I am not sure that at the age of seven I understood what the word ‘immigrant’ meant or that I would soon be an ‘immigrant’ in England. We lived in Cardiff, but my father had found work in West Bromwich as a manager of a printing company and, with my mother, had already moved to a new house in the nearby town of Smethwick. My brother and I were temporary guests of my Aunt Margaret and her husband George. Uncle George worked for Her Majesty's Customs & Excise, but the important thing was that he had a motorbike with a sidecar. It was by this means that he took us over a hundred miles to Smethwick to begin our new life.

There were no motorways and the journey was not very fast or comfortable. However, it was certainly an experience, with my brother (aged 10) sitting on the bike behind George and me in the sidecar (and vice versa). And no, I don't remember any helmets.

It was in fact the longest journey I had ever undertaken - in contrast, from Cardiff to Barry Island was only five miles. But it wasn't just the geography: everything in Smethwick looked different to a child's eyes, from the impenetrable yellow fog, the product of heavy industry, to the equally impenetrable local accent.

At my new school in Smethwick I met other children who spoke what was, to all intents and purposes, another language. At first communication with the other children was almost impossible and it was not very easy to understand the teachers either. But fortunately children's brains are quite adaptable and after a few weeks I could understand most, if not all, of what they were saying.

After the Second World War the British government actually encouraged migration from its colonies in an attempt to fill the many vacancies. People from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, along with African and South Asian groups, moved by the hundreds of thousands to the UK.

And they were not treated very well: there was open racism everywhere at an individual level. Now we have laws against this kind of racism, but instead we see a variation of the concept: open opposition to immigration in general. As we have noted in the past, what was a concern of small groups on the extremist right has spread to the more mainstream parties. It seems to be an almost worldwide phenomenon.

The justification for this concern is a combination of fear - ‘immigrants are all criminals’ - and that immigrants ‘steal our jobs’. Of course there is truth in the third claim that we don’t have the accommodation for a flood of immigrants but, ironically, if we let them in and allowed them to work, we might even overcome our present housing shortage.

It is also a way of safeguarding so-called ‘national identity’ - a version of the conspiracy theory called ‘the grand replacement theory’. With immigrants coming from the four corners of the world, at least until relatively recently (for example, a certain Scottish woman and a German man).

I’m not sure how the USA can claim to have a unified national identity. But in a country where the emphasis is on the line of succession in the names given to their children and grandchildren - Kennedy junior or Fred Smith III - it is probably easy for them to imagine that, in spite of everything, there really is an exclusive national identity - if not local monarchies.

But the desire to remain in the place of one's birth is a very powerful human instinct. It is easy to forget that, even in this age of mass displacement, over 96% of the world's people remain in the country of their birth. Most people who flee disaster do not travel very far, travelling to relative safety within their own or neighbouring countries. They hope to return home as soon as the disaster has passed.

Migration to another country, especially a distant one, is not undertaken by destitute or unambitious people. It requires resources, documents and contacts. Having the will to look for something new and to leave, leaving everything and everyone behind, requires an uncommon mentality.

And to imagine that one does this to pursue a life of crime is ridiculous. It is usually more profitable to be a criminal in your own country, where you understand the system and already have contacts.

The panic about migration is actually a panic about change. Migrants are individuals who make a risky bet: that they can build something new, something better. As we see form the rhetoric of Farage & Co, the opposition to migration is often the reverse: a belief that to protect the future it is necessary to build it in the image of a mythical past - and therefore without migrants. But being fixed in the past, mythical or real, is not a formula for human well-being.

In 2015, in her response to the arrival of so many asylum seekers, mainly from Syria, Angela Merkel said ‘We can handle it’. Almost immediately, however, opinion turned against Merkel.

And a decade after this statement, the far-right party, the AFD, is consistently in second place, with a fifth of the vote, ahead of the February elections. ‘Germany for Germans’ is the slogan, a slogan that can easily be adapted to almost any European country and, above all, to Trump's America. But we are beginning to realise that this approach will make no sense in the fairly near future.

Already we can see difficulties due to the presence of many Syrian doctors in Germany. After the change of power in Syria, the German government decided to stop accepting asylum applications. And if the Syrian government stabilises, one can imagine an outflow of doctors to Syria from a Germany which is already short of doctors.

But you don't have to look to highly trained experts to see how this could work. Here in England we have suffered from a lack of Polish plumbers following Brexit. And we are not the exception. Canada needs construction workers. Italy needs welders and pastry chefs. Sweden needs plumbers but also forestry workers. We have already seen that America needs skilled construction workers, and agricultural workers. But it also needs immigrants to take care of its children and the elderly. I am not convinced that the Trumpian policy of putting all ‘illegals’ in jail in Guantanamo Bay is very wise.

And we have seen another aggravating factor gradually emerge: the worldwide birth rate. Over the years, we have seen the result of China's one-child policy, a policy that continues to produce its effects despite being abandoned a few years ago. Given the initial resistance to the policy, the party would have imagined that, once it was abolished, the desire to have children would lead to the restoration of a ‘normal’ birth rate. But no. Under-population is a major challenge for China today. Fifteen years ago, China had about seven workers for every pensioner. In 2050 there may only be two.

It will almost certainly be amongst the nations competing with the West for migrants in the decades to come. And not only do we see this effect in China: in almost every country we have something similar. Those that reject migrants, whether they recognise it or not, often have a real need for new people. Many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living and take care of their pensioners. They will therefore have not to erect barriers to exclude migrants, but to compete with other countries to attract migrants.

As China has shown, the right-wing response - expelling migrants and convincing citizens to reproduce - is a fantasy. Hungary, the symbol of the right in Europe is a case in point. There, Viktor Orban's government is trying to live with this very fantasy. But since it has been unsuccessful in increasing the birth rate, the government is at the same time trying to attract foreign workers in the face of a chronic labour crisis. This despite Orban declaring during the Syrian crisis in 2016 that ‘Hungary does not need a single migrant to run the economy, sustain the population or give the country a future’.

It will not be a case therefore of having to erect barriers to exclude immigrants, but instead of competing with other countries to attract immigrants, the workers we will all need.

4 February 2025

Paul Buckingham