Them and Us

How immigrants and locals can thrive together

Philippe Legrain

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781786077912
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Winner of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equality Award at the Business Book Awards 2021

‘Underpinned by scholarship...entertaining…Legrain’s book fizzes with practical ideas.’ The Economist


‘The beauty of diversity is that innovation often comes about by serendipity. As Scott Page observed, one day in 1904, at the World Fair in St Louis, the ice cream vendor ran out of cups. Ernest Hami, a Syrian waffle vendor in the booth next door, rolled up some waffles to make cones – and the rest is history.’

Filled with data, anecdotes and optimism, Them and Us is an endorsement of cultural differences at a time of acute national introspection. By every measure, from productivity to new perspectives, immigrants bring something beneficial to society. If patriotism means wanting the best for your country, we should be welcoming immigrants with open arms.

PART ONE
FEAR AND LOATHING

 

INTRODUCTION

The Populist Peril

It was a scorching hot August weekend in the border city of El Paso, Texas. Saturday morning shoppers congregated in the air-conditioned cool of the Cielo Vista Mall. Among them were many Mexicans who had crossed over to the United States to shop at Walmart, along with locals stocking up at the crowded hypermarket.

One happy young couple who had recently celebrated their first wedding anniversary were out shopping for school supplies. Jordan Anchondo had just dropped off her five-year-old daughter, Skylin, at cheerleading camp and was at Walmart with her husband, André, and their two-month-old son, Paul.

Suddenly shots shattered the peace. A gunman was firing into the crowd of shoppers. Many ran. Some cowered. Others tried to hide. André leapt in front of Jordan to protect her, while she shielded their baby. The shooter mercilessly gunned them both down. Baby Paul was grazed by a bullet and suffered broken bones, but survived thanks to his parents’ bravery.

Seemingly senseless mass shootings are all too common in the US, a fractious country with easy access to semi-automatic weapons. But the deaths of Jordan, André and twenty other innocent victims in El Paso were not random. Their alleged assassin, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist called Patrick Crusius, deliberately targeted Latinos. Jordan was not Latina; her husband, a car mechanic and entrepreneur, was the locally born son of a Mexican immigrant.

‘This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,’ stated a message posted just beforehand on 8chan, an online message board favoured by far-right immigrant-haters. Put aside the fact that El Paso was actually founded by the Spanish and that Texas was part of Mexico until 1836. The mass murder in El Paso was an act of terrorism – an act of unlawful violence and intimidation against civilians in the pursuit of political aims. Although President Donald Trump subsequently sought to distance himself from the racist hate that motivated it, the terrorist’s manifesto echoes Trump’s repeated mischaracterisation of the peaceful attempts of people to cross the US-Mexican border, often to seek asylum, as an ‘invasion’.1

Words matter. When Trump visited El Paso after the attack, purportedly to console its grieving residents, he was met with protests. (He also had his picture taken – grinning, thumbs up – with baby Paul and his relatives.)2 In his 2019 State of the Union address seven months earlier, President Trump had slandered the peaceful, Latino-majority city. He had falsely claimed that El Paso was ‘one of our nation’s most dangerous cities’ until the erection of a border wall to separate it from its neighbouring Mexican city, Ciudad Juárez.3 Soon after, he compounded the insult when, at a rally on the city’s outskirts, he accused unauthorised migrants of ‘murders, murders, murders, killings, murders’, while the crowd bayed, ‘Build the wall!’

Yet it was actually a white supremacist, from a town more than 1,000 kilometres away, who massacred innocent people in that diverse city – a successful union, like Jordan and André were, of races and cultures.

Polarised

Saturday 3 August 2019, the date of the El Paso terror attack, happens to be when I started writing this book. That tragedy is an extreme symptom of a debate that is tearing Western societies apart. Are immigrants and people with a foreign background a threat and a burden – or do they in fact have a lot to contribute? Are divisions between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ set in stone – or can people of different ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds live together and mix peacefully and productively? In short, diversity: merit or menace? Those are the big questions this book addresses.

The El Paso attack is part of a global rise in far-right, anti-immigrant terrorism. In 2011 Anders Breivik, a white supremacist, assassinated seventy-seven people, mostly young social democrat activists, in Norway. In 2018 an Italian man in the town of Macerata shot six people whom he thought were African; the previous year he had stood as a candidate for Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega Nord, now known as Lega. In 2019 an Australian gunman massacred fifty-one people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. And in February 2020 a neo-Nazi who expressed hatred for non-Germans shot nine immigrants dead in the German town of Hanau.4

Individual politicians who stood up for immigrants have also been murdered. Days before the UK’s referendum on European Union (EU) membership in 2016, British MP Jo Cox was murdered in the street by a neo-Nazi who shouted ‘Put Britain first!’ In 2019 Walter Lübcke, a German politician who supported his country’s welcoming of refugees, was also killed; the mayors of Cologne and Altena have been stabbed for similar reasons but fortunately survived.5

