Immigration

Wokeness: the far right’s last scapegoat

“Do-gooders” are no longer just a nuisance – their “decadence”, according to populist demagogues, is now an existential threat to civilisation

“Right on”. “Politically correct”. “PC”. “Social justice warriors”. “Virtue signallers”. Now “woke”. Rightwingers and authoritarians of all stripes have been sneering at liberals, leftwingers and anyone with a conscience for at least 50 years, and the onslaught has intensified in step with social media’s dominance of the infosphere.

But recently, there’s been a noticeable increase in stridency – and a worrying raising of the stakes.

Whereas not so long ago, people who discussed pronouns, chucked statues into rivers and sat on roads were merely a nuisance, of late they have evolved, if we are to believe some commentators, into a clear and present danger to our way of life. It turns out they’re not just a symptom of the collapse of democracy in the western world, but a root cause.

Current Tory party chair and former anti-culture culture secretary Oliver Dowden, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in February, talked of the west being “in the clutches of a painful woke psychodrama”, afflicted by a “dangerous form of decadence”; Sherelle Jacobs delivered a pale imitation of his pale speech in the Telegraph; while Matthew Syed in the Times bewailed the “poison introduced into the vitals of the system” (paywall). As usual, these talking points have been taken up and repeated, usually verbatim, across the political right.

But unlike the hordes of reflexive retweeters, I have questions.

1. What do they mean by decadence exactly? What form is this terrifying descent into depravity supposed to be taking, and how is it unfolding?

Decadence comes from the same root as the word decay, and as I used to understand it, means something not dissimilar: a marked deterioration in standards, of art, for example, or of the values of a nation.

And indeed, such matters have been the bugbear of small- and capital-C conservatives since time immemorial: think the original Cancel Queen, Mary Whitehouse, having an embolism over Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling (before presenting Jimmy Savile with an award for “wholesome family entertainment”), or Catholics soiling their cassocks over a collectible card game.

It has also, we should remember, been an obsession for some of the west’s bitterest enemies. Adolf Hitler outlawed all “degenerate” art as “cultural Bolshevism” (in his view, cultural degeneracy went hand in hand with physical degeneracy); Osama bin Laden demanded that the west “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest”; while Josef Stalin kept the peasants on side partly by issuing endless direful warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the west.

But it doesn’t seem to be that sense of decadence that Dowden, Jacobs and Syed are fretting about. Their diatribes make no mention of fornication, slovenliness or drug-taking, of violent computer games or the corruptive influence of the Teletubbies. In fact, you have to go through all three jeremiads with a fine toothcomb to find any examples of the hell-in-a-handbasket horrors they’re deploring.

Syed’s piece contains a throwaway line about the “infiltration of the universities” (for which he fails to provide any evidence, or indeed any hint as to what shadowy cabal might be masterminding it), but it’s mostly an attack on “me first” society, global finance and British foreign policy of the last 30 years. Can the blame for any of that really be laid at the door of human rights lawyers or Just Stop Oil, whose byword is “me last” and who are generally bitterly opposed to the financial and petrochemical giants and the concept of war?

Ordinarily, I’d presume that Syed was ordered to shoehorn in the anti-woke lines by his editor at the Times, but the writer himself chose to promote it on Twitter with the following quote:

While Xi Jinping was resetting the world order through his Belt and Road initiative and Vladimir Putin was recreating the Russian empire by annexing Georgia and Crimea, we were arguing over gender-neutral toilets
Matthew Syed, Twitter, 6/3/22

It’s certainly clickbaity, and, as was undoubtedly intended, duly generated its fair share of pop-eyed “debate” on everyone’s favourite social media battlefield. But as with most clickbait, it’s a bunch of shit.

For one thing, as a comparison, it’s up there with the far right’s very worst for sheer asininity. Are we really supposed to accept that the geopolitical policy decisions of the unassailable ruler of a major world power are equivalent to the bickerings of a handful of 19-year-old Durham University students? Mightn’t those worthy woke warriors be setting their sights a little higher than questions of bathroom access if they had the economic, cultural and military might of a nation of 1.3 billion people behind them?

Syed is also guilty of the same fallacy as the commentators who burst a blood vessel whenever they chance upon a new “woke” initiative in the police force: “Perhaps the police should spend less time filling in forms and more time solving murders!”

The latter point relies on the bizarre assumption that the police force is some sort of monolithic entity that can focus only on one activity at a time, rather than a heterogeneous organisation made up of multiple forces consisting of hundreds of thousands of individuals with different skills, responsibilities and specialisms. Syed’s zinger is predicated on the similar idea that the entirety of the United Kingdom is permanently engaged in trivial squabbles while all of China is Greatly Leaping Forward, when in truth the only people devoting more than a few seconds a year to these culture war issues are a small crowd of earnest lefties and the far-right commentators who’d be hunting down Jack Monroe recipes without them.

Dowden’s Heritage Foundation homily is equally free of substance, consisting mostly of 40-watt fire and brimstone about free speech, privilege, “cancelling”, “fashionable nostrums”, “policies inimicable to freedoms”, and people “seeking to expunge large parts of our past”.

