Cynicism And Salvation: A Response To Suketu Mehta On Immigration – OpEd

By Ben Sixsmith

“You owe us and you need us” is the message of Suketu Mehta’s Foreign Policy article on immigration. While I think his piece is vindictive, condescending, illogical and often uninformed it is refreshingly blunt.

Let us step back for a moment. In these arguments it is tempting to bracket people as “pro” and “anti” immigration. I am not anti-immigration. I think some measure of movement makes cultural, economic and humanitarian sense. (I am an immigrant as well, though I would have argued the same before leaving England.) What I do oppose – and have opposed, and will continue to oppose – is mass immigration on a reckless, utopian scale that ignores tradition, prudence and the popular will. Mr Mehta disregards them, and does so with some contempt.

The headline and the illustration are, well, illustrative. “This Land is Their Land”, booms the former. Not even our land. Theirs. The illustration depicts migrants in a rowing boat, clutching The Stars and the Stripes. (Are they crossing the Atlantic?) A man holds a child while a woman wearing a hijab looks across the sea with a determined expression. I do not think I am being cynical if I suggest that this is an unrealistic portrayal of a Middle Eastern family.

Mehta has no time for distinctions between immigrants, even saying the difference between refugees and economic migrants is a mere “choice of words” as “whether you’re running from something or running toward something, you’re on the run”. An atheist fleeing Afghanistan might disagree with him. There is in fact a clear difference between running from death and running towards wealth. But for Mehta migrants are more or less a monolithic bloc: “us”, with “our communities”, arranged against the West.

Mehta scorns the idea that Westerners have the right to choose which migrants to accept. To him, immigrants are “creditors” taking what they are owed. “All hail Western civilization,” he sneers, “Which gave the world the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and global warming.” Westerners have done – and do – a lot of dreadful things but Mehta’s denunciation veers into agitated overstatement. As grotesque as the Atlantic slave trade was, slavery had existed for millenia. The Arabic slave trade began hundreds of years before Europeans disgraced themselves with this oppressive system, and ended long after the success of abolitionism. Great as our contribution to climate change appears to be, the world’s leading contributors to fossil fuel emissions include China, India, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Mehta attributes all or at least most of the troubles of underdeveloped countries to Western misdeeds. British wealth and Indian poverty, he claims, citing Shashi Tharoor, was built on the depredations of the British Empire. Alex Tabarrok refuted these ideas in his review of Tharoor’s book – while, I should add, granting that the British did appalling things.

Europeans “corrupted our governments”, Mehta continues, neatly absolving African and Asian officials of blame. They did this “so their corporations could continue stealing our resources”. If the West is cunningly bent on plundering the Third World why is it so often Chinese businesses that do crooked deals in Africa? Or is that somehow our fault as well?

Syrian migrants are moving, Mehta claims, “Because the West…invaded Iraq…and set in motion the process that destroyed the entire region.” Iraq was a disgraceful catastrophe, true, but does Mehta think the Middle East – with its ethnic divisions, Islamic extremism and authoritarian rulers – would have been harmonic if the war had never taken place? The argument that Iraq caused the Arab Spring was rubbish when neocons made it in its first triumphant weeks, and remains rubbish now. We do owe Iraqis for our miserable recklessness, and are assisting them in the destruction of ISIS, but the idea that the West bears all responsibility for the troubles of the Middle East is childish nonsense.

Mehta’s condemnation because vengeful when he claims:

It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian Embassy, begging for a residence visa.

I think well enough of migrants to believe that Mr Mehta is putting these strange, vindictive words into their mouths. (Our editor, Sumantra Maitra, also has an Indian background and criticised the piece on Twitter. Mehta blocked him.)

Having claimed that immigrants are bitter people, bearing fantasies of Western suffering, Mehta insists they are actually going to save us. If I thought so poorly of a people, I might not be warm, generous or cooperative – but, again, I do not think most migrants share his view.

Some do. Some hold it to far greater pathological extremes. Mehta has a lot of fun with Enoch Powell’s nightmares of the River Tiber foaming with much blood, but it would have been nice to have some recognition of the hundreds of people who have died in New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Nice and Manchester. The jihadists who perpretrated the crimes in those great cities thought of themselves as “creditors” as well.

To Mehta, it seems, immigrants are just better than natives. “They will bring energy with them, for no one has more enterprise than someone who has left their distant home to make the difficult journey here.” Immigrants are different. Some are enterprising and some are not. Some immigrant groups are less reliant on state welfare than native Britons, for example, and some are more. “Given basic opportunities,” he continues, “They will be better behaved than the youth in the lands they move to, because immigrants in most countries have lower crime rates than the native-born.” Again, it depends on which immigrants and which natives – and how creative Mehta could be with “basic opportunities”.

Once Mehta reaches his grand climactic claim that the “immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet” this reader could feel his arteries throb. As an immigrant – in Poland, which Mehta reveals his ignorance of when he suggests President Andrzej Duda leads the ruling party – I hope I am doing well for my host nation. I work hard to make a difference in my community. I cannot imagine having the brass balls to claim it needs me, though; that I am its “salvation”; that I am “rescuing” it. I would not be very popular if I did.

This article was published at Bombs and Dollars