Immigration

It's a bad time to be an immigrant, or someone who "looks like" an immigrant. You can't even say the word between California and Croatia without making people nervous. Immigration. A few weeks ago, in a move that sounded strangely familiar, the state of Arizona passed a law dictating that immigrants carry their documents with them at all times. And how will the authorities know they are carrying their documents? Simple: they can demand to see the papers of anyone of whom there is a "reasonable suspicion" of illegality.

Many brits will hear in this law the echos of their own Terrorism Act 2000, section 44 to be precise, which allows the police to stop and search anyone who looks "suspicious." The problem here is what constitutes "suspicious." Personally, I'm suspicious of all white people because they have been and continue to be the perpatrators of the biggest crimes in human history. However, when governments start talking about "suspicious", they are invariably referring to people of my skin tone and hair color, or darker -- immigrant looking people. Of course, racial profiling is illegal, so politicians are making up all kinds of ingenious ways in which to identify a suspicious person. Congressman Brian Bilbray suggesting paying close attention to "the kind of dress you wear". You can see why these white people make me suspicious.

Minorities, racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise, are easy scapegoats in times of crisis. When things begin to go pear-shaped in a country, the first to the chopping block are the ones with funny accents, darker skin, different histories, their own ways of doing things, and Jewish people, who have often embodied all of these things. In the United States, our current whipping boys are Latin Americans, predominantly from Central America and Mexico. In Britain, it is Indians, Pakistanis, Carribbeans and Eastern Europeans. In France it's North Africans. Every wealthy country in the world has its class of undersirable and maybe even subversive, but most definitely 'suspicious', people who they whip mercilessly until the their constituents, bloodlust satisfied, go to sleep at night and dream of a world that has never hear the word "globalisation".

Being "anti-immgrant" is one of the general idealogical banners that the American Right is rallying around because it simultaneously scapegoats a lot of much broader problems while also letting Republican commentators take underhanded digs at President Obama. Bear in mind that many in the Tea Party Movement still doubt Obama's citizenship. And so the fear is amplified exponentially -- not only are immgrants overflowing our borders to steal our jobs and rape our daughters and degrade our way of life, but they have installed another darky in the White House to turn a blind eye to all of it! Mary -- get me my gun.

The words are made up but the sentiments among a certain group of white, working class, traditional-valued, bigoted Americans and the fearmongers who pander to them are very real. Just like the BNP is very real, just like the Swiss People's Party is very real. Now it could be that British culture, cultivated by hundreds of years of homogeneity IS lost and cheapened by immigration, and therefore needs some sort of protection (Tim: I would like to hear your views on this), but my country was built by immigrants, and it is absurd to think that they are simply going to stop coming if we put a couple of laws into place. A law like the one in Arizona does nothing besides legitimize bigotry by the police, which, if you've been keeping track, is not an organization that historically needs excuses to be bigoted.

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Well, first of all, there's an easy answer to your query, Ted: immigrants built your country; invading hordes built ours. That Great British Culture the nationalists love to bleat on about - is it Roman? Viking? Celtic? French? Perhaps - and those of a hard right persuasion might need to look away here - it's a multinational blend of all of them, and that's precisely what makes it so 'great' in the first place. After all, our patron saint St George was Turkish, the Queen's half-German and our much-loved national dish is the defiantly untraditional Chicken Tikka Masala - it's not entirely clear what, exactly, our flag-worshipping friends are trying to protect.

What is clear, and Ted already touched on this, is the deeply unpleasant role of racism in all this. Wave-upon-wave of our beloved European conquerers have found themselves quite comfortably accomodated into the myth of an 'indiginous Britain' - it is only when burkas and turbans grace the high street that the hard right really raises it's ugly, shaven head. We've had our tensions with Eastern European migrants, sure - but they are treated more as unwelcome neighbours than the malicious gypsy status reserved for our darker-skinned cousins. It is little surprise that our 'Stop and Search' statistics make for depressing reading; even less of a shock, sadly, that our incoming government has just made it even easier for the police to act on discriminatory sentiment rather than pesky old 'human rights'.

So yes, immigration is hotly, if rarely intelligently, debated on this side of the Atlantic as much as it is on yours. Fear is a powerful weapon, particularly in a recession when jobs are scarce - and as Gordon Brown's infamous encounter with Mrs Duffy revealed, someone different is always the easiest target when communities feel under threat. In my view, this is where good governance should come to the fore: it's their job to protect basic human rights and explain to xenophobes that they are plain wrong. Unfortunately, we choose to make concessions to the racists instead, letting prejudice creep into everyday policing and eroding some of our clearest civil liberties. Last time Stop and Search was enforced in Britain, it led to riots on the streets. If history has taught us one thing, it's that it's clearly no way to keep the peace.