In 2,300 words of hufflepuff, the only real-world instances of “dangerous decadence” that he drops in are the defacement of Winston Churchill’s statue during the Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 (someone spray-painted the words “was a racist” under his name; truly, democracy is finished), “obsessing over pronouns” (another surefire omen of doom) and “seeking to decolonise mathematics”.

I literally work in the news, and this last horseman of the apocalypse was news to me. After a more demanding than usual Google search, I’ve concluded that it refers to a minor kerfuffle in early 2021 over a paper by Californian academics suggesting adding an anti-racist element to the teaching of maths.

Maybe it was a bigger deal in the States. Even so, it didn’t seem to dominate the agenda of vast swathes of the US population for long, much less of anyone further afield.

Let’s be charitable for the moment and assume that these demagogues have simply chosen poor examples to illustrate their point. A second question still needs addressing:

2. If western citizens are misdirecting their energies, what should they be doing instead?

Because if re-examining history, or hanging banners from Marble Arch imploring people to use less fossil fuel, constitutes “dangerous decadence”, if conversations about pronouns are a waste of time, then the implication is that individuals thus occupied should be channelling their efforts into more productive endeavours. Exactly what endeavours, our friends on the right are again reluctant to spell out (unless they’re seriously suggesting we should be spending our days planning multi-trillion-dollar global infrastructure projects and invading France).

My best guess is that what they want us to do is devote 100% of our time and energy to the betterment of the nation (and by nation, of course, what the far-right elites generally mean is them). We should be good little serfs, tilling the fields in the service of our masters, paying our tithes and dying young so as not to be a burden on the state.

And if there is any time left at day’s end after we’ve completed our designated duties, we should devote it to wholesome, morally improving activities, like athletics and shooting and unprotected sex (take that, Great Replacement!). None of this culture rubbish. Culture leads to reflection, and reflection leads to scrutiny.

The underlying message coming through to me, at least, is that we should shut the fuck up, and cease daring to question the status quo that is so endlessly lucrative for them and increasingly harmful to the rest of us.

But such a vast, sustained and coordinated anti-woke operation – even if its thesis is as weak as Dowden’s handshake – seems like overkill if all they are trying to do is silence a few plebs. Which leads me to my final question:

3. What’s really going on?

The irony here is that the narrative these prophets are trying to foist on us comes within shouting distance of the truth. Because there is some consensus among historians that decadence was indeed a factor in the erosion or implosion of many of Earth’s great empires (most of the commentators seem to have at least skim-read the Wikipedia entry on Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).

But it wasn’t the corruption of everyday folk that was the problem. In Rome, in the Mongol empire, in the Byzantine and the Ottoman, the rot started at the top. Think Caligula building a marble stable for his horse; the petty theological infighting that led to the downfall of the Byzantines; Kublai Khan’s extravagant spending; Suleyman shunning his official duties to spend more time in his harem.

Rome fell not because ordinary citizens were frittering away their days bickering about minor tweaks to the human rights framework, but because their rulers were spending too much time and money feasting, fucking and erecting ever bigger monuments to themselves to run their territories properly; and because, with inequality skyrocketing, the common folk, increasingly vexed at working for peanuts while their overlords bathed in asses’ milk and risking their lives on the battlefield for leaders who kept the lion’s share of the spoils, were less and less inclined to give their all in service of the “greater good”.

Remind you of anything?

If I asked you to point to anyone in the western world in the first quarter of the 21^st century who could be said to be charging head first into the abyss of turpitude, where else could you begin but with our leaders? When it comes to lax morals, low standards and all-round malevolence, no student, judge or “wokester” can hold a candle to Oliver Dowden’s Tories and the corporations they serve.

Because in case you hadn’t noticed, the party presently running the UK is now packed to the rafters with councillors, MPs, aides, ministers and peers guilty of deporting longtime legal residents of the UK, plotting to drown and exile asylum seekers, slashing international aid, illegal lobbying, cronyism, filing false expenses claims, tax avoidance, lying, cheating, illegally carousing in a pandemic, excessive drinking, drug-taking, Muslim-bashing, gay-bashing, bishop-bashing, bullying, sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, treason and murder. These are people, for crying out loud, who have actually tried to depict “do-gooders” as the bad guys and have now described the head of the Church of England as a virtue-signaller.

(Another reason cited by Gibbon for the collapse of Rome – one the faux Christians on the libertarian right oddly seem to skip over – was the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. The devoutly anti-intellectual stance of the church, itself perpetually riven by theological disputes that really did weaken the state and distract people from external threats, stripped away the foundations of culture, philosophy and technological superiority on which the empire had been built. In other words, they’d had enough of experts.)

Ultimately, then, the war on woke seems to be just another deflection tactic.

Authoritarian governments have long invoked bogeymen to frighten the unwary into voting for them, and to give them someone other than the government to blame. But the current bunch are running out of scapegoats.

They can’t blame Labour for the precipitous national decline any more, because Labour hasn’t been in power for 12 years. Nor can they point the finger at the EU, because the UK is free of its “shackles” – not that they’re having much luck finding EU rules they want to scrap anyway. And while the smear campaign against immigrants shows no sign of abating, people are slowly waking up to the overwhelmingly positive net contribution they make to society, largely thanks to the catastrophic labour shortages caused by the exodus of EU workers.

