Immigration: it should be so hard to talk about, and yet it is so very easy. Raise the subject, as the government does ham-fistedly almost every week, and the debate that follows is always the same. First the left refers to “dog-whistle” politics. Then the right insists that these conversations, far from being racist, are “necessary”. Finally, our newspaper columnists, liberal and otherwise, make futile attempts to advance the argument with full reference to (delete as applicable) their Syrian dry-cleaner/their friend who teaches at an inner-city state school/their friend who has a child at an inner-city school/their former career as a teacher at an inner-city state school/terrorism/the white working class.
But perhaps this is unfair. For what, in the end, does any of us know about all this? The world of the immigrant lies beyond our range of vision, invisible and unreported. We live here, and he lives . . . there. Although we flatter ourselves that we sometimes visit his realm – didn’t we take an Uber the other day, and wasn’t the driver chatty? – the truth is that we do not see it at all, not close up. Almost every idea we have about it is preconceived, the result of second- or third-hand information. This is a choice: we turn away from what troubles us. But its more desolate expanses would resist our attention even if we were to venture in. We might as well be the police or the immigration service, for all the welcome we’d get.
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