Whose country is it anyway?

France's President Hollande says that the deported 15 year old girl, Leonarda Dibrani, can return to France to finish her education, but that her deported family cannot return with her.

This looked like a desperate attempt to patch up the political damage wrought by the very public story of her deportation following her detention whilst on a school field-trip.  It has emerged that her father lied about where she was born in order to make a better case for asylum - she wasn't born in Kosovo, as he had stated, but in Italy, where she rarely attended school as her father sent her out begging instead.

This story apart, as a regular participant on the BBC's Have Your Say pages, I've contributed to a number of discussions on this the most difficult and perhaps dangerous of political footballs, immigration.

As the years have gone by, so my views on who has the right to live where have changed, from an early traditional Little England viewpoint to something, well, more welcoming.

Back in 1972, when my parents sold our house in Sussex to a couple comprising a white guy and his African wife, our neighbour of two doors away, the postman's wife, remarked "Oh well, I suppose we've been lucky so far."

Immigration is one of those issues which really gets people into self-righteous mode.  The idea that someone comes along from nowhere, settles in your country and in doing so seemingly entitles themselves to all the things that you and your family worked so hard for so long to earn, well that's pretty much anathema to the modern capitalist (or even the modern socialist, it seems to me).  

It strikes me that the source of all this is ownership.  If I have a stake in a country - be that a physical stake, like a house, family wealth, or a non-physical stake, like my own and my family's history, then there is a sense of entitlement and ownership which goes with that.  If someone from outside comes along, then the natural human reaction seems to be to feel a need to defend that stake against further dilution.  So the view that comes out is that these are OUR jobs and OUR benefits and OUR culture and OUR way of doing things.  In this way we can defend the status quo, where we see the value for ourselves.

In 1973, there was a big wave of immigration into the UK from East Africa.  Idi Amin, the president/dictator/whatever of Uganda and his forces forcibly evicted all the Indian and other Asian settlers from the country - around 80,000 in total.  About half of them arrived in the UK on British passports with very little money and even fewer friends.  Even our rural comprehensive school in West Somerset had a few new arrivals from 4,000 miles away.  There was probably a big political debate going on then, I don't remember, all I do remember is that some Indian kids came to our school.  That's the first I remember of anything that had to do with immigration.  Living in a place like West Somerset, it wasn't a big topic of conversation, it happened, we shared, end of story.

A few years later, at the age of nineteen, I moved to London - primarily because there weren't any jobs in Somerset for me outside of what I'd tried already - forestry, painting and decoration, property renovation.  I went to work in a bank, and started at the bottom at the not-very-esteemed rank of junior, or grade 1 clerk if you prefer, and suddenly the world was a very different place.

Back in those days, the world was a very different place.  And banks were too.   All the things which technology does so well for us in 2013, people, aka junior clerks, did then.  In 1979, my first job on arriving in the machine room ("mech" room) of a West End branch of Barclays Bank (which is now a fashion store) was to file statements.  There was a physical file for every account in the branch.  At that time, bank customers could choose whether they received their paid cheques back with their statements or not.  In order to sort this particular need, one of two fifty-something women who'd worked there since the beginnings of time (May and Vera, I seem to remember) would go through the piles of paper and take out any for those customers who did not want to receive their cheques back.  Having spent the first three hours of each day adding up the amounts of cheques on ancient adding machines so that someone could agree their total to a mysterious figure supplied by head office, my next job each day was then to get hold of all the vouchers, as they were called, the cheques for those who wanted them, the credit slips, the debit slips et al, and to file them in the right divider in a drawer somewhere.  After that, there was the day's run of statements, which came off one of those printers that used paper with holes down each side.  First, you had to remove the perforated edges with the holes in them, then split the statements up into single sheets, and then go through all those drawers once again, either filing the statements, if they had "file" printed on them, or putting them in envelopes together with all their relevant vouchers if they had "post" printed on them, after first checking that all the entries on the statement were evidenced with a voucher of some sort.

There was some folk-lore surrounding statements.  People spoke in hushed tones of one junior a couple of years previously who had got so frustrated with the job of filing, they had thrown a basket of cheques and vouchers out of the fourth floor window and let them flutter down onto Regent Street below.  And another one, who left a filing basket of cheques in the loo after an unsuccessful attempt to flush them away, was later discovered to be notable only by their absence.

What has this got to do with immigration, you may well ask?  Well, two things.

First, office jobs are different now.  That job which I did then at the tender age of nineteen doesn't exist any more - it's been replaced by technology.  If it did still exist, then it would be a minimum wage job and I'll bet that more than half the country (the half who get paid substantially more than the minimum wage) would be very happy for an immigrant to do it.

But second, and quite un-related to that first point - this was the first time I had really been exposed to people originating from far-away lands, and what was very interesting to me, second-generation immigrants.  A year after starting at the bank, I moved on to the tills, and became a grade 2 cashier.  Here, I worked on the next till to Sylvia, whose second name I can't remember.  Her family was from Jamaica, but she had been born in London - she lived in Edmonton if I remember right.  What struck me was that, despite her having been born in London, she had a Jamaican accent.  She and I shared a lot of jokes, a lot of laughs together.  Over the course of a year or so, I got to know her pretty well, or at least, her work persona.  She had a great sense of humour, and I remember in particular a day when a middle-aged Caribbean couple came into the bank, and tried to get a forged cheque past her.  She went through all the checks, as were our instructions, but something obviously didn't feel right for her, and she made a call to our fraud centre on a hunch.  She discovered she was right, and she told our two burly messengers to shut the doors and detain the couple whilst the police were called.  The man, having been caught out, started to castigate poor Sylvia with a stream of abuse, saying she had brought shame on her family, that she was a sister and she should have looked after her own.  After they had been taken away by the police, I asked her if their abuse had upset her?  No, she said, of course not.  Firstly, she was honest and they were fraudsters, but also, there was no way she was their sister, her family was from Jamaica, and they were from Antigua.

