The shores of America

I'm reading two books at the moment which both speak to the immigrant experience in twentieth century America, albeit in different ways, The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader and The Last Sultan, Robert Greenfield's biography of Ahmet Ertegun, a founder in the late forties of Atlantic Records, the soul and R&B label whose roster of artists included Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

Bellow was the son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire who had travelled from St. Petersburg to Chicago via Canada whereas Ertegun arrived in Washington, D.C. with his jazz-loving brother Neshui in 1935 from London where their father had been the Turkish ambassador (The Last Sultan also discusses the Erteguns' relationship with the Chess brothers Leonard and Phil, founders of the Chicago blues record label of the same name and themselves Jewish immigrants from a town in Poland, now Belarus).

There a couple of things which immigrants bring to their artistic endeavours, whether literary or musical. One is the ability to see the society they have joined with the perspective of an outsider, and the other is a blindness to its barriers and rules: I'd guess, for example, that Ertegun was the only student at the exclusive private prep school he attended as a teenager in Maryland who bought records and went to jazz clubs in Washington's black section.

No borders

Home Secretary Theresa May continues to flounder over allegations that she ordered immigration officers to relax passport controls for both EU and non-EU nationals.  Labour has predictably jumped on the issue to claim that "Britain's borders aren't safe under the Tories".  What very few people question is the need for immigration and passport controls in the first place.

Immigration controls are usually presented as natural and having always existed.  Neither of these things is true  In Britain, immigration controls date from the Aliens Act 1905 which resulted from an anti-semitic campaign by the far-right British Brothers League to restrict Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire. 

It is true that if the entire population of the world decided to move to London tomorrow, it would cause problems in housing, transport etc.  But how likely is that if immigration controls were scrapped?  As it stands, the entire population of the rest of the European Union (somewhere between 400-500 million people) have the right to live in Britain, as did all Commonwealth citizens up to the 1962 Immigration Act and as have Irish people since Ireland gained its independence in 1922.  The actual numbers of immigrants has largely depended on the economic conditions in the countries they came from, the demand for labour in Britain and access to cheap long-distance transport.

The fact that the EU allows free movement of its (mainly white) citizens but restricts entry to Arab, African, Asian and Hispanic people outside it is clearly racist.  The fact that Britain is an island also probably has something to do with the obsession about controlling borders.  The Schengen Agreement means that citizens of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and other EU countries can travel between them without a passport. 

And let's not forget that the immigration laws are routinely used to intimidate and victimise migrant workers, as in this case of a cleaner and RMT member currently facing deportation.