Sunday 19 September 2010

I've always been unmoved by arguments that immigration benefits' the country economically. Maybe it does, if you eat at restaurants rather than working in them, and then hurry away to expensive areas where no immigrants live. But for most people it's an unmixed curse.
For the migrants themselves it is often a journey into exploitation and squalor, miserable pay and ten-to-a-room living conditions. It holds down wages and puts unwanted pressure on services, transport and housing which are already under strain.
But there's something else about it that is profoundly, heartbreakingly sad. When so many of our fellow creatures don't speak our language, don't understand our laws and customs, don't know our history, can't read our facial expressions or work out when we're joking, we live at a lower level than we did before.

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