"The real question isn’t who belongs, but how we rebuild a shared sense of belonging"
You can't even attempt to answer the latter without answering the former. Cohesion is built on similarity. Contrary to the frequently pushed "diversity is our strength" narrative, the research tends to show that higher diversity results in lower social trust. Having a "shared" culture (or shared anything) is necessarily based on having a point of commonality, something all the people sharing have. In terms of community, especially at the national level, that thing that is shared is often a common history and traditions in that place.
Is this an argument that all nations must use "Blood and Soil" as their point of commonality? No, the US demonstrated that points of commonality can be more abstract, a particular perspective or culture or ideals. OTOH, the US has also demonstrated that when a divide forms in regards to those perspectives, cultures, and ideals, a country reliant on them for unity can fall into deep dysfunction and approach civil war. The less you want to rely on Blood and Soil for national unity, the stronger the shared cultural bonds need to be to make up for it.
Likewise, many studies on the effects of immigration suggest that there are practical upper limits to both the rate of immigration and percentage of the population that are recent immigrants above which cultural assimilation breaks down and immigrants tend to form their own ethnic enclaves, balkanizing the country and weakening any shared sense of culture between them and the native population.
You're right to hesitate to allege racism, but wrong to imply it anyway. A nation, by definition, is somewhat exclusive. It has borders and exists primarily for the benefit of the current inhabitants. All decisions regarding who else should be allowed to immigrate are rightly made from the perspective of how that immigration will affect the current inhabitants. Immigration CAN be a positive. It CAN also be a negative. It is the responsibility of the nation to determine who will benefit the country and who will not when making decisions about immigration policy. So it's an entirely fair issue for those who have been there longer to raise the question of whether more recent immigrants have made their country better or worse, and in cases where the answer is "worse" to change their policy.
So arguing that various words or peoples are also prior immigrants is not a counterargument at all. The people who were there already can choose to welcome and adopt some things and peoples and not others, based on their own interests. They get to decide what they are willing to "blend" in and what they wish to exclude. Immigrants need to be making the case that they are adding something of net value, according to the values of the people they are asking to welcome them. They need to assimilate into the host culture, at least enough to establish sufficient points of commonality for social cohesion and trust to develop.
To "build a shared sense of belonging" there must be something to belong to that is distinct from not belonging. I'm not British, English, or a citizen of the UK. I have no side in those discussions. You apparently do. Yet I don't see any answer here, or attempt at an answer, regarding what you think the proper points of commonality are for your nation to "share" in order to "belong". If you can't articulate who doesn't belong, or what it is that newcomers should assimilate into, you'll also never be able to say who does belong, because you lack references for either the internal or the external. What is it that you belong to? Why? Who would you welcome and would you not welcome to join you? Why?
Thank you for your POV. The article wasn’t to give a solution to this, it was to make those who are asking for people like me to remigrate from the UK to consider whether it’s just people they want to get rid of or does it go further into language. I write about etymology, and so far all words, at some point, were immigrants assimilating within these borders at some point in history. The fact you’ve thought this much about it means my aim for this article is done. It’s part of the conversation, not a solution finder.
Great piece! The remigration enthusiasts had no problem sending British people all over the world to settle new colonies. Should all of their descendants remigrate too? Then we really would have a housing problem.
Yes it is fascinating when you start asking questions what this all really means, but the etymological movement of words has made me question a lot of what is being asked.
I live in a part of England settled by early humans. They all died or left because the Ice Age was too cold for them to survive. Over the last 10,000 years the same land has been settled, colonised and resettled many times. Londinium was a settler-colonial trading post from day one.
That doesn't mean Britain didn't have any stable culture or tradition. It's just that the pace of change massively accelerated with the invention of ship and then aeroplane engines.
In my view, the Blair government's mistake after destabilising the Middle East with the second Iraq war was to assume that large numbers of non-Commonwealth migrants with limited English skills would assimilate as quickly into British society and the economy as Commonwealth migrants had done after 1945. Growing the economy rapidly with cheaper labour was always an experiment, but the conditions in the 90's were very different from the 40's.
