Plural Identities

I'm taking my boats to another pond!

I wonder if the BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) blackmail tactic from non-doms that they will leave the UK if the government's tax plans are implemented (apparently Greek shipping families are the latest to threaten to take their toys elsewere) is not having quite the desired impact on the government.  Maybe (insert appropriate cliched adjective - dour, son of the manse, puritan) Gordon Brown and any residual socialist feeling in the Cabinet means that they would quite welcome the departure of conspicuously consuming, property price inflating squillionaires.  There is no doubt that the non-doms have pushed the top end of the London property market to weird levels (and as one Old Money Brit living in Holland Park described to me, spending money in mind boggling ways - digging below their Regency houses to build cinemas and swimming pools) which has an unhelpful knock on effect (a 1 bedroom flat in the East End that I bought as a first time buyer in 1988 for £60,000, at the height of that property boom apparently sold for £285,000 last year).  And this and the flash spending (see the Financial Times, How to Spend It magazine for inexplicably award winning stomach churning silliness) surely has a divisive effect on society.   I know it's not very New Labour to be against wealth creation, and Gordon Brown has apparently managed to say New Labour without washing his mouth out afterwards at a Cabinet meeting... but...

Culture not incentives creates successful economies

Almost by way of an answer to Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday, which wondered why Portuguese immigrants to the UK were less successful in getting jobs and staying off benefit than other immigrant groups, this article by Gregory Clark, of the University of California concludes that it is the people, not the incentives or institutions, which make a successful economy.  He proposes further encouragement for schemes which enable people from less successful economies to move temporarily to more successful economies and then bring their new "cultural" attitudes to wealth creation back with them on their return. 

He doesn't mention it, but I think this phenomenon may explain Ireland's recent economic growth, stimulated by Irish returning from the US.  It was noticeable that the Portuguese immigrants in the UK who were interviewed for the Dispatches programme had no intention to move back to Portugal, didn't want to do the kind of low paid jobs that Polish immigrants were happy to take on, and had perhaps imbibed the slacker/sponger aspects of British culture rather than our Protestant work ethic.  Mind you, judging by this slightly Pollyfilla-ish article by Sarah Sands in the Financial Times, it may only be a question of time before the legendary Polish builders start slacking off too.

It is similar to the kind of recommendations made by Philippe Legrain for temporary immigration schemes.

Absence from blogging

I have (by myself! even though I am a girl!) finally got round to setting up my own wireless access.  I never feel like blogging at my PC in my home office, because that is for work, and it is more sociable and motherly to be in the sitting room, doing a bit of surfing and blogging on my laptop, while at the same time helping my son with his K'nex.

I have not found much I wanted to comment on this past month. There was the Commission on Integration and Cohesion report (original website seems to have disappeared in the Brown changeover) which was so practical and sensible, it didn't really hit the headlines, but in its emphasis on local voluntary activities links nicely with an initiative I have just become involved in, the Time Together Refugee Mentoring scheme.

I have not been matched with a mentee yet, but it seems likely it will be someone from the Gateway Protection Programme, and therefore probably Ethiopian.  The Programme doesn't get much publicity, deliberately I suspect, but seems to me to be a very Good Thing, whereby various countries, in partnership with the UN High Commission on Refugees, have a managed programme of bringing in groups of refugees, usually from refugee camps in the developing world (where most refugees are found).  The UK is taking 400 this year, I believe, of which Brighton is taking 40, who are Ethopians in refugee camps in Kenya.  Rather than facing the random process and frequently inhumane treatment arising from trying to reach a country, illegally, and then trying to claim asylum, families and groups are given support and mentoring in resettling in the UK.

Digging for America

From the American novelist Anne Tyler (nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as the greatest novelist writing in English - and I think I agree)'s most recent novel, Digging to America:

Sami, born in America, of Iranian parents rants to his Iranian extended family and friends, all living the in the US, regarding:

The American craze for logic - "Logic's why they're always suing each other.  They believe that for every event there has to be a cause.  Surely somebody is to blame! they say...They feel personally outraged by bad luck"
American so-called openness - "So instantaneously chummy they are, so 'Hello, I love you,' so "how do you do, let me tell you my marital problems,' and yet, have any of them ever really truly let you into their lives?"

Modern, liberal America is embodied in Bitsy, who adopts a Korean and then a Chinese child, and tries to keep them connected to their 'ethnicity' by dressing them in native costume, whilst agonising about  organic food and excoriating Sami's wife, who has also adopted a Korean child, for going out to work two days a week.  Bitsy says, towards the end of this wonderful novel, about the Iranian woman's elegant, also Iranian mother-in-law - "what I really have against her is, she's elusive.  Oh I hate it that world finds elusiveness so attractive!  Elusive people are maddening!  Why doesn't anyone realise?"

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Conway twitty

Well obviously I suppose I should read the report in full, but the way the Civitas report from David Conway has been reported in the Sunday Express is riddled with self contradictions.  If you cite as being particularly pertinent the fact that the July 7th bombers were all second generation immigrants, ie are the product of an immigration inflow dating back 30 years, then why is it suddenly so much more worrying that we have a 42% increase in net immigration last year (which in itself strikes me as a suspect figure, as the UK had net inward migration until recently, so 42% might just represent the fact that there were 100 extra immigrants over emigrants last year, and 142 this year) and the Labour government since 1997 is somehow to blame for it all?

Hear the 'discussion' between Philippe Legrain and David Conway on the Today programme for more of a flavour of the particular axes that David Conway has to grind ("they bring AIDS, TB and marry their cousins!!).  And this gives some clues - there seems to a Christian fundamentalist axe being waved too, plus he's a senior research fellow of religious studies at Roehampton University (formerly World of Carpets) and writes for the Tablet. Nuff said.

