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.