So having exhausted the enemies without, they’re turning their fire on enemies within: charities, judges, lawyers, teachers, students, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and anyone else who has enough time at the end of their day to read a book or the temerity to ask a question. But it should be glaringly obvious to all but the most loyal Daily Mail reader that it’s not Greta Thunberg who’s plotting to usher in the Dark Ages 2.0. The self-appointed harbingers of doom are bringing it themselves.

Immigration: the pros – and the big con

It’s way past time we had a grown-up, informed conversation about freedom of movement

I’ve made the case for migration being an intrinsic part of what it is to be human. That does not, of course, necessarily make it a good thing. Human instinct is not the most reliable moral compass. And since purportedly liberal voices have recently joined the far-right tub-thumpers in talking about “tighter controls”, and even the Guardian has to use “actually” in the headline of a positive story about immigration, there are clearly issues yet to be settled here.

So here’s a cost-benefit analysis: a comparison of the (alleged) benefits and drawbacks of human resettlement.

The downsides

Prior to 1066, most arrivals in the British Isles were invaders or raiders rather than true migrants. The relative calm that followed the Norman Conquest paved the way for the first peaceful settlers – and the slurs the natives have lobbed at them have barely evolved in a millennium.

‘They’re stealing our jobs’

Twaddle on every level.

It was never “your” job to begin with. It was a job advertised in the country where you happened to be born. It was the employer’s job, to give to whomsoever she chose.
The migrant is in no sense “stealing” the job; she is merely competing fairly for it. If you’re finishing second best to someone whose first language isn’t English, you might want to think about a different line of work.
The majority of immigrants take jobs that Britons simply don’t want to do, such as cleaning, fruit picking and social care. Many more take roles that Britons cannot do: the UK has huge skills shortages in a number of sectors, notably engineering, IT and healthcare.

(Incidentally, the racists who trot out this line can rarely back it up with evidence. When they do, it’s anecdotal: “It happened to me” or “It happened to my mate”. Sorry to break it to you, Socrates, but the value of anecdotal evidence is precisely diddly-squat. All the large-scale data says otherwise.)

Besides, the number of jobs available is not fixed (this common misapprehension is known as the lump of labour fallacy). Immigrants earn and pay taxes, pay rent, buy food and clothes and phones and all the other things natives do. This indirectly creates more jobs. Furthermore, many of them start up their own businesses (indeed, immigrants are twice as likely as locals to do so), thus directly creating more jobs. If there were a fixed number of vacancies in an economy, then unemployment after years of mass immigration should be stratospheric. It’s not. The latest figure is 4.1%, or 1.38 million people – among the lowest of all time.

It’s true that living in an economic union of 550 million citizens means there’s 10 times as much competition as when the UK’s borders were closed. But it also means there are 10 times as many job opportunities. That’s the whole point of an expanded labour market: more choice for employers, more for employees.

‘They’re driving down wages’

Not according to 99% of all research into this issue, they’re not. Some studies have found marginal evidence of a slight depression in pay for the very lowest-paid, but the picture is far from clear-cut, not least because it’s impossible to know what would have happened to wages in the absence of freedom of movement.

At worst, according to the Migration Advisory Council’s calculations, a 10% increase in the number of non-natives entering the services industry may have resulted in a 1.9% decrease in wages for those employed in it – most of whom, traditionally, were migrants already.

Besides, any short-term losses are more than made up for in the long term by overall growth in the economy due to immigration, which benefits everyone.

‘They’re all scroungers’

This argument, in conjunction with the above, conjures the image of Schrödinger’s immigrant: a shadowy figure simultaneously stealing people’s jobs and lazing in front of Jeremy Kyle while wallowing in the opulence conferred by the UK welfare system.

It’s also bollocks. Government figures show that foreign nationals are far less likely to claim benefits than people born in the UK; while they make up 17.6% of the working population, they account for less than 7.4% of benefits awarded.

This is largely because the law grants foreign-born citizens less access to the welfare system in the first place. Under our arrangement with the EU, no EU citizen can claim benefits for the first three months of their stay, and they can be deported if they have not found work after three further months on benefits (or cannot otherwise support themselves).

Besides, it makes no sense. Who in their right mind would give up their friends, family and culture, uproot everything and go to all the trouble of building an entire new life in a country with unfamiliar food, customs and language, with the sole aim of pocketing the princely sum of £73 a week?

‘They’re all criminals’

Jewish usurers, Gypsy thieves, Italian mobsters, Irish thugs, Asian grooming gangs: virtually every wave of foreigners to set foot on these shores has endured systematic accusations of wrongdoing. While every cart has its bad apples, it simply isn’t true that immigrants are more likely to break the law than natives.

There are just under 10,000 foreign offenders in British jails and NOMS-operated IRCs, a fraction under 12% of the prison population, and they make up 9% of the population overall. “Whoa!” you cry. “That’s above the national average! Immigrants are more criminal than the average Brit!”

Unfortunately for your argument, Mr Racist, IRCs are … immigration removal centres, which hold people awaiting deportation, almost exclusively for immigration violations. They generally hold around 3,000 people. So the number of foreigners detained in English and Welsh prisons, for actual crimes, is only 8% of the total. Or below the national average.

