What decided Brexit what will decide the US election and Merkel's fate - Immigration

Ten of London’s 33 boroughs change half their population every five years, and figures are similar in other big conurbations. There are many reasons for that: more divorce and fewer extended/multigenerational families living in close proximity, changes in communication technology, the expansion of higher education, and in recent years a big increase in immigration.

Immigration, at least on a significant scale, can be hard for both incomer and receiver especially when the cultures of traditional societies are being imported. Opposition to it can be xenophobic but is not necessarily so. When social scientists like Michael Young in the 1950s and 1960s discovered the significance people in settled working class communities attached to stability and continuity, and how it was often lost in new housing developments, it was considered something to celebrate and defend by people on the left. But when, a few years later, those same communities objected to that continuity being disrupted by the churn of mass immigration they were often ruled beyond the pale.

Liberalism is often uneasy about group attachment: ‘What’s the fuss, we are all just individuals aren’t we?’ And when thinking about immigration conventional liberals too readily assume a society without any pre-existing attachments. But group attachments of many kinds remain strong, indeed are hard-wired into us. Societies are composed of people who come from somewhere, speak a certain language, have certain traditions and ways of doing things. (The idea of multiculturalism is partly premised on the overwhelming importance of these traditions to people.)

The idea of ‘people like us’ whether in class, regional or ethnic terms is a simple reality of life. Outsiders can, and often are, absorbed into these groups and communities but it is usually easier if it happens gradually and in small numbers - one reason for postliberalism’s support for a return to more moderate levels of immigration.


Modern colour-blind liberalism demands, rightly, that everyone be treated the same; but that does not mean that everyone is the same. And that raises issues about how we live together: about communities, about integration/segregation, about contact, trust and familiarity across ethnic and other boundaries, about areas people feel comfortable living in and areas they don’t.

The idea of ‘people like us’ whether in class, regional or ethnic terms is a simple reality of life. Outsiders can, and often are, absorbed into these groups and communities but it is usually easier if it happens gradually and in small numbers—one reason for postliberalism’s support for a return to more moderate levels of immigration. And that raises issues about how we live together: about communities, about integration/segregation, about contact, trust and familiarity across ethnic and other boundaries, about areas people feel comfortable living in and areas they don’t.

The actual integration story in Britain is mixed. On the one hand there is a story of declining racism, an increase in mixed race couples and children, upwardly mobile minorities and unselfconsciously mixed communities. But elsewhere there is also a story of white exit and parallel lives—and what Robert Putnam has called ‘hunkering down’—especially in parts of the north of England. Most people from the white British majority are resistant to becoming the minority in any given area and this has led to almost half of the ethnic minority population of Britain living in wards that are less than 50 per cent white British. According to Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College that number was only 25 per cent in 2001.

Many liberals believe it is enlightened not to notice the extent to which group identities both exist and influence behaviour, but this does nothing to prevent what Trevor Phillips has called ‘comfort zone segregation’. We need to think harder about how to lean against the drift to separation, especially in schools.