Some months ago, I read a supremely instructive book: Bloody Foreigners – the story of immigration to Britain, by Robert Winder. It was extremely well reviewed, and described by The Sunday Times as “a breath of fresh air in a foul and fetid room”. That reviewer noted of Britain: “Our aristocracy was created by a Frenchman, William the Conqueror, who also created our mediaeval architecture, our greatest artistic glory. Our royal family is German, our language a bizarre confection of Latin, Saxon and, latterly, Indian and American. Our shops and banks were created by Jews. We did not stand alone against Hitler; the empire stood beside us. And our food is, of course, anything but British.”
I found the book particularly interesting because so much of what Winder writes about is relevant to our own situation, though on a markedly smaller scale. “Britons are characterised by a marked lack of interest in anyone else,” Winder writes. “This famous insularity may at best lead to a live-and-let-live state of affairs in which, so long as the neighbours are not bothering anyone, they can do as they damn well please. But at its worst it can curdle into vicious hostility. The demonisation of asylum seekers as indolent scroungers obscures the fact that immigrants are by definition entrepreneurs. No one more gloriously passes the test proposed by Norman Tebbit’s disdainful insistence that people should get on their bikes in search of work than those who have crossed the world in search of a better life. In another, parallel, irony, many of those quickest to oppose the persistent desire of migrant workers to come to Britain are also the quickest to exploit the cheap labour they offer. Their houses are cleaned, cars washed, extensions built, coffees mixed, drinks served and children cared for on the cheap, and often in the tax-evading invisible economy, by migrant workers.”
This is all too accurate when said about Britain, and it is accurate too when transposed to Malta.
Robert Winder continues: “All the rhetoric that seeks to depict modern immigration into Britain as a hazard, putting at risk a thousand-year way of life, plays false with historical truth: Britain has always accommodated strangers. One of the reasons why it has been able to absorb so many overseas citizens in recent times is that people have been settling here since time began. Immigration is an old, old story, one that defines the texture of British life every bit as significantly as our grand heritage of stately homes – many of which themselves have immigrant foundations…. Immigration has given us many institutions that seem built into our heritage: Rothschilds, Warburgs, Barings, Reuters and Cazenove in the City; Marks & Spencer and Dolland & Aitchison in the high street; Trust House Forte and Tesco in our ring roads…Then there are the literary figures who would not be here if they or their parents had not fixed their sights on Britain – T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Germaine Greer, Doris Lessing and many others. The most prominent historian of these islands, Simon Schama, is himself the son of an immigrant. Immigration has given us shady tycoons (Robert Maxwell), respected generals (Peter de la Billiere), noted intellectuals (George Steiner), amazing musicians (Alfred Brendel) and brilliant athletes (Linford Christie). There is much more to this story than the drug-dealing yardies and fiery clerics often deployed as immigrant archetypes.” Winder forgot to mention Britain’s most celebrated playwrights, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, who was born Tomas Straussler into a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia.
For us to be unaware of the recent success stories of immigrants to Britain is forgivable – though only just, given our 200-year links with that country and the constant deluge of British media. That we fail to remember how we are ourselves an immigration population is unbelievable. The ebb and flow of people to and from these islands has been constant through the centuries, stopping – or rather, slowing down – just long enough to give us a sense of nationhood.
And even that sense of nationhood was deliberately forged, for political reasons, rather than arising naturally. Our surnames, like our physical characteristics, are a fascinating cornucopia. It would have been even more varied had the large numbers of Muslim and Jewish slaves, who converted to Christianity and stayed on here after slavery was abolished only 200 years ago, not been obliged to change their surnames to “Christian” ones on conversion. What we are today is the result of all those mixed and varied influences. But that doesn’t need explaining: you can tell just by looking at us.
In conversation recently, an acquaintance explained his opposition to the introduction of “foreign elements” in our society on the grounds of what “it did to Britain”. Do we want to end up like that, he asked me? I said that would be rather nice – though it would be preferable if the immigrants had legal status rather than illegal. Our economy and society are roughly at the point that Britain’s were at when the doors were opened to legal immigration in the 1950s and early 1960s: stultified and stultifying, same-y, boring, lacking direction and with no dynamism.
If you don’t feel the spirit, it’s not because you are temporarily depressed. It’s because there isn’t any. There is a general feeling of having run up against a brick wall. It’s not just you; it’s the entire country. When societies reached this point in the past, their rulers went to war to distract them, inject adrenalin and unite them in a common objective. Or they would organise a magnificent royal wedding. Such things are no longer possible.
The arguments used against immigration are only nominally against illegal immigrants. They could just as easily be used against any kind of immigrant. But in less than five years, our period of grace, in which non-Maltese EU citizens are prevented from working here with absolute freedom, will be over. Anyone can come and work or trade here, or even sit around the streets and beg or busk, as long as he or she is a citizen of one of the other 24 EU member states.
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The point is that change is the very essence of successful survival. Societies and economies that remain static, or virtually static, eventually atrophy. That is what almost happened to Britain after the Second World War, before new waves of immigrants were allowed in, including many Maltese. We are now in that position. The argument is used that the economy cannot support so many people, but the opposite is the case: there are not enough people to support the economy. Resisting change will not help us to survive; it will make us redundant and irrelevant. My acquaintance who fears that what happened to Britain will happen to Malta sees only the downside. He is repulsed by miscegenation, put off by the presence of mosques, attributes to immigrants the rise in crime, and sees them as parasites in their host society. He thinks of them as leeching something out of Britain’s society and economy, rather than contributing, and heavily so.
He didn’t have much to say when I reminded him (perhaps he never knew) that many of Britain’s longest-lasting businesses had been built, over the last three centuries, by immigrants, mainly Huguenots and Jews who had fled persecution in their homeland. He did remember, because he reads The Sunday Times Rich List, which names the wealthiest individuals in Britain, that many of the names on it are not British names – and that the ones at the very top of the list are not British at all, or are British only by naturalisation.
As Wilder put it: “All over Europe, economists are nervously scanning demographic trends and tripping over one inescapable fact: if national economies are going to grow to a level sufficient to provide pensions for the existing working population, then serious immigration is a necessity, whatever anyone feels about it. Few politicians choose to spell this out as boldly as they should, but immigration, far from being a threat to our way of life, might one day turn out to be quite the opposite: our best hope.”
If the original “Maltese” had successfully fought off all incursions of outsiders, there would be only a few thousand of us now, living primitive lives and rendered hideous and stupid by inbreeding. Instead, we are a nation-state with most of the trappings of one, including a government, a civil service, legislation and an international airport. And unlike, say, Pantalleria or Djerba, we direct our own destiny. Whether we direct it down the plughole or not is entirely up to us.