Britons Are Not All Immigrants. Why do People Keep Repeating This Rubbish?

In a recent ‘counter-protest’ against the ‘riots’ there was a man wearing a t-shirt which said, “We Are All Immigrants.”

I am going to be generous and call this a “paradox” and not a “lie”. This is because I’m a sceptic. If I were solemn, stern and severe, then I would have to say that it is a lie. We are not all immigrants.

But with language we have to be sceptical, not pedantic or solemn: and being sceptical involves being humorous, admitting a bit of mixed signals and crossed frequencies and unintended consequences and also – the grand political possibility that we may assert that something is the case when it is not the case (in one sense) although it magically becomes the case (in another sense) just because we have asserted it.

“We Are All Immigrants” is true and not true.

It is not true because we are not all immigrants. On the contrary, as Andrew Collingwood has shown in these pages, following Benjamin Schwarz, three-quarters of us – if we are descended from anyone living in the United Kingdom before, say, 1950 – have roots going back six thousand years and almost all of us have roots going back as far as the Angles and Saxons. No one knows exactly how many Vikings or Normans settled here, probably more of the former than the latter, but it is estimated that the only major ingresses of population between 1100 and 1950 were the Huguenots in the 16th Century and the Jews in the 19th and 20th Centuries, fleeing oppression. In short, historians and historical geneticists agree that Britain had until recently probably the most stable population on earth, not only for reasons to do with limited immigration but also to do with the remarkable continuity of laws and institutions that historians like Hume and Stubbs and Maitland liked to write about and considered constitutive of whatever good order we happen to enjoy.

But it is true because it is not a statement of fact but a statement of right. It exists, in the mind of the t-shirt wearing bien-pensants, as a statement of attitude, belief, aspiration. There has always been plenty of black in the Union Jack, as well as brown, yellow, green, and other assorted rainbow colours.

De facto, then, nay, we are not all immigrants, never were, bloody rubbish.

De iure, then, yea, we are all immigrants, not least because we want to show the world that we respect other cultures, are ‘open’, inclusive, diverse, etc.

Note that the first is a fact, and the second is a hope. The problem is not with the hope itself, but with the fact that the fact is obscured and even obliterated by the hope. The t-shirt-wearing ‘nice’ people believe, somehow, in their tiny factual minds, that the hope that “We Are All Immigrants” is, in fact, a fact.

What is this all about?

It is about the dread word, “solidarity”…

…as it gets mixed up with another word, “liberalism”.

Solidarity is a good old collectivist word. It means the status of “standing solid” with others. Surely a good thing. But it has been given a twist by liberalism.

Liberalism is a good old individualist word, oddly enough. It means the consciousness held by someone “standing somewhat apart from others” but it also means, “nonetheless standing in an attitude of generosity to others”.

What we have nowadays is a mixture of collectivism and individualism in this liberal solidarity. It involves a particularly generous form of standing solid with others. It means siding with the lower, the lesser, the excluded, the exploited, the subjugated. Siding with the murdered, the raped and the hated. With the poor, the lepers, the lame. The immigrants, the refugees, the decolonised. Oh, and, a bit more awkwardly, the women.

And this, in our time, has given us phenomena such as “Je suis Charlie”, #MeToo and now “We Are All Immigrants”.

The logic is: “I, a privileged member of a privileged society, acknowledge my privileges (simplified into a singular ‘privilege’), and ostentatiously and symbolically sacrifice this privilege by making political genuflections to certain (er, privileged) causes which always involve putting myself into the position of the less privileged – thus, happily, though ironically, raising my status.”

“Je suis Charlie” was relatively specific, since it concerned a single event.

#MeToo was a bit odd as it stretched from specific sympathy for those with Hollywood stories of being sexually exploited by others, to a general sympathy for everyone who might ever be exploited in this way. But notice the shape of the slogans. Not “Poor old Charlie” but Je suis Charlie. I sympathise with Charlie so much that I become Charlie. Solidarity becomes identification. Not “#HerToo” and not “#YouToo”, but “#MeToo”. #MeToo says: “Not only you are exploited: it is we women, we everyone, as well.”

And “We Are All Immigrants” generalises the point even further. Not merely is it I, Je, Me, but the collective We. Now we are no longer involved in individual identification: it is no longer a matter of willing, or hoping, or wanting. Nay, it is a matter of destiny. The t-shirt which says “We Are All Immigrants” says in full: “Sorry, you cannot argue with this. Whether you like it or not, Mr. Far-Right, and Mr. Mediocre White Male, you are like the Jamaicans who have come since the 1950s, the Poles who have come since the 2000s, the Bulgarians who have come since the 2010s, and the Syrians and Somalians who have come since the 2020s: you are a bleedin’ immigrant. And as for you, Mr. Nodogsnoblacksnoirish, you should refuse to let yourself into your own pub.”

Our slogan henceforth could be:

#Je-suis-Everyone (except those who reject this sentiment).

The tragedy of all this – the fact that I write about it in comic manner does not mean I want to suggest that it all just Wodehousian persiflage – is that what we are seeing running through our society at the moment is a great battle, or culture war, if you prefer, between the extremist grandads and the centrist dads:

The extremist grandads are the people who – mostly out of prejudice (but sometimes out of conscious reflection) – observe that “We Are Not All Immigrants”: these are the people who base everything on this fact, and then perhaps add to this fact a hope that immigrants can be kept out, or limited somehow (for the sake of nation, tradition, culture, etc.); and
The centrist dads are the people who are ostentatiously ‘nice’ and who therefore care not for facts, and live entirely in the hope that we can “imagine-all-the-people” lying down with lambs and lions and jackals in genial UN- and WEF- and WHO- and IPCC- and IOC-type harmony, living in a world free of Piketty-type inequalities, Fauci-type viruses and Packham-type meltdowns. These are the ones who say: “We Are All Immigrants.”

Needless to say, it is the latter who are either, if we are harsh, lying, or, if we are less harsh, stuck in a paradox. Either way, what they are saying cannot be simply true.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.