The Seditionist

There is an increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in most developed countries. Its effects range from far-right politicians winning elections and bans on minarets and burquas to the mob violence of Cronulla beach some years ago. There’s also a tendency for these sentiments to be expressed more vehemently, and for the called-for action to become more extreme.

I think the reasons are to be found in our self-destructive, fear-based, exploitative and commercialised life-styles that impress upon us every day that we are merely parts of a great Progress Machine to be disposed of without notice. But it’s not the reasons behind this wave of hatred towards impoverished countries I want to address in this post.

Rather, it’s the underlying justifications people give for their blatant antipathy towards foreigners (with the most fervent sentiments usually directed against people of darker skin tones or Muslim cultural backgrounds). We who inhabit developed nations say we don’t want any more uneducated migrants. We don’t know what to do with them. There aren’t any jobs. They’re culturally backwards and incabable of integrating. They’re prone to criminality and depravity.

All right, let’s take these things as given. While overblown, there is some truth to these accusations. The mass migration from the poorest parts of the world is unlikely to consist mainly of computer experts and medical doctors. Many of the migrants have had little or no schooling. Their trade, if they have one, is often irrelevant to a modern economy and thus they fall into the growing segement of the population described as ‘unskilled’.
Their cultural views on women’s rights are often outdated (strangely, many of those who complain the loudest are also against giving equal rights to gays).

But what’s the conclusion? That we have a right to keep poor migrants from our bountiful shores?

If we accept that all humans are essentially equal in their intellectual ability and their moral fibre, we cannot blame Africa’s or Asia’s millions of poor for their poverty. The usual derisive arguments directed against our own poor make no sense. If we have a poor country of x million and a rich country of x million, the cause of poverty cannot be found in the human building blocks of the poor country unless we accept some racial theory of white supremacy. No, the difference is historical and the inhabitants of the poor country are not to blame. Being human beings as valuable as those who inhabit the rich country, they deserve the same things. Anything else is unjust and inhumane.

Unless we want to subhumanize the developing world, we cannot escape our ultimate responsibility for the welfare for all of the world’s billions. To do so by one-sided anti-immigrantion rhethoric without a detailed plan of how to raise the developing world to our standard in the forseeable future is hypocritical and deserving only of contempt.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 1:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.