Let’s stop apologising for immigration and immigrants

I’ve got news: Labour did okay on immigration. We positively contributed to progress. We don’t need to apologise.

As the world opened up its borders and economies, and labour markets changed immeasurably, Britain adapted and prospered. Our economy boomed, our culture was nourished. Britain, still not comfortable with the sometimes-sickening indiscretions of empire, strode forward; realising that the only meaningful response to those indiscretions was to embrace a fairer, inclusive, more progressive future.

Pardon the hyperbole, but in government, Labour arguably managed immigration and multiculturalism as well as, if not better than, any country on Earth. We look across to America and see a black President, but one who is forced to publicly display his birth certificate to show his “authenticity”. We turn the other way to the Scandinavian social democracies we admire so much and see that they are now struggling with racial tensions after their first serious waves of modern migration. And then we look south to France, where a candidate of the far-Right was a serious contender to lead the nation of liberté, égalité and fraternité.

This is not to ignore our problems, but meanwhile, in 2012, we celebrated the modern incarnation of Britain. Wildly. A Jubilee, normally reserved to crow about the monarch, was used as an excuse to put up Union Flags and embrace who we are and what we’ve become. And an Olympic Games, where our multicultural society was not only paraded in a misty-eyed opening ceremony, but on the podiums of what seemed like an endless wave of Team GB success.

The rhetoric of 2012 may be over-used but it is not overstated. Yet even beyond that, we need not apologise. The NHS, staffed by people like my Dad who came here from Mauritius, would not be the great institution it is today without the way Britain under Labour embraced the immigration and integration that helps the cogs turn. Our universities are a hub of migrant activity – not just the people who keep the things running in academic and maintenance jobs, but the students who bring invaluable global experience and expertise to them. The same students who then scatter the globe with the skills they learn. One of our great global exports would be nothing without the way we facilitated and embraced immigration. And how many communities up and down Britain have that national institution – a convenience store, central to the hyper-local area, started and run by migrant entrepreneurs.

The list could go on.

I was born in Britain. I have a slight Cardiff accent. I was schooled here and have worked in jobs here since I was 16. I am brown-skinned and I am British.  And I’m made to feel British by the culture of the country, my local community and the people in it. So why do I continuously get the sense that political leaders of all colours (political and, sadly, skin) feel the need to continuously justify my place in this society?

Labour is rightly trying to address people’s thoughts on immigration, but we have work to do.

Because what are people’s actual concerns about immigration? Some people are concerned it means more brown people. We can’t ignore those people, but we should absolutely ignore their concern. Others fear for the disruption to their cultures. There is something in this that we need to address, but it is something that happens in practice rather than in rhetoric. Communities build themselves, but the state can help, locally and nationally. A message on how Labour gives people the pen to join the dots between under-the-surface cultures would be welcome and some measures already trailed by Yvette Cooper, like English language requirements, fit that bill. An active Labour movement, doing the work of developing the necessary community relationships, is also an essential part of that picture.

Stripped down, in my opinion, these are a couple of the only pressing matters that are really related to immigration.

But we are still accepting the frames of the debate from the Right – that immigration negatively affects jobs, housing and security. The more we link illegal wage under-cutting to migrants, the more that frame is solidified and polished. The problem in this instance is not immigration, but bad employers and unfair practices in a broken capitalism – something that Ed Miliband has rightly spoken about tackling. The more we discuss housing within an immigration framework, the more people will buy into the shameful declarations of Government Ministers who blame migrants for housing problems, rather than a legacy of decline in house building or greedy landlords charging extortionate rents.

We need to be optimistic, not apologetic. Because due to the vacuum we leave, we end up dealing with the lightning rod that people are being duped into holding by the Right, rather than building a social democratic shelter for them from the real storms.

Stewart Owadally is a Labour member in Lewisham Deptford