In some cases, it appears that immigration actually lowers crime. One research paper, for example, found that the incarceration rate among foreign-born US citizens was a quarter of the rate for those born there.

Criminals, like benefit scroungers, are lazy. It’s their defining quality. The reason they commit crimes and sign on, rather than getting a job, is that they want maximum return for minimum effort. But (as any British plumber allegedly put out of work by a Polish counterpart will tell you) most migrants work hard.

It stands to reason. Is someone who has the get-up-and-go, organisational skills and commitment to do the necessary research, learn a new language, fill out all the paperwork, leave behind home, career and family, travel hundreds of miles, set up a bank account, etc, really going to turn into a slob on arrival? Is a rapist-in-waiting really going to go to all that trouble merely because he fancies raping British women?

Blackguards and wastrels are more likely to ply their “trades” nearer home, where they have established criminal networks and understand the local markets and loopholes, than to trudge halfway across the world to an alien land with a firmer rule of law.

It’s worth mentioning – because most Leave voters sure don’t seem to know – that under EU law, the UK already has the power to deport criminals of EU origin. It can also prevent known offenders from entering. In the year ending June 2017, 5,301 EU citizens were deported from the UK, and in the period 2010-2016, the Border Force refused entry to 6,000 EU nationals.

“But look,” say the racists, linking to a single story about an EU immigrant who committed a crime, or a handful of bad guys. Again, they’re generalising from isolated incidents to a broader pattern that the figures just don’t support.

“I don’t care if only 0.25% of foreigners commit crimes,” bleat other racists. “Ten thousand is too many! Get rid of them all!” That’s like banning all cars because 0.6% of them are involved in serious accidents every year, or banning all doctors because 0.4% of them have criminal convictions. Madness.

When racists attempt to support their claims with evidence, they invariably cite the Quilliam report, just about the only vaguely authoritative investigation into so-called grooming gangs conducted to date in the UK. Close analysis, however, reveals it to be no such thing; its assumptions, methodology and conclusions have all been rubbished by other commentators.

As a footnote, I would remind you that Britain’s departure from the EU threatens its participation in the European Arrest Warrant, under which almost 7,000 criminals were removed from 2009-2016.

‘They’re putting pressure on housing and social services’

There is some logic behind this one. Unlike the labour market, a country’s resources and services are, at any given point, finite. If more people arrive, there will be fewer houses, school places and GP appointments to go around.

However, governments always have the option to build more houses and schools, just as they have done to accommodate population growth throughout history. And as it turns out, immigrants disproportionately take jobs in education and healthcare, and, being younger and healthier, use these services less. As the UK is now discovering, if you create a hostile environment for foreigners, the teachers, lecturers, doctors, nurses and carers will be among the first to leave, and services will come under yet more strain.

“Why can’t we just train our own?” whine the racists. We can; but in the first place, it’s expensive – it costs £70,000 to train a nurse from scratch, £479,000 for a general practitioner, and £725,000 for a consultant. Second, it takes time: four years for a nurse, nine for a doctor. And third, you can’t expect exactly the right number of British students to step into a particular role simply because The Country Needs It. Supply does not always meet demand (which is another argument for a common market; it creates a larger playing field over which such imbalances can be corrected).

By the by, the notion that “Britain is full” is risible. The population density of the UK is 272/km2. By comparison, Monaco has 19,009 people per square kilometre, or 70 times the concentration. The UK population would have to reach 4.5 billion before it was as full as Monaco.

‘They’re destroying our culture’

A couple of hundred years ago, English culture was cockfighting, bear-baiting, maypoles and Morris dancing. Few got out their hankies when they faded away to be replaced with football, pubs and Celebrity fucking Big Brother.

In any case, the speed of change in the UK is constantly being exaggerated by the media. The endless stories in the Daily Mail and Express about people forced to say “Happy holiday” instead of “Christmas”, the word “Easter” being omitted from chocolate eggs and pork products being dropped from restaurant menus are usually anecdotal if true at all: scaremongering designed to sell more papers. Oh, and there are no sharia courts. There are a few dozen sharia councils that consult on matters of marriage and divorce.

To those racists who insist that the British way of life is under threat, I say this: Welsh, Scottish and Irish cultures are all still pretty damned vibrant. If they can survive centuries of English dominion, why can’t English culture survive the arrival of a few million guests?

Culture is fluid. Like language, it’s a living, breathing thing. Any culture that stops changing withers and dies. And how do cultures change? By evolution, certainly, but mostly, like language, by borrowing from others. To illustrate this point, I’ve compiled a short list of aspects of “British” culture that aren’t actually British at all:

Fish and chips (Portugal, Belgium), roast dinners (France), full English breakfast (Germans popularised sausages and bacon, while baked beans come from South America via the US and their sauce is made from Mediterranean tomatoes), barbecues (Caribbean), beer made from hops (Netherlands), golf (ancient Rome or China, via pre-Union Scotland), April Fool’s Day (France, or the Netherlands; certainly not England), Christmas and all things Christian (Middle East), Christmas trees (Germany), Easter eggs (Africa via Iraq), New Year’s celebrations (Iraq), pantomime (Italy), curry (India/Sri Lanka), pizza (Italy) and St George (Turkey).

