Your man in Westminster is temporarily your man in Walt Disney World so I thought I’d share with you a conversation I had with our Uber driver whilst travelling to one of the parks the other morning. Our driver was Moroccan, degree educated and spoke fluent English. Driving for Uber was just one of the jobs he was doing whilst making a new life for himself in the United States.
I asked him what it was like to be a Muslim in Trump’s America. His answer was sobering. He told me that misunderstanding over his religion was widespread and that Islamophobia was tolerated in a way that other types of racism would never be. Yet despite this hostility, he was steadfast in his commitment to integrate with his new community – “becoming an American” as he put it – whilst maintaining his Islamic faith.
I don’t for a second pretend that US immigration policy is perfect – it patently is not. Nor do I pretend that cultural assimilation in the US is universal. However, as the UK grapples with what a post-Brexit immigration policy might look like, it was useful to be reminded of a couple of things.
Firstly, for all the talk of a points based system, economies still need a good supply of relatively unskilled labour. The Green Card lottery is calibrated to meet the needs of the US economy each year and is regarded as fair simply because it is so random.
Secondly, the debate about immigration in the UK (and the US) is too often dominated by concern over illegal immigration and the plight of refugees. Economic migration can be enormously beneficial; particularly in areas where we have full employment. It just needs to be properly controlled.
Finally, in the UK we’ve always been more cautious when talking about assimilation. We shouldn’t be. Celebrating diversity is important but it is nowhere near as important as celebrating what we all have in common, our shared purpose as a nation and our enthusiasm for being British.