a three-bedroom trailer, is fairly typical of an Irish Traveller woman, except that she is separated from her husband’. She is in fact a victim of domestic violence. It turns out according to one study that ‘61% of married English Gypsy women and 81% of Irish Travellers had experienced domestic abuse’. Most of them can’t read or write. Travellers’ rights are protected, centrally their insistence on being free to move location and be provided places to live, as well as their customs of intermarriage. Yet somehow mainstream society is always to blame for stereotyping them and failing to provide them with enough help.
To read a jargon-saturated academic text like McGarry’s (2017) Romaphobia, you would not think Travellers were ever responsible for any troubles in the real world. Rather, they are persecuted from all directions by a mainstream society
that always stereotypes them in highly negative terms and cannot recognise their right to live freely as an ethnic minority. But as in other cases, there are signs the police are under PC pressure to avoid confrontation and accusations of racism. In August 2017, the Norfolk town of Cromer was visited for a long weekend by about 100 Travellers who set up an unauthorised camp in a car park, leading to 40 offences being committed and businesses having to close, losing tens of thousands of pounds. It seems the police ‘misread’ the situation as ‘low level disorder’ and did almost nothing to intervene. Later, they were forced to apologise to the local community. Nobody is obliged to believe the Daily Mail’s (26 October, 2017) version of these events, but local people who complained included an Indian restaurant owner whose restaurant was occupied by dozens of Travellers who stole drinks and were violent, while the police did nothing effective to intervene (Bristow, 2017).
On 9 August 2017 news media were full of reports of the convictions of 18 people from the Newcastle area, 17 of whom were men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish origin, for the grooming, drugging, trafficking and rape of white girls between the ages of 13 and 25. The offences were committed between 2010 and 2014. A total of 461 people were arrested in connection with these offences. Organised gang rape sessions had been a prominent feature. It was said that ‘the sexual exploitation of young people’ could not be tolerated, as if it has not long been illegal and indeed one of the most stigmatic of offences to commit paedophilic crimes. One of the men involved is widely reported to have said ‘All white women are good for one thing, for men like me to fuck and use as trash, that is all women like you are worth’ (Daily Mail, 9 August 2017). This serious organised crime, a repetition of similar events in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Bristol and other cities, might almost be seen as a mere cultural misinterpretation. And yet the ire of the left is often reserved for right-wing activists like Anne Marie Waters who draw attention to the perpetrators of such heinous crimes.