Keir Starmer’s announcement of cuts to immigration has sent left-wingers into a spiral of alarm. Alert! Alert! The gammon is in the vegetable box!
One of the overheated responses to Prime Minister Starmer’s argument that Britain is in danger of becoming a “nation of strangers” is that Britain is a “nation of immigrants”.
“Britain is an immigrant island,” claims the popular science writer Marcus Chown, “Has been since Roman times. It’s the source of its energy, its vitality, its greatness.” “Migrants quite literally built this country,” adds the commentator and think tanker Jonathan Lis.
Their talking point is far from new. “The very story of Britain has always been one of migrants,” wrote Rachel Shabi for the New York Times in 2017, “The whole country is a living museum of immigration.” “The city was built by migrants,” said Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, in 2023 about the British capital, “By refugees.” BBC Bitesize informs young people that “[the] story of migration is the story of our nation”.
This is all complete nonsense — as blatantly false as saying that Finland has a warm climate. The British population, as the great geneticist Walter Bodmer has reflected, showed “extraordinary stability” from the Anglo-Saxon times to the modern age. “While the Romans, Vikings and Normans ruled Britain for many years,” Andrew Coghlan of the New Scientist has observed, “None left their genetic calling cards behind in the DNA of today’s mainland Caucasian population.” (It is also worth observing that it seems provocative for Mr Chown to compare modern migrants to invading armies.)
The “nation of immigrants” meme is a preposterous American import
Migrants were most certainly important in the development of London, but to give them sole credit for building the city is to obscure the work of countless native Britons. If nothing else, Christopher Wren, John Nash and Herbert Morrison were all native Brits.
The “nation of immigrants” meme is a preposterous American import — serving a rhetorical, rather than analytical, function in making mass migration seem both inevitable and desirable. How could Britain reject it if Britain is in fact nothing without it? The claim has an argumentative punch, perhaps, but that does not make it any less untruthful.
To say this is not of course to obscure the very real contributions that migrants and their descendants have made to British life. Joseph Bazalgette, who designed London’s sewerage system, was descended from a French economic migrant. Benjamin Disraeli, one of our great prime ministers, was descended from Jewish migrants. Joseph Conrad might be my favourite novelist. Walter Bodmer, quoted earlier, was born in Germany before becoming a distinguished academic in the UK. It goes without saying that such a list could go on and on.
But to jump from recognising the contributions that migrants and their descendants have made to British life to defining British life by the contributions of migrants and their descendants is ahistorical and appropriative — misleading people of British descent about their past while robbing them of the legacy of their ancestors. I am a migrant in Poland and I hope I have been of some use in local Polish life. It would be grossly arrogant, on the other hand, to behave as if Polish life is the product of migrants such as myself. (My suspicion is that this sort of disingenuous and arrogant rhetorical manoeuvre — however innocently it is promoted — also makes people less inclined to appreciate the actual contributions of migrants because it makes the arguments seem more like a zero-sum game.)
Advocates for mass migration have done themselves an intellectual disservice in their dependence on this kind of ahistorical meme. When the political consensus held that diversity was “our greatest strength” and that mass migration was the key to economic growth, such memes became a sort of quasi-religious mantra among people who shared the same inevitabilist premises. With the intellectual and popular case for these ideas in ruins, though, to the point that even the Labour prime minister is rejecting them, they seem hollow to the point of naked absurdity.
But what else do liberals have? Their assumption was that the argument had been won — or even that the argument was so reactionary that it was bad to have at all. Their triumphalist phrases sound more like lamentations — the dirges of people who never expected to have to defend their positions.
Migrants have been and will be important to Britain, and no sensible person could think that deniable. The attempt to convince people of British ancestry that they and their predecessors have been little more than spectators to their own history, though, is dishonest, arrogant and ultimately self-destructive.
