On the right to be here (Guest Post)

If you listened to Question Time the other night you would have heard Tim Farron MP speaking about the benefits of culture and diversity that immigrants bring to the UK, as a reason to stay in the EU. That is all well and good. It is obviously a good thing that EU immigrants have a positive effect on the country; as a study at UCL has shown they have a net positive effect on taxation versus welfare.

But there is reason to be critical of such a stance, even for those who are pro-immigration (which as a migrant I am). This kind of framing of the argument places the onus on the immigrant to show that they are valuable rather than understanding that the immigrant has a right to live here based on the history of our prosperity.

The resources and the products that you and I live on today have been mined and produced by people in other countries who we might call ‘less fortunate’. Less fortunate in this case means they have not had the opportunity to use the resources and the labour of others in order to build a very advanced technologically-embedded society.

We live in a post-industrial society where almost everything we need, including almost half the food, arrives from the outside. We could not be in the position we are in today, where everyone I know owns a smartphone, and many people also own a laptop and a tablet on top of that, unless other people had been made to work for our advantages, mining and farming and stitching for pennies an hour in conditions we would never accept here, to keep our products cheap.

We would love to believe a myth that technology has lowered the need for manual work and so our advantages are purely of our own making, but we find in many industries, like garment production, almost nothing but location has changed in 100 years, where workers rights and pay are still dismal and labour continues to be the major cost of production.

So when an Indian, Congolese, Philippine or Italian person says they have a right to be here, it isn’t out of some cosmopolitan post-materialist abstract claim about ‘one world, one humanity’. It is because our riches are built on the resources and the labour of those abroad. They build our cities, our technologies; they are our doctors, our farmers. This is their Britain as much as it is ours.

By Emmanuel

Politics & Environmental Politics MA student at Keele university.

Fifth vs Sixth Nation UK

Let's cut the head off of an argument before it begins. We're claiming that the ~8 million immigrants in the UK (a larger population than Welsh or Scots) are the fifth nation of the UK, maybe you could read this as meaning the fifth nation is at war with the other four (and especially the English). That would be bullshit. We, all five nations, should be at war with the Sixth.

What is the Sixth nation of the UK?

It has many names. We will call it Corporate Britain, but we can also call it the City of London.

Here's a distinction. Fifth Nation UK is International Britain. This is Britain to be proud of: of Pakistani lawyers, Indian doctors and Spanish nurses, Jamaican authors, Polish mechanics and the Great British Breakfast.

Sixth Nation UK is TransNational Britain. This is Britain's enemy: It is the Britain of the Upper Classes, Britain of the Billionaire bosses who double their wealth whilst we see an explosion of foodbanks, Britain of the Murdoch Empire, Britain of the Russian Oligarchs, Britain of South African security megacorps, Britain of Eton & Oxbridge. That part of Britain which none of us will ever touch, where you will never be at home in, because you are not welcome.

The five nations of the UK have one common enemy, and it is Corporate Britain. Parasite Britain. This is the Britain which for centuries has been sucking the wealth of the other five nations. This is the Britain which makes housing unaffordable and is privatising the NHS whilst telling you to blame sick people for health tourism and saying we can't afford it because of benefit tourists which is complete bollocks. Then they make the poorest people in the country work for free on the basis that they are work-shy scroungers, distracting you from the real criminals.

Somehow, they've made you forget that it was the TransNational elite who caused the financial crisis of 2008. Somehow, because of foreigners and the lower/working classes, you can't have nice things any more. We call bullshit.

If you are British, we are not your enemy. We are like you, we are also being shat on by the same people. And you are letting them get away with it. Just look at all these rich fucks stealing all your money.

Fifth Nation UK

England; Scotland; Wales; Northern Ireland; and the Rest of Us

There is a voiceless group who have lost out more than any other in this last election: the eight million immigrants in Great Britain. We mostly could not vote (some have British citizenship) but we live here, we work, we pay taxes, we take part in community life and we do live by the same laws. We are absolutely vital for the UK economy and we pay much much more than we receive.

This is what I am calling the UK's Fifth Nation. It is made up of 8 million people born abroad currently resident in the UK from all over the world. We are 1 in 8 of the UK population, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Germany, Jamaican, Irish, Pakistani, South African, Romanian, Nigerian, French, American, Spanish, Kenyan, Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Ghanaian, Italian, Iraqi...*  and we are under attack.

Under attack by an enormous rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. By a media who calls us "scroungers", "benefit sponges", "criminals". By the rise of UKIP, by a Labour party who is willing to carve "Controls on immigration" into stone, and a Conservative government who is willing to cut our access to universities and the social welfare safety net.

We are at the blunt end of anti-Muslim hatred and anti-Roma/Gypsy racism, Police violence hits us and our children the hardest. Many of our number have been trafficked here, or are under the control of violent gangs and Mafias and live a daily struggle for survival and dignity. We do the hardest and least well paid jobs, from fruit picking to cleaning to clothes making, building, nursing and running small businesses amongst many, many others.

This is what I'm calling the UK's fifth nation.

We are many, we are here, and we demand dignity, an end to racism and the right to participate in British life.

Signed,

Johnny Foreigner

*We also include the children and grandchildren of immigrants, whose identities are as varied as grains of sand.