Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jane Taylor's avatar

You are so right Paul. Diversity is not a strength, integration is.

Expand full comment
Mary Belgrave's avatar

In “Immigrant Nations” (2011) the Dutch professor Paul Scheffer points out that immigrants often feel alienated in new surroundings and hang onto old customs as an aid to survival.

Clashes are inevitable if large numbers of asylum seekers arrive in European towns unless there are shared common values and allegiances to bring people together as a nation. I’m defining the nation as an “imagined community”(Anderson 1983).

I often wonder how someone like Owen Jones would fare if he moved to a tiny village in Somalia with no internet, no English, no familiar rituals, value system? He and others on the left gloss over the contradictions of integrating people who come from this type of place into the U.K. which has always prided itself on a history of tolerance and freedom but which is now being sorely tried by the open door policies of the government.

Expand full comment
13 more comments...

No posts