‘They don’t integrate’

Admittedly, some do so more successfully than others. Just two points here: 1) integration is a two-way street. If you demonise and/or intimidate immigrants and refuse to employ them or socialise with them, you can hardly blame them for sticking with their own kind. 2) I can state categorically that every one of my friends from the EU – the ones who are still here, as well as the ones driven away by Brexit – speak and write English to a far higher standard than the average Brexiter on social media.

‘Allowing free movement within the EU discriminates against non-EU citizens’

This laughable bad-faith argument is about migration from specific countries rather than migration in general, but I’m mentioning it here because it seems to have gained a lot of traction of late.

You can see its appeal. It allows Brexit diehards to paint Remainers as the bad, racist guys and by extension themselves as the angels. But the notion that, because certain people enjoy certain advantages and others do not, you must create a level playing field by removing them from everyone – “’S not fair!” – is absurd.

By this reasoning, Fitness First is discriminating against non-members by only allowing in paying members. Alice is discriminating against Jenny (and everyone else on the planet) by dating Brian, so she must remain single for ever. And you are discriminating against all other fruits by eating an apple, and so must starve.

It’s impossible to strike deals with everyone at once. This is just a cynical contortion of language in an attempt to mislead, one that smells very strongly of 55 Tufton Street.

‘They’re all riddled with disease’

What utter bastards! When they’re not stealing your job or raping your children, they’re infecting you with typhus and AIDS!

Accusations of uncleanliness have dogged migrants for centuries – the Irish and the Gypsies came in for a particularly hard time – and while this line hasn’t seen so much play in the Brexit debate, the fake news merchants at Fox News and the like are frantically pursuing the health emergency angle in their rush to demonise the central American migrant caravan.

The claim is, to put it politely, a bunch of arse.

‘They’re replacing the native population’

The more hysterical nationalists are convinced that if immigration persists at its present levels, white British people will soon be in a minority, or eliminated altogether.

This is the slippery slope fallacy in action: the assumption that a trend will continue unchanged. But trends never do. Rates of migration rise and fall. The UK has recently experienced a peak in new arrivals, as a result of the accession of the eastern European states. As those states’ prosperity approaches that of the UK, the number of people moving here will decline.

Other racists point to the fact that immigrants “outbreed” the native population – new arrivals tend to have larger families. This is quite true. However, it is also true that natality among subsequent generations tends to subside to local levels (pdf).

The upsides

They fill skills shortages

No one’s seriously going to dispute this, are they? I’ve already mentioned the high levels of foreign-born staff in the NHS and the education system, but they also make up a disproportionate chunk of the workforce in catering, construction, fruit-picking, food preparation and technology. Food is already rotting in fields and patients dying alone in hospitals since the number of immigrants began to fall after the Brexit vote.

They’re great for business

Immigrants bring energy, dynamism and ideas. Immigrants are responsible for one in every seven new startups in the UK, and their ventures create 14% of all British jobs. Here’s a far from complete list of great “British” brands that were in fact founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants: Dollond & Aitchison, M&S, Tesco, Rothschild & Co, ICI, General Electric, Burton, Selfridge’s, Barings Bank, Barnardo’s, Mme Tussauds, GlaxoSmithKline, British Petroleum, Reuters, Schroders Asset Management, Moss Bros, Triumph, Lion’s soaps, Shell, Easyjet, Cobra Beer, Acorn Computers (ARM), WPP, Cafe Nero, DueDil, RationalFX, Deliveroo, Transferwise, Kano, Carwow and Hassle.

They enhance our culture

New food, new music, new fashions, new words. You can draw up your own fucking list this time.

They boost the economy

If you can find me a single authoritative, peer-reviewed study that shows that immigrants to the UK have a net negative effect on the economy, I’ll shag Katie Hopkins.

Immigrants put more in than they take out; natives’ net contribution is negative

Cultural homogeneity has a positive impact on GDP growth

Influxes of asylum seekers increase per-capita GDP, reduce unemployment and boost tax revenues

Migration has no negative impact on employment outcomes; increases productivity

But you don’t have to trawl through academic papers for proof that freedom of movement is an economic boon. You just have to draw up a list of the richest cities and countries in the world and then look at their respective levels of migration.

They compensate for falling birthrates

Indigenous Brits are not reproducing at a sufficiently high rate to replace the existing population. British-born women have an average of only 1.7 children each, and a further 200,000 Brits leave these shores every year. Without immigration to make up the shortfall, the British population would decline by 417,000 every year.

And a shrinking population, as China is discovering, is catastrophic for the economy, because there are fewer people to pay tax and thus fund healthcare and pensions for the older generation.

They enhance our personal lives

As well as giving us access to a wider employment market, migration – inward and outward – vastly increases the choice of friends, business partners and lovers available to us. As this is hard to quantify, there’s little in the way of hard research on the subject, but I know I am not alone in having made dozens of wonderful, life-changing connections that would never have come to pass without freedom of movement.