"The real question isn’t who belongs, but how we rebuild a shared sense of belonging"
You can't even attempt to answer the latter without answering the former. Cohesion is built on similarity. Contrary to the frequently pushed "diversity is our strength" narrative, the research tends to show that higher diversity results in lower social trust. Having a "shared" culture (or shared anything) is necessarily based on having a point of commonality, something all the people sharing have. In terms of community, especially at the national level, that thing that is shared is often a common history and traditions in that place.
Is this an argument that all nations must use "Blood and Soil" as their point of commonality? No, the US demonstrated that points of commonality can be more abstract, a particular perspective or culture or ideals. OTOH, the US has also demonstrated that when a divide forms in regards to those perspectives, cultures, and ideals, a country reliant on them for unity can fall into deep dysfunction and approach civil war. The less you want to rely on Blood and Soil for national unity, the stronger the shared cultural bonds need to be to make up for it.
Likewise, many studies on the effects of immigration suggest that there are practical upper limits to both the rate of immigration and percentage of the population that are recent immigrants above which cultural assimilation breaks down and immigrants tend to form their own ethnic enclaves, balkanizing the country and weakening any shared sense of culture between them and the native population.
You're right to hesitate to allege racism, but wrong to imply it anyway. A nation, by definition, is somewhat exclusive. It has borders and exists primarily for the benefit of the current inhabitants. All decisions regarding who else should be allowed to immigrate are rightly made from the perspective of how that immigration will affect the current inhabitants. Immigration CAN be a positive. It CAN also be a negative. It is the responsibility of the nation to determine who will benefit the country and who will not when making decisions about immigration policy. So it's an entirely fair issue for those who have been there longer to raise the question of whether more recent immigrants have made their country better or worse, and in cases where the answer is "worse" to change their policy.
So arguing that various words or peoples are also prior immigrants is not a counterargument at all. The people who were there already can choose to welcome and adopt some things and peoples and not others, based on their own interests. They get to decide what they are willing to "blend" in and what they wish to exclude. Immigrants need to be making the case that they are adding something of net value, according to the values of the people they are asking to welcome them. They need to assimilate into the host culture, at least enough to establish sufficient points of commonality for social cohesion and trust to develop.
To "build a shared sense of belonging" there must be something to belong to that is distinct from not belonging. I'm not British, English, or a citizen of the UK. I have no side in those discussions. You apparently do. Yet I don't see any answer here, or attempt at an answer, regarding what you think the proper points of commonality are for your nation to "share" in order to "belong". If you can't articulate who doesn't belong, or what it is that newcomers should assimilate into, you'll also never be able to say who does belong, because you lack references for either the internal or the external. What is it that you belong to? Why? Who would you welcome and would you not welcome to join you? Why?
Thank you for your POV. The article wasn’t to give a solution to this, it was to make those who are asking for people like me to remigrate from the UK to consider whether it’s just people they want to get rid of or does it go further into language. I write about etymology, and so far all words, at some point, were immigrants assimilating within these borders at some point in history. The fact you’ve thought this much about it means my aim for this article is done. It’s part of the conversation, not a solution finder.
Great piece! The remigration enthusiasts had no problem sending British people all over the world to settle new colonies. Should all of their descendants remigrate too? Then we really would have a housing problem.
Yes it is fascinating when you start asking questions what this all really means, but the etymological movement of words has made me question a lot of what is being asked.
I live in a part of England settled by early humans. They all died or left because the Ice Age was too cold for them to survive. Over the last 10,000 years the same land has been settled, colonised and resettled many times. Londinium was a settler-colonial trading post from day one.
That doesn't mean Britain didn't have any stable culture or tradition. It's just that the pace of change massively accelerated with the invention of ship and then aeroplane engines.
In my view, the Blair government's mistake after destabilising the Middle East with the second Iraq war was to assume that large numbers of non-Commonwealth migrants with limited English skills would assimilate as quickly into British society and the economy as Commonwealth migrants had done after 1945. Growing the economy rapidly with cheaper labour was always an experiment, but the conditions in the 90's were very different from the 40's.