[andrei]

Zelandakh, on 2015-September-14, 07:04, said:

If I had to take my chances between a random Mexican immigrant to the USA and a random member of the Tea Party movement, I might well be inclined to go for the former. With one notable exception, all of the Mexicans I have ever known have been more than reasonable and easy to get along with.

Tell us about the Tea Party members you've met.

[kenberg]

NPR (National Public Radio) reports on individual cases. In one a man clearly state his interest in getting to Europe was economic. Among other items, his daughter is a good student and he hoped to buy her a laptop computer. In another, a man was formerly a cop, apparently ISIS is targeting former and current cops, and he has (he says) good reason to fear for his life.

Under the first criterion, I suppose most everyone in Syria qualifies for asylum. The second qualifies under more restrictive criteria but it is difficult to sort fact from fiction and with the numbers as large as they are it is probably impossible to sort it out.

I have not claimed to have a solution and I don't claim that I have one now. I think Cameron's decision to take people only at the early stages of the journey makes some sense but at 4000 a year this is barely a dent.

Mostly I wish for wisdom as well as generosity, but I am not sure we have enough of either.

[y66]

From Rescuing the English (slow to load) by Paul Kingsnorth

Quote

Some years back, I was driving through northern England with a friend. On a Cumbrian A-road west of Kendal, we passed a layby in which was situated a typical British roadside snack bar: a white caravan, a couple of plastic garden chairs, pink and yellow DayGlo cardboard stars advertising chips and fried breakfasts and tea. The full English.

On top of the caravan was an aerial, and attached to the aerial, blowing in the wind that was coming off Morecambe Bay, was a St George’s cross, the English national flag – a common sight now across the nation, though I’m sure it never used to be when I was young.

“What do you think that’s about?” my friend asked. “Why do you think you see so many of them in places like this now?”

I said I hadn’t thought about it. But it seemed my friend had. He told me it reminded him of a road trip he had taken when he was younger across the southern states of the US: the former Confederacy. There, he said, you would often see the old Confederate flag flying in similar places: unofficial, at once underground and open, an act of defiance.

“It’s not the same,” he said, “but it’s sort of similar, isn’t it? It’s like the sign of a people that lost. But they’re saying ‘We’re still here’.”

We’re still here. I think of this now when I see Ukip heading for third place in the general election, or when I read that levels of both immigration and objections to immigration are at record highs, or that trust in the political system continues to collapse, or that the euro is on the brink again, or that 45% of Scottish voters want to break away from the UK. I think of this and I wonder about England. I wonder about the future of this great national elephant, shifting its bulk in the peeling glamour of the British imperial room. I wonder what England is, and where it is going and what its people want to be. I wonder if it will survive as a nation, and whether it matters, and I wonder what will happen next.

*

Seven years ago, I published a book called Real England. It was both a personal state-of-the-nation report and a record of my own anxieties. For years I’d sensed an ongoing, hard‑to-pin-down loss of many of the things I felt made my country distinctive. I’d watched local pubs being turned into theme bars or pricey flats. The old town-centre breweries were going with them, and the collapse of independent shops was transforming high streets into identical colonnades of brand names. In the countryside, what little that remained of a particularly English rural culture was being emptied out, as villages became commuter dormitories or dead collectives of second homes for the wealthy. In the cities, independent shops and pubs and markets and clubs were being gentrified out of existence, and more sinister things were happening, too: public streets and open spaces were being privatised, enclosed and policed by private security guards. The small and the local, the traditional and the distinctive were being stamped out by the powerful, the placeless and the very, very profitable.

This was not a phenomenon confined to England. Around the world, an increasingly deregulated consumer capitalism was, and is, elbowing aside local cultures and national identities and, in many cases, democracy as well. Everyone in politics and the media seemed to agree on how wonderful this all was, and all the official figures from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the ranks of chief economists and chancellors proved that we were all better off. It was to be Tiger Economies and the Global Race and Economic Growth for ever. The world was now a giant airport lounge through which happy consumers could wander at will, picking baubles off the shelf, unmoored from history, place and meaning. Concerns about any of this were usually dismissed as “nostalgia”: a harmless but irrelevant longing for a “rose-tinted past”.

I must have spent about nine months wandering England researching that book, talking to lock keepers and farmers and canal boaters, cafe owners and MPs and market traders, landlords and apple growers and campaigners against second homes. Above and beyond all of their specific grievances, I sensed a strange unease. It wasn’t about particular local problems, and though it was sometimes voiced, more often it was unspoken. I hadn’t expected it, but it was definitely there. Many people seemed to feel unacknowledged, unlistened to, ignored, looked down on: not just as individuals, but as a people, as a nation. As the English.

More