Overall, far-right terrorists murdered 109 people in the US between 11 September 2001 and September 2019 – slightly more than Islamist jihadi ones did6 – and caused 70 percent of terrorism deaths between 2009 and 2018.7 Police in the UK say the fastest-growing terrorist threat is from the far right, which was associated with seven of the twenty-two plots to cause mass casualties between March 2017 and September 2019.8 Globally, there were thirty-eight fatal far-right terrorist attacks in 2018, up from nine in 2013.9 In the West, there were more than twice as many far-right terrorist attacks in 2018 than Islamist ones.10

While violence remains rare, the international debate about immigration is also increasingly inflamed. In the final days of the Brexit referendum campaign, leading Leave campaigner Nigel Farage stood before a poster depicting a huge line of non-white refugees and warned that Europe was at ‘breaking point’. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, claims Muslim migrants threaten Europe’s Christian identity and are ‘the Trojan horse of terrorism’. Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, has suggested that seriously ill asylum seekers detained offshore and admitted into the country for medical treatment could be ‘paedophiles, rapists and murderers’.11 Trump himself was categorical about Mexican immigrants at the launch of his first presidential campaign in 2015. ‘They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,’ he railed, pledging to build a border wall to keep them out.

Immigration is perhaps the most controversial issue in the West today. Our (relatively) open and liberal societies are under attack by people who blame outsiders in general and immigrants in particular for everything they think is wrong with their lives and society as a whole. Immigrants stand accused of stealing jobs, depressing wages, straining public services, sponging off welfare, pushing up house prices, increasing congestion, threatening our identity, security and way of life – and even eating the Queen’s swans.12

In the US, the fact that Trump said outrageous things about Mexicans and Muslims and still became president has broken taboos and made it easier for others to express more extreme anti-immigrant views. In many other countries, slandering immigrants is deemed much more acceptable than explicit racial prejudice. Politicians dehumanise them. Tabloid headlines vilify them. Radio shock jocks and Fox News TV pundits incite violence and blare out abuse.13 Facebook groups foment extremist views. No wonder hate crimes have soared in many countries.14 Violent words sometimes beget violent actions.

More broadly, anti-immigrant feeling is a rallying cry for President Trump and far-right populist nationalists in Europe whose rise poses an even greater threat to our societies. In the 2019 European Parliament elections, Matteo Salvini’s Lega came first in Italy, as did Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is the largest opposition party in parliament. The Swiss People’s Party is the country’s largest. In November 2019 the Sweden Democrats, who have neo-Nazi roots, topped the polls for the first time,15 while the Forum for Democracy was the second most popular party in the Netherlands. Austria’s Freedom Party was in government in 2018–19.

This trend is not universal. A new anti-immigrant party failed to win any seats in Canada’s 2019 election. Ireland lacks a significant far-right party. In Australia Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has faded. Portugal’s National Renovator Party has no seats and hardly any votes.

There is no room for complacency. Until recently, the far right had failed to make inroads in Spain either, perhaps because memories of General Franco’s fascist dictatorship were still fresh, as well as because many Spaniards had relatives who had emigrated. But in the November 2019 elections the anti-immigrant Vox party came third, its far-right views having been legitimised by centre-right parties that had sought to capitalise on opposition to Catalan separatism by becoming more nationalistic.

Far-right populist nationalists blame corrupt liberal elites (their enemies) for betraying ‘real people’ (their supporters) by bringing in unwelcome foreigners. They exploit fears that white locals are being replaced by non-white outsiders.16 As well as threatening immigrants and people from an immigrant background, they also often have a reactionary social agenda. Through their typically close ties to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, they are a menace to Europe’s security. They want to undermine, take over, leave or destroy the EU. And as Hungary’s example shows – which Orbán has turned into a corrupt, authoritarian state where the press is muzzled, the judiciary is politicised, helping refugees is criminalised and he can now indefinitely rule by decree – populist nationalists ultimately threaten liberal democracy itself.17

Even out of government, far-right populists can wield huge political influence. Witness how then prime minister David Cameron called the Brexit referendum to stave off the perceived threat from Farage. While the collapse of Farage’s successive political outfits has left Britain without a viable far-right party, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is often opportunistically Trump-like. Having long insisted Europeans were welcome to stay in Britain after Brexit, during the 2019 election campaign he said they should no longer be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Previous Books by Philippe Legrain
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One. Fear and Loathing
• Introduction
• 1. Why is Immigration So Unpopular?
• Part Two. People on the Move
• 2. A Very Brief History of Migration
• 3. Post-1945 Migration
• 4. The Current Picture
• 5. Future Flows
• Part Three. Economic Dividends
• 6. The Lottery of Life
• 7. Dynamism Dividend
• 8. Diploma Dividend
• 9. Deftness Dividend
• 10. Diversity Dividend
• 11. Drudgery Dividend
• 12. Demographic Dividend
• 13. Debt Dividend
• 14. Development Dividend
• Part Four. Cultural Challenges
• 15. Cultural Cornucopia
• 16. Irregularity
• 17. Identity
• 18. Illiberalism
• 19. Integration
• Part Five. Seeking Solutions
• 20. Persuading Sceptics
• 21. Conclusion. Open Future(s)
• Notes