The United Kingdom has a long and proud history of immigration. Largely, immigrants built and continue to sustain this nation. However, for as long as I can remember, policy on migration has been a matter weighing on public consciousness. Recently, a large spike in anti-immigration sentiment online and elsewhere marks a concerning step in the decline of Britain towards racial intolerance and authoritarianism.
It is a poorly kept secret that social media platforms push an agenda upon their users. It’s basic human psychology; you can only react to what you see. If all you see are videos of immigrants crossing the channel in small boats, making ‘illegal’ food deliveries or living in hotels at the expense of the taxpayer, you are bound to raise an eyebrow. Accompany the video with a faceless commenter remarking that ‘Britian is full’, or that we should ‘Stop migrants draining our public services’ and, if you don’t know any better, you will start internalising their rhetoric. If you are unfortunate enough to ingest too much, you’ll start parroting it, and the cycle continues.
The reality of course is that the videos you watch, and the news headlines you read are curated. Spun, edited or purposefully selected to invoke a sense of anger or disgust. You will notice that the headlines about white British-born offenders are not anywhere near on the same level of public interest. In no small part, these social media spheres contributed to the recent and worrying rise in violence exhibited by xenophobic mobs outside of hotels temporarily housing asylum seekers.
Nick Timothy, a Conservative MP, deleted a post he had made on Twitter accusing the Metropolitan Police of ‘literally giving a full police escort’ to an ‘illegal Deliveroo driver’. This was based on a video he had seen online which appeared to show this. In reality, the driver was protected by police as he was trying to make a delivery to a migrant hotel but was immediately surrounded and threatened by a violent mob protesting outside. As per the Met, there is ‘no evidence’ to suggest that the driver was working illegally. A bald-faced lie by a Member of Parliament is no small matter, but this is just one of the thousands of examples of misinformation being pumped into public forums daily in relation to migrants.
I watched a YouTube video the other day talking about how long the waiting list for driving tests had become. The presenter, however, did not blame the DVSA, the government, or anybody with the power to change anything. Instead, he states that ‘Illegal immigration and mass migration is what is contributing towards the waitlists.’ Obviously, his claims are based on no real evidence. In truth, he has no way of knowing the demographic or migration status of people booking driving tests. The fact of the matter is that successive governments have failed to increase the amount of funding allocated towards test centres and the DVSA sufficiently enough that 81% of the nation’s test centres have reached their ‘maximum waitlist’. The YouTuber, like many of the British public, are blaming the wrong people for the problems faced by the nation today.
Driving tests are a good example, but by far not the only or most important. You will hear stories of wait times for a GP appointment, the lack of employment opportunities, or the housing crises across cities in the country. The people all too often blamed are those washing onto our shores in horrifically overcrowded, unsafe small boats. All of the aforementioned problems are not their fault. They could easily all be fixed if the government had financed our public services properly, instead of giving away multi-million pound contracts to their friends, refusing to raise minimum wage in line with inflation, or funding a genocide in Gaza?
The other side of the problem is the ignorance of the benefits our society reaps from immigration. The people rioting outside of ‘migrant hotels’ conveniently forget that the taxi driver who took them home after one too many pints at the pub was an immigrant. Or that the doctor they saw earlier that week was too. People like my father, a migrant from Syria, who is now a GP in a small British town working himself to the bone to provide for the sick and elderly, as well as his family. Recently, he was on a team of 5 doctors working from 8 in the morning to midnight. Not a single native among them. Are these the people who are ‘bogging down’ our nation?
The government, other parliamentarians and third parties want you to blame immigrants. Because as long as we’re blaming each other, we’re not blaming them. Our problems are not caused by the people in small boats. They’re caused by the people in Westminster.