They make war less likely

Last and foremost, freedom of movement between the nations of Europe has – exactly as it was intended to – increased mutual reliance, cooperation and understanding between peoples, tempered nationalist tendencies, and led to the longest spell of uninterrupted peace in the continent’s history. I’m in no hurry to throw that away.

So that means …

“Tottenham has turned French” – Unnamed Londoner, early 16th C
“A certain preacher … abused the strangers in the town, and their manners and customs, alleging that they not only deprived the English of their industry, and of the profits arising therefrom, but dishonoured their dwellings by taking their wives and daughters” – Sebastian Giustinian, ambassador to Venice, 1517
“A congregation … of distressed exiles growne so great and yet daily multiplying, that the place in short time is likely to prove a hive too little to contain such a swarme” – W Somner, 1639
“The nation it is almost quit undone//By French men that doe it daily overrun” – Anonymous, 1691
“Why should we take the bread out of the mouths of our own children and give it to strangers?” – John Adams, US president, 1800
“The Jews of the lower orders … have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830
“Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are – some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?” – Donald Trump, 2015

I feel ashamed to be a human being when I’m reminded of how little we have learned through the ages.

When debating Brexit with Leave voters on Twitter, I used to concede the point that “having concerns about mass immigration is not racist”. I take it all back. It’s racist as fuck.

The reason I’ve liberally peppered this post with the word “racist” is that, after looking at material from hundreds of sources and weighing the matter long and hard, I’ve concluded that there is no argument against immigration. The benefits are enormous, the costs negligible. The only possible reason left that anyone could have for objecting to immigration is xenophobia, English exceptionalism, Fear of the Other: in a word, racism.

Immigrants are people. Just like us. In fact, usually, better than us; more industrious, less likely to commit crimes, younger, healthier, brighter. If you deny or dismiss the fact that migration is a fundamental part of human nature; if you wave away the proven benefits; if you insist on stressing the downsides to the exclusion of all else, even though there is scant (if endlessly repeated) evidence to back up your point; then you, my foe, are a racist.

Most people who have actually encountered large numbers of immigrants are not afraid of them; they know from experience that the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. The only reason people think migration is a bad thing is that power-hungry populists, rightwing media and, increasingly, trolls in the employ of enemy powers tell them that it is.

Historically, there have been some problems, but it’s invariably the migrants who bear the brunt. Locals might have been mildly inconvenienced by the unsanitary conditions in an Irish ghetto, or the din generated by Italian ragamuffins playing barrel organs on the streets of 19th-century London; meanwhile, the migrants themselves were starving, dying from cholera, being shunned and deported and lynched.

Robert Winder put it so eloquently in his book on migration, Bloody Foreigners, that I’m shamelessly going to quote him in full:

“Illegal immigration is a fine-toothed comb. The system catches the clumsy or the clueless; only the best, the bravest and the luckiest slip through. It should never surprise us when migrants prosper; nearly all of them have passed an exacting extrance exam.”

All this fearmongering about immigrants and minorities has no basis in reality; it is the tool of dangerous demagogues. It is they, and not the targets of their false fury, that we should be deporting.

Vagabond spirit: why man will never stop moving

Migration is not just something that some humans do to earn a quick buck. History shows us it’s in our DNA

Humanity has itchy feet. Long before he flew his first powered flight, before he wheeled his first wheel, and even before he tamed his first horse, man was on the move. Within just a few thousand years of leaving Africa, he had settled the world twice over.

The evidence is piecemeal, but it looks as if the first enduring, large-scale exodus of Homo sapiens from Africa took place around 70,000 years ago (although our ancestor, Homo erectus, had ventured abroad a million years before, leaving remains as far apart as Spain and Taiwan, and Homo heidelbergensis, forefather of the Neanderthals, had already arrived in Europe). A group of more or less modern humans crossed the Bab-al-Mandab Strait on foot from present-day Yemen to Djibouti. Some headed north, some west, some east, and within 10,000 years, the descendants of these intrepid explorers had reached northern Europe, eastern Asia and Australia.

By 20,000BC, humans had crossed from the far east to the Americas via a convenient ice bridge over the Bering Strait. Within 8,000 years, they had reached modern-day Chile.

Prehistory being pre-history, we’ll never know for sure what drove those early upheavals. Speculation has centred on climatic and ecological pressures – the ice age, desertification, loss of tree cover, changes in sea level – but since many self-evidently remained in Africa, some of the movement may simply be attributable to overspill, competition with neighbouring tribes, and the serendipity of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: “Ooh, look! There are more goats and more fresh water in the next valley.”

Snap, crackle and stop

Agriculture changed everything. The domestication of pigs and cultivation of cereals about 12,000 years ago obviated the need for hunting and gathering, and made roaming harder; growing root crops means putting down roots. The improved efficiency of food production also meant that a smaller area of land could support a greater number of individuals.

So successful were these proto-farms that they quickly proliferated and expanded, soon coalescing into small communities, then towns, then cities. The next few millennia brought technological innovation and trade, which only accelerated the trend towards ever larger settled populations. And in between their many and ruinous wars, the cities gradually formed alliances, which solidified into nation states. And with nation states came borders.

