Immigration: nothing to see here

By Richard North - August 14, 2024

And so, after another mindless stabbing of an innocent child, this one in Leicester Square, the police clamp down on the identity of the assailant.

Before pictures become available, there is much social media speculation as to his ethnicity but, when a video is posted by a member of the public, it turns out to be a white man. One notorious race grifter then starts crowing: “Alot (sic) of racists suddenly silent”.

Possibly because the attack was in such a public place, with so many witnesses, it is pointless for the police to play their usual games of “going dark” to let the furore abate, before going to court whence the assailant’s details are released.

Thus, with commendable speed, the case comes to court and his identity revealed. The assailant is Ioan Pintaru, a 32-year-old Romanian citizen of no fixed address. The charges were read to him through an interpreter so one must assume that his grasp of English is poor.

Immediately, the Metropolitan Police intervene on social media, with the message: “Media and the public are strongly reminded that this is an active case. Nothing should be published, including on social media, which could prejudice future court proceedings”.

At first sight, this is a blanket prohibition, preventing further speculation and the police do nothing to elaborate on the restrictions, leaving the reader to guess what might, or might not, prejudice future court proceedings.

This, however, should not preclude the asking of general public policy questions such as why Pintaru is in the country, when he entered, and why – given that he is “of no fixed abode”, and presumably unemployed – he hasn’t been deported.

In the circumstances, such questions might be an entirely valid contribution to the debate on immigration – and especially if this is yet another Home Office failure – but the very last thing the establishment wants is a public discussion on this topic.

This is especially so in the case of the Guardian which recruits Indian-heritage race grifter, Maya Goodfellow, to come up with a piece headed: “We keep hearing about ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration. The truth is, there are none”.

From her sub-title, we then see that Goodfellow’s thesis is that: “Immigrants aren’t to blame for a society designed to benefit the richest – and it’s time Labour started telling the public so”, a weary straw man argument that manages to skirt round just about every substantive argument on immigration.

Expanding on her theme in the text, she tells us that concerns about immigration
are demonstrably not legitimate. People who arrive in the UK aren’t to blame for an economy designed to benefit the richest while exploiting and abandoning the poorest.

Citing a Migration Observatory study, she then argues that immigration is not a significant causal factor of low wages and it is not why people have insecure jobs.

Those, in themselves, are debatable arguments, but Goodfellow isn’t interested in debate. Instead, she moves from one polemical point to another. “Anti-immigrant feeling isn’t a natural, inevitable reaction to change either”, she asserts.

Nothing, of course, is inevitable, but her assertion that anti-immigrant feeling isn’t a natural … reaction to change needs substantial qualification. At its most basic level, response to immigration is determined by numbers and by the cultural impact. The larger the number and the greater the cultural disparities, the more likely it is that there will be anti-immigrant feeling.

Relying again on a single study, she notes that areas with low levels of immigration had some of the highest proportion of leave voters in them.

This vote, we are told, “was at least partly motivated by anti-immigrant concerns”, presumably to illustrate her point, neglecting salient facts that some of the low immigrant areas have high proportions of “white flight” natives, whose very presence in those areas is an anti-immigrant response.

But no, according to Goodfellow, anti-immigrant feelings exist only because they are summoned up by “mainstream politicians and certain sections of the media”. And these arise from the characterisation of “certain groups of people, usually those who aren’t white (or not-quite-white), as a cultural threat – often targeting Muslims, no matter where they were born”.

Bluntly, this argument, from a woman of immigrant stock (she is extremely coy about her origins) is insulting. Effectively, she posits that native white residents only respond adversely to immigration because they are put up to it by politicians and the media.

On this perilously slender foundation, though, she builds a towering assertion that this makes “legitimate concerns” in this case “illegitimate”. And somehow, if this perversion is held, it “doesn’t mean dismissing what people are saying”.

How she reconciles this intellectual contortion with reality isn’t explained, but she goes on to argue that engaging people with these views need not lead to legitimisation. The purpose of engagement, she implies, is to persuade people of another way – essentially (although she does not say this) to correct their wrong-think.

And to make people love immigration, the government “could change the narrative” by making the history of empire and migration a statutory part of the curriculum. Then it should actively counter racism in the press, among opposition parties and within its own ranks.

Strangely, she then argues that the government could also use this moment to change people’s material circumstances. By this, she means getting rid of “hostile environment” policies and providing safe routes of travel (one of the only viable solutions to stop people from having to cross the Channel).

Other measures might be to make visas cheaper, provide better housing, simplify labyrinthine Home Office processes and end temporary, exploitative visas, giving people the ability to come here on decent terms and stay if they want to.

What this seems to amount to is that the way to counter anti-immigration sentiment is to facilitate more immigration. But, above all, the message must be managed.

Says Goodfellow, the anti-immigrant sloganeering needs to stop: whether it’s the appeasing of “legitimate concerns”, a commitment to “stop the boats” or the more-acceptable-in-polite-society promises to put “controls on immigration”.

Thus, the fact that we have murderous immigrants, or people of immigrant stock savagely murdering people in the streets, quite evidently, has absolutely no impact on anti-immigrant sentiment. It is our bad, for even noticing.

Apart from the more recent incidents, therefore, we should take nothing from this report which has three “men” jailed for “teenager’s fatal stab murder.

The three, Emile Riggon, 23, Jozeffi Jeffers, 28, and Phillip Bryant, 33 – all black men (pictured) and therefore of immigrant stock, if not actually immigrants (we are not told), were all found guilty of murder following a trial at Leeds Crown Court which ended two days ago.

As for the victim, 19-year-old Emmanuel Nyabako (a traditional Yorkshire name that) had been stripped of his clothes by his attackers and dragged naked into the road after being fatally stabbed in Francis Street, Chapeltown, on 26 August 2023.

According to Goodfellow’s dictum, though, we should simply accept that stabbing young men to death, stripping them and dragging their naked bodies into the streets, is just one of those quaint English rituals (a bit like Morris dancing) which have nothing whatsoever to do with immigration. If only the press and politicians would recognise this, the politicians would be better able to understand the “Faaar-Right” violence.

And yes, this woman is serious. Furthermore, she seems particularly influential in Labour circles, with her thinking reflecting Starmer’s current stance: suppress the debate and re-educate the public. Then we shall indeed learn to love immigration.