Hostility towards immigration is nothing new. Following the First World War, French
Alliance vice president Paul Haury rejected the idea of replenishing France’s
population through immigration, citing the dire consequences evident in the
United States. “The exploits of gangsters and child murderers demonstrate that
there is something disordered in that country, whose traditions have been
swamped by a flood of too many heterogeneous immigrants.”[1] However, what is troubling today is the tone
and imagery that the current immigration debate continues to take in
Britain. Historical and current
discussions of immigration and immigrants constructed through the employment of
a highly negative emotive, and vague rhetoric make attempts to have a viable
discourse on this topic, at the very least, a struggle. Ingrained associations comparing immigration
with being ‘swamped’, ‘flooded’, and ‘overrun’, encourage a culture of
negativity in which studies that argue otherwise, are quickly dismissed and
“anecdotes end up trumping statistics.”[2]
How can history help us to understand the current debates? Historical
studies can demonstrate a myriad of similarities between current political and
public discussions surrounding immigration and other campaigns that have
focused its rhetoric onto the threat of an ‘other’, particularly in times of
economic and political uncertainty. In
my own work, I recall the themes present following the French defeat in June
1940, calling for a ‘National Revolution’ in order to restore a society that
had been crippled and rotted from within.
The Vichy leadership, under the paternal figure of Marshal Pétain,
called for a restoration of the ‘natural order’, destroyed as a result of
‘decadence’. This restoration was based
upon the values of family, work, and nation and relied upon a rhetoric that
equated the national revolution as the cure for a sick nation. Its assumptions that the current state of
France was an aberration, made justifications to return France to the French
seem natural, and inevitable. On June
16, 1940, a law was created making it permissible to strip a naturalized French
citizen of this nationality, and on July 22, a commission was set up to review
all naturalizations granted since 1927 and to strip those of French citizenship
who were thought to be ‘undesirable.’[3] This event and the rhetoric that accompanied
it can highlight a number of important themes and troubling definitions that must
be taken into consideration, not only in the present immigration debate, but in
current issues more generally.
Nigel Farage’s Radio 4 statement, "If you said to me, do you want to see another 5 million
people come to Britain, and if that happened we would all be slightly richer, I
would say, do you know what? I would rather we were not slightly richer … I do
think the social side of this matters more than the pure market economics,"
is problematic in that it implies, but fails to address the idea of retaining
Britain for the British.[4] Farage’s argument rests on a vague reference
to ‘the social side’, without ever addressing what this entails or who would be
a welcome player. Similarly, Ukip’s party manifesto, under a
heading of “Free Speech and Democracy” to “teach children positive messages and
pride in their country” and to put “Britain first” by returning[5]
“self government to the British people”, encourages assumptions that link free
speech with patriotic sentiments and a Britain is best mentality, rather than
fostering a real and critical dialogue about what it means to be British, how
to cope with real changes in the nation, and the role that diversity plays in
this definition.[6] Additionally, assumptions that there is a ‘natural’ or ‘equilibrium’ state of a nation that we must return to tend to be backward looking in nature, focusing upon a rosy image of what is perceived as ‘the good old days’.
History, and the rise of the modern nation state has
demonstrated that it is too easy to focus a debate on an ‘us vs. them’
rhetoric. As academics, we need to
foster a shift in the terms of argument.
We need a new rhetoric on immigration that employs a fresh, and forward
looking language, and forces us to define potentially problematic terms and
ideas instead of reinforcing old stereotypes and associations based on ‘the
yellow peril’ or most lately stemming the tide of Eastern Europeans.
Chris Riddell, The Observer Comment Cartoon, The Observer, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2014/nov/23/ukip-immigration
[1]
Philip Nord, France’s New Deal
(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 51
[2]
Owen Jones, ‘Statistics Alone Won’t Win the Immigration Debate’, The Guardian, November 5, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/05/statistics-immigration-debate-european-migrants-uk-20bn
[3]
Muel-Dreyfus, Francine. Vichy and the
Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender,
Translated by Kathleen A Johnson (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2001), 85
[4]
John Harris, ‘It's not
about the money: what Ed Miliband and David Cameron can learn from Nigel Farage’,
The Guardian, January 10, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/10/farage-political-nose-gdp-immigration
[5] My
italics
[6]
UKIP, What We Stand For, http://www.ukip.org/issues
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