(There is no mistaking the direction of travel here. Throughout history, the size of the communities in which humans could manageably live has grown, from tribes to farms to villages to towns to cities to countries to supranational entities like the European Union. And in that time – a propos of nothing – the amount of violence has fallen dramatically.)

Now humans were limited politically as well as practically in terms of where they could go. And yet the peregrinations went on; natural disasters, famines and droughts are no respecters of borders, and war continued to displace millions. Since the dawn of civilisation, to take a handful of examples, we have seen the Jewish diaspora, the spread of the Huns across central Asia and Europe, the expulsion of the Huguenots from Catholic France, the settlement of the Americas by European powers and the forcible relocation of millions of Africans as slaves.

Resettlements large scale and small continue to this day (I wouldn’t be writing this if they weren’t). The last century has seen a further surge in the US population, Nazis deporting 8 million Jews and other minorities, and the Rohingya driven from Myanmar. Some peoples, of course, never stopped gadding about; there are still plenty of nomadic tribes in Africa, Siberia and Afghanistan, and many Australian Aborigines still go on their “walkabout”.

Even in the most stable cultures, wanderlust is still very much a thing. Most people now channel it into formalised escapes such as fortnights in Europe or gap years. But that’s not enough for some. They take up itinerant lifestyles; they uproot themselves entirely and start new lives on the other side of the world; they retire to sunny Spain. Around 130,000 Britons depart these shores for good every year (it’s telling that there is a wealth of information out there on the number of immigrants entering Britain, but very little about the number of people leaving).

In the modern era, we have a much better understanding of the reasons behind these upheavals. They can be divided into two categories: voluntary and involuntary. The first group consists overwhelmingly of economic migrants (although people also emigrate for love, lifestyle, climate and curiosity). In the latter camp, we have forcible removal – slavery and trafficking – and displacement due to war, famine, overpopulation and religious persecution. Those who cross borders for any of these reasons are classified in international law as refugees (asylum seekers while their status is being confirmed).

How does the total break down? To take the recent history of the UK as an example, refugees make up less than 10% of the total of newcomers; the UK receives about 50,000 asylum applications per year – many of which are unsuccessful – out of a total of 550,000 migrants. For comparison, Turkey is currently harbouring more than 2,500,000 displaced people.

An Englishman’s home …

You might expect island nations to be a special case. When your borders are naturally defined, there’s little scope for dispute, and having a giant moat around the country hampers wantaways as much as it does invaders. This is certainly true of Iceland, which has largely been a bystander in the global hurly-burly and consequently has a population so homogeneous, they’ve developed an app to prevent accidental incest.

Things panned out rather differently in the British Isles.

While Homos antecessor and heidelbergensis apparently paid visits to Britain while it was still attached to the European mainland, and several groups of Neanderthals popped in, the land was not continuously settled until the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago. The first modern humans to arrive were Neolithics about whom we know next to nothing. Next up were the Beaker People, probably originally from Portugal, in around 2,500BC, followed by two waves of Celts from central Europe, and the Romans. (Side note: the occupation forces were not, for the most part, Roman, being made up of tribes from all across Europe and North Africa.)

Rome’s withdrawal was the cue for another spate of incursions. First came the Germanic tribes, mostly Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. Just as they were settling in, the Vikings turned up. After a few generations of pillaging and raping raids, many of them, too, settled down. Then came William the Bastard.

And despite the nationalist boast that Britain has repulsed all invaders since 1066, the influxes didn’t end there. Many of the pilgrims who flocked to Canterbury from across Europe never left. Specialist tradesmen – weavers, cobblers, masons, miners, brewers – filed in from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Thousands of French and Flemish Jews came at the bidding of the Norman court. Tens of thousands of Huguenots, fleeing persecution in 17th-century Catholic France, chose England as their haven. They were followed by waves of Dutchmen, Travellers, Italians, and Irish. Almost all received the sort of reception that would make a Daily Mail editor proud.

And yet without these injections of labour, talent and energy, there would have been no British Empire. It was the Huguenots who brought the textile expertise that gave the country a solid financial base. Britain’s navy would have been far less formidable without the technical prowess of Dutch engineers. And the subjugation of India and the slave trade (all the advantages of immigration, but none of the bother of letting them in!) swelled British coffers to the point where it could begin to paint two-thirds of the globe pink.

For all the nationalists’ claims of “British purity”, if you were to take a DNA test, there’s every chance that as well as Angle, Saxon and Norman blood, there’d be traces of Beaker people, Celts, Picts, Gauls, Mediterraneans, north Africans, various Danes, French Huguenots, Flemish, Germans, Dutch, Ashkenazy Jews, Italians, Gypsies and Irish.

Migrant caravan — The ‘migrant caravan’ travelling across central America towards the US, apparently with the aim of blowing it up or giving everyone Aids or something

To boldly go

Humanity has only been relatively sedentary for a tiny portion of its history. It would be preposterous if we had shed all our wayfaring instincts in the space of a few generations.

Sure, we have a sense of home, of identity, of belonging; but we also have a driving need to move on, to explore, to seek out new worlds and civilisations. Humanity’s passion for discovery has already driven us to every corner of the globe, to the darkest depths of the ocean and the largest object in the night sky – and still we yearn to go further.

