One insider’s view of the thorny subject of immigration

Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous to be true. I never thought I’d witness government and parliament in this country tearing themselves to tatters and becoming so irrelevant that Westminster might as well be located on the dark side of Jupiter.

Perhaps the most incendiary topic lumbering about in the disintegration of our governance is immigration. No other subject manages to beget such nonsense and fury. The claims of anti-migrant, anti-immigrant sentiment are rife, despite the fact that even on the far right it is almost impossible to find anyone who is completely against the notion of immigration; it’s all about how it should be conducted.

Suketu Mehta, an American of Gujarati origin, who wrote a highly acclaimed portrait of Bombay, Maximum City, has now come up with This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, a consideration of the state of play.

Most popular

Richard Dawkins

Will the Supreme Court gender case victors get the apologies they deserve?

Mehta signals his position, in neon, straightaway. Resistance to immigration ‘is based on fear and prejudice’, and he ends his preface with ‘the heart should have no borders’. His investigations are principally concerned with the US, but he’s happy to lambast other ‘rich countries’ — such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan as well as many in Europe — or, as others might prefer to describe them, the democracies who, obviously, are the real villains on the global scene.

This line of thought doubtless goes down well in the bars of Brooklyn, but it’s annoying to encounter in this book a Twitter-level analysis of economic history and a student union sophistication in argument. The ‘rich countries’ stole their wealth from the poor, through colonisation or imperialism? I can’t remember where Canada, Switzerland, Finland, Ireland or Singapore had their colonies, or indeed how Germany’s postwar resurrection had anything to do with shafting farmers in paddy fields.