Whilst I was working in the bank, the riots broke out in Brixton and Tottenham and a few other places.   From memory, they were all about the lack of opportunity in, and the over-policing of, immigrant neighbourhoods.  One of our messengers lived in the middle of Brixton, he had to leave his house for a few days due to the riots and the violence.  They were difficult times, but the outcome of those times, I think, was that the UK came to terms with being a multicultural place, and people's perspectives changed, and became more accepting.

The Scarman Report into the Brixton riots highlighted the high unemployment and lack of amenities at a time of economic recession.  That was thirty years ago.  Whatever happened, whatever people unknown to me did after that, something got better.  London became a multicultural place that was comfortable with itself, as did a number of other cities around the UK.  The violence between white and black that seemed to me to be a common feature of tube travel back in the early 1980s disappeared.  Trevor Macdonald became the chief newsreader on ITN.  John Barnes, and then Ian Wright, blazed the trail in football.  Great Britain started to win Olympic medals again.  People started not to notice colour, it became a secondary, or even a tertiary feature.  Having said all of that, in the team where I work now, those of us who work in front of clients in the UK, sixteen of us, all are white and from the UK, Ireland, the US, Australia and South Africa.

So, that question at the top of the page, whose country is it anyway?

Having lived for eight of the last nine years in France, I guess I've been an immigrant myself.  Having said that, I didn't take anything from France, from the French.  If I saw a dentist, I paid as a private patient - it still cost less than having something done on the NHS in the UK.  I paid my taxes on the house.  I spent money in the local economy - quite a lot of it, as we renovated a house from scratch.  I didn't ever consider myself to be French, I was always an "anglais" but I did feel accepted by the people I met.  I guess it's different, being from Europe, and indeed from the country next door.  But what it did for me was to stop me thinking about myself as British and in fortress Britain, it took me to the next step of thinking about myself as a European.  And from there, it's not too much of a step to just consider yourself a resident of the world.  Once you've got to that point, and you've realised that you have the freedom to go to a great many places, and to stay there if you choose, it's hard to see the world from the blinkered "them and us" perspective that many people seem to have on immigration.

I get paid very well for what I do.  I pay a substantial amount of tax on my earnings.  I don't grudge that in any way, because I recognise that there needs to be some equalisation between those who have been lucky in playing the system, and those who haven't.  But do I think I have the right to choose whether that tax should be spent on indigenous Brits or immigrants?  No, I certainly don't.  What gives me the right to live here?  An accident of birth.  What if I'd been born in Somalia, or El Salvador, or Nepal?  Why should I be denied the opportunity to live here in the UK, just because I was born somewhere else?  Two or three hundred years ago, when the only travel people did generally was migration, then things were different.  But nowadays I can get on a plane with relatively little formality and go to most places in the world, why shouldn't I decide to stay wherever I go?  And if that's the case, why shouldn't others come and stay here?

If I'm not careful, this argument will soon be treading on the even more difficult ground of Property, and that I think needs to be a subject all on its own, so it's probably time to draw stumps here.

So how, or why, has my view changed on immigration over the past thirty or so years?

Since I've been an adult and out in the world, I've never felt "entitled" to a heritage of any particular description.  But the world has changed, immigration is much more of an issue now than it was in the past.  Enoch Powell's famous "rivers of blood" speech back in the 1960s referred to what was, at the time a small minority of immigrants.  His forecast of ten percent of UK residents from ethnic descendancy by 2000 was a little high, but the number was more or less of the right order.  

There are those in our society who feel entitled to something, and they see immigration as a threat to their entitlement.  I have difficulty in seeing things that way, but as I have said before, I think I've had a lucky ride in this life so far, there's often been resource to spare, and so it's difficult to see some points of view.  If I'd had my nose pushed into the grindstone every year for little reward over the last thirty years, maybe I'd have a different attitude.

In any case, with the expansion of the EU, and the lifting of restrictions on migration from the more recent additions in the east, notably Romania and Bulgaria, we are likely to see a further increase in the years ahead.  The "indigenous" UK population is not fully replenishing itself in any case, the birth rate is lower than maintenance level, reflecting other developed societies around the world.   If the impact of the Romanians and Bulgarians is similar to that of the Poles who have made the UK their home in the past ten years, then I can't see too much of a problem.  Maybe that's me being selfish.  I very much appreciate the influx of courtesy and intelligence which has hit the catering and hospitality industries in the UK in the last few years, although I have huge sympathy for the university graduates who are doing those jobs in our economy because they can't get other work.  Hopefully, that will change going forwards and they will be able to get onto more meaningful long-term careers which will help them find fulfilment, and allow the next influx of people to find their own foothold on the ladder to self achievement.