Migration is in our marrow. To jam a spoke in the wheel at an arbitrary point in history – to say, “It ends here” when the world is changing at ever more bewildering speed – is not just economic and political folly; it’s a denial of our very nature.

The Tale of the Dog in the Manger

A Clumsy Parable about Immigration and Freedom of Movement

Once upon a time, there were two towns called Catford and Dogcaster that were constantly at war.

No one knows why the first war started. But because the citizens of the two towns did not know each other, they did not understand each other. Both found the ways of the animals of the other town strange and improper. “It’s disgusting, the way those stuck-up Catfordians strut around in their ridiculous clothes!” the Dogcastrians would say. “And how lazy they are, not going for walks, and sleeping for half the day!” Meanwhile, the Catfordians complained: “What savages those Dogcastrians are, chasing their tails! And they don’t even cover up their poo!”

And so, at the slightest provocation, the towns fought each other. They fought over the hunting grounds to the east; they fought over the lake to the west – “It is ours to fish in!” cried the Catfordians. “It is ours to swim in!” insisted the Dogcastrians – and they fought over mountains hundreds of miles away that no Dog or Cat had ever visited.

Sometimes the Dogs would win; sometimes the Cats. But no victory was ever sweet. For generation after generation, the townsfolk on both sides lost homes, livelihoods, loved ones. Life brought them nothing but poverty, disease and misery.

To make matters worse, in the dark, dense forest between the two towns, there lived a huge, vicious bear. The bear liked to eat Dogs and Cats, and because the towns were always so weakened by the wars and the disease and the poverty, they could not fight back. So the bear wandered in and out of both towns freely, and gobbled up whichever Dog or Cat it fancied.

After one particularly bloody war, the towns’ leaders met in secret. “We cannot go on like this,” said President Garfield. “Something has to change,” agreed Prince Prince. And they struck upon an idea. The two towns would begin to trade.

Dogcastrians were excellent cooks, while Catfordian food was plain. The Cats were highly skilled at dressmaking, while Dog clothes were dowdy and grey. So President Garfield and Prince Prince ordered their finest merchants to begin selling their wares to the other town.

The Cats and Dogs were wary of each other at first, but after a few weeks of meeting, and bartering, and buying, each side discovered that the other was not so bad after all. Before long, stalls selling delicious Dogcastrian food sprang up in the streets of Catford, and elegant Catfordian fashions became all the rage in Dogcaster.

Slowly, they grew accustomed to each others’ differences. Some Cats noticed that Dogs, who slept far less, were happier and more productive, and they made an effort to stay awake a little longer each day. Meanwhile, some Dogs began, rather sheepishly, covering up their poo.

Soon the inhabitants were cooperating on projects that benefited both towns. They drew up a plan to share the lake and the hunting grounds fairly, and began working together on improvements: a park, a bridge, a dam, and eventually, something no Cat or Dog had ever thought they would see: a beautiful, straight road, linking the towns together.

With travel between the two towns so easy, more and more Dogs and Cats began to make the journey. Some of the merchants even moved in to the other town to save time travelling. And sometimes, their families and friends followed them.

And after a short time, Dogs began to fall in love with Cats, and Cats with Dogs. Some of the ordinary townsfolk were horrified at first, but soon grew to accept it, and little Dogcats were born.

So began an era of peace and prosperity. The citizens of both towns had twice as many jobs to choose from, and the businesses twice as many employees. They had twice as much space to play in, twice a many schools to learn in, and twice as many shops to shop in. Citizens who were unhappy or persecuted in one town now had somewhere safe to go.

One day, the vicious old bear wandered into Catford, expecting another easy meal. But the Catfordians called their Dogcastrian friends, and together, the townsfolk fought bravely, and gave the old bear a bloody nose, and it shambled back into the forest.

Life, for most Dogs and Cats, was good.

***

But there were some Dogs who did not like this new world. They had grown up hating the Cats, and still did not trust them. They had not personally benefited from the prosperity that others had. These bitter, usually old, uneducated Dogs, whom the other Dogcastrians nicknamed “Whiners”, wanted things to return to the way they used to be – even if that meant poverty, disease and war. They liked leaving their poo out in the street for all to see. They spoke rudely to the few Catfordians they met, refused point blank ever to travel to Catford, and frankly, didn’t see why anyone else should, either.

And the Whiners grumbled, and they plotted, and they whispered false rumours about the Cats, and they waited.

***

Then, one fateful night, in a Dogcastrian pub called the Manger, a loutish Cat called Stimpy got into a drunken fight with a Dog called Ren, and killed him. As soon as the news got out, the Whiners saw their chance. “We told you!” they screamed. “All Catfordians are killers!” And they began loudly sharing other stories, true and false, about Cats doing bad things.

The ordinary folk of both villages were appalled and called for calm, but many believed what the Whiners were saying. A Catfordian stall was vandalised and burned. Retaliatory attacks on Dogcastrian merchants followed.

Soon, trade between the two villages ceased.

And before long, Catford expelled all the Dogs, and Dogcaster cast out all the Cats. Mixed Cat/Dog families were cruelly separated. Finally, the furious citizens of Dogcaster, whipped into a frenzy by the Whiners, tore up the road between