Allophilia

We've inadvertently been practising allophilia at my company, Japan Intercultural Consulting, it would seem.   We usually kick off our seminars by asking the participants what they find positive about working with Japanese people (if they are European) or Europeans (if they are Japanese).  When we've forced them to be positive, we then let them get stuck into the 'challenges', because there are no negatives, just challenges, in the modern corporate world...  This approach could also be said to be in line with what is known as "Appreciative Inquiry", which means to start with what is right (about an organisation, for example) rather than what is wrong, which is the usual consulting approach.

More often than not, the European participants say what they like about working in a Japanese company or with Japanese people is the pure and simple fact that it is 'different', alongside predictable aspects like polite, long term planners, loyalty, calm, quick to help, stick to promises etc. 

I wonder what kind of results this sort of approach would yield if applied nationwide.  Whereas I can imagine getting some positive answers, based on actual experience of interacting with Hispanics from non-HIspanic Americans, I fear what kind of response one might get from asking somebody in the UK what they liked about Bengali British, or the "invisible minority" British Born Chinese.  Many probably would not have any experience on which they could base their opinions?  Or else they would find the question troubling in its implication that it is OK to generalise about groups of people based on their ethnic backgrounds.  Allophilia theorists say in response to this that:

efforts to fight racism often err in trying to abolish or minimise the difference between groups—telling people that “we and they are really the same” or “we all belong to a bigger group, and that matters more than any slight difference.”

The experience of Bosnia and Rwanda, where murderous hatreds resurfaced after decades of apparent symbiosis, shows that categories are resilient. That is one reason why Mr Pittinsky thinks that “mere tolerance is inherently unstable.”

Strangers into Citizens

Despite the fact that this campaign has been written about in the Spectator, is supported by Ken Livingstone, our Madeleine of the Sorrows and various Catholic churches, it seems like a good thing to me.

Temporary immigration

There's nothing like a bracing encounter with a taxi driver to shatter one's cosy liberal middle class vision of tolerant Britain welcoming hard working immigrants filling jobs indigenous Brits don't want to do.  Cocooned by a Today programme which runs an item on Blue Peter phone in scandals and John Hurrumphries frothing about the Channel 4 programme on global warming as its lead stories, I had failed to hear about the riots at the Campsfield detention centre.  My Brighton taxi driver had, and his view was "Who's paying for all that damage?  We should never be letting immigrants in here in the first place if you ask me".  I hadn't asked him, needless to say.  It turns out the detention centre has started taking in foreign criminals (the wrongly released ones) in addition to the asylum seekers it was originally designed for, and these people of course have nothing to lose by  further criminal behaviour.

Philippe Legrain has a chapter in his book suggesting that one way of overcoming objections to immigrant workers is to allow them in on temporary stays.  I can foresee lots of problems with enforcement, but I suppose if it allows both immigrants and employers to be more transparent with each other that the employment offer is simply low skill low paid work, this would avoid the kind of situation currently occurring in Japan, whereby foreign workers are being brought in as "trainees" but are in fact only exploited and not trained in any skills at all.

Welcoming immigrants

A Financial Times/Harris poll published a couple of weeks' ago showed that 47% of Britons believe migration by workers within the EU has been negative for the economy, and only 19% think it has been good, whereas in Spain 42% of the population believe migrants have been a benefit and only 24% think they have been bad for the economy.  Two-thirds of those surveyed in Britain said there were too many foreigners.  Although the government line is that the influx of eastern Europeans has been good for the economy, filling skill gaps and keeping wage growth under control, but not causing wage reduction or unemployment, they are introducing an immigration points system next year to give preference to young, highly skilled professionals and entrepreneurs.

Philippe Legrain argues, convincingly, in "Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them" (I'm about half way through...) that actually low skilled, unskilled immigrants are more beneficial  to the recipient country, being happy to do the jobs that native  populations don't want to do, at lower cost, and, as a group, repatriating sums of money larger than most official aid to their (usually poor) countries.  We may be in danger of doing what Australia does, which is importing highly skilled people to do unskilled jobs.

Targetting younger immigrants is more justifiable, as they are more likely to be net contributors in terms of taxes and benefits, particularly given our ageing population.

I think the British hostility to immigration shown in the poll is more to do with our national habit of disagreeing with or not understanding the theoretical, abstract or general, but in practice being unconsciously in agreement.  It's the "I'm not a racist, some of my best friends etc etc" stance.  We also need to realise it is not just our friends that might be "immigrants" but the people we rely on or are connected to in our daily lives - from my own life: a Cuban manicurist, my son's best friends' parents including Italians and Americans, a hairdresser married to a Gambian footballer, a South African dentist and South African vet, a personal trainer married to a Venezuelan water engineer.

Bloody gaijin everywhere

Back in Japan again, hence lack of postings.

I'm struck by how many more 'foreigners' there are both in Tokyo and Kariya, just outside Nagoya, particularly in the client workplace I have been doing my training in.  Partly this is explained by it being Chinese New Year, so a lot of tourists from China and Korea, but also an increase in the numbers of foreigners working in Japan - a deliberate policy on the part of my client. 

The latter is clearly leading to some questioning of what conditions should be set for long term residence in Japan, including education of immigrant children.

And tonight on the news a newscaster said, "interesting that it takes a foreigner to point this out", not in a hostile, more in an off-the-cuff way, about Scott Mallon, ex-Morgan Stanley, 18 years in Japan, heading up an investment fund called Ichigo Asset Management Limited, who has led the first successful shareholder revolt in Japan against a proposed acquisition.  I just saw him on the news and he played it well, perfect polite Japanese, saying he was doing it on behalf of the 40 million shareholders in Japan.