A comprehensive survey on attitudes to immigration on both sides of the Atlantic has just been carried out by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, with people interviewed in the US, Canada, Britain and five other Western European countries.
http://www.gmfus.org/...
The results are very revealing and often contradictory, certainly in the case of Britain.
The most striking result is that British people are far more likely than those in other countries to complain that there are too many immigrants in our country. 59% of British people agreed with this, whereas just 27% said so in Germany and the Netherlands, despite the fact that both these countries have similar numbers of foreign born citizens, and similar levels of population density.
66% of Brits say immigration is more of a problem than an opportunity. The next highest figure was 53% in Spain, and in Canada just 27% agree.
The figures also show that British people are far more likely than people in other European countries to want to deny services to illegal immigrants, though if push came to shove I imagine very few of us would deny a child their right to an education, or deny treatment to a dying child just because their parents happened to be here illegally.
Brits are also far more likely (58%) than other Europeans (35%) to believe immigrants take jobs and drive down wages.
Looking at these figures, I wouldn't blame you if you concluded we were a pretty bigoted, xenophobic society, yet the picture is not quite so simple. Our attitudes to immigration are contradictory, we have widespread opposition, often downright hysteria, to the idea of immigrants, yet the vast majority of us are not hostile at all to the actual immigrants.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/...
This survey doesn't reveal a bigoted nation but rather a confused one. For 100 years, we have conducted our conversation about immigration in terms of "illegals", "bogus asylum-seekers" and "welfare scroungers" out to steal "British jobs from British workers". Since the Edict of Expulsion in 1290 which saw England's entire Jewish population deported, public debate about foreigners has always been more hysterical than objective.
And yet we are also, I think, a tolerant and broad-minded country in the main. Over centuries, we have experienced wave after wave of migrants and seen how the new arrivals have added something to our cultural tapestry. If we look back far enough, all of us will find elements of migrant stock
The article above suggests that our fear of immigration may be partly down to our being an island state, therefore more introspective and programmed to see immigration as an invading armada. This can also be seen in Australia, culturally similar to Britain and also an island state, during the recent hysteria about boatloads of refugees off the coast.
Over the centuries we have been conditioned to think 'threat' whenever thinking of immigration. Yet once the immigrants themselves are here we are very accepting towards them and wonder what the hell all the fuss was about. As the article mentions, we have absorbed wave after wave of immigration, usually first with paranoia, then once the immigrants had actually settled, a realisation that the sky had not fallen. As a result of this, race relations are no worse than they are in mainland Europe, and the poll shows we more positive about the integration of immigrant communities than many other European countries are.
This I believe is where the BNP have gone seriously wrong. There is a lot of space in the market for a stridently anti-immigration party, who would campaign to put a complete halt to immigration. But the British people have no place in their minds or heart for an anti-immigrant party, a party that openly seeks to deport immigrants who have already settled here. People have very different attitudes towards 'immigration' and immigrants who are already here, and when the BNP bash the latter they just sound bigoted and unhinged to the average British person.
I hope this doesn't affect our image too much, because believe me when I say we're no more intolerant than any other country, we've just been condition over the centuries by an immigration debate dominated by hysteria and dishonesty, in which the most extreme voices always dominate. We have very different attitudes towards 'immigration' and 'immigrants', and I really wish people would be able to connect the two.