How to Address Concerns about Immigration
Every time I say something liberal about immigration or immigrants, people swarm to tell me that I'm being silly and idealistic and we have to respect people's genuine, legitimate concerns.
Since they rarely say "these are my concerns" - there's a lot of hand-waving and a lot of pre-emptive defensiveness about how not-racist they are - it's difficult to figure out sometimes what the concerns are.
Sometimes the acceptably non-racist immigration concern is the "drain on infrastructure," but the tide is already starting to shift on that one as people realize the infrastructure is underfunded by local and national governments rather than overused.
Sometimes the concern is about symbolic threats: hearing many languages on the bus, seeing a shelf of Polish food in the supermarket, Muslims celebrating their own holidays, and the general sense that the UK is not in control of its borders. That last point was made by shadow education secretary Angela Rayner as quoted by the Telegraph near the end of Labour's conference: "Immigration is a good thing for the UK but what is not good is when people don't know about what numbers we have. I think you do have to talk about those things. People raise that on the doorstep all the time and it is important that we deal with those concerns."
And it is certainly true that "people don't know what numbers we have." According to an Ipsos Mori poll, Brits think on average that immigrants make up 24.4% of the population; in reality it's 13%.
But there's no indication that she addresses these concerns on the doorsteps with "About eight million people in the UK were born outside it." Does she say "About 8% of the population are not British citizens"? Does she say "Less than 3% are recent migrants to the UK"? (I got all these numbers from Oxford University's Migration Observatory in a few seconds' googling; it's not difficult to find out.)
Does she say "We're used to hearing about 'mass, uncontrolled' immigration but it's neither of those things? People who hear about my experiences with UK immigration are shocked at how controlled it is. The process has gotten increasingly expensive, intrusive, prolonged and stressful in recent years, to appease voters' "concerns."
But most voters don't know about the barriers; they're unlikely to know any immigrants well enough to hear their stories firsthand (areas of lowest immigration are regularly shown to be the most "concerned" about it and to vote accordingly) and the media and politicians still go on about "mass, uncontrolled immigration, so people think there's still cause for concern.
So the immigration controls haven't done anybody any good, and have brought misery and suffering to the lives of millions of people - and if you want to be nationalistic about it, many of those suffering people British, living with the fear or the reality of being separated from non-British spouses or children because of these immigration controls - as Tim Farron has said, three-quarters of British people cannot afford to fall in love with someone foreign.
Does Angela Rayner address the immigration concerns like that? Does anyone?
This is not a problem that can be solved by pandering to it. As the post-referendum rise in racist, xenophobic hate crimes illustrates, there are British people for whom any non-white people or speakers of languages other than English (even if they speak English as well!) are too many. This is what we as Lib Dems need to address, from policy to doorsteps.
* Holly is an immigrant, bisexual, disabled, and probably can tick most other diversity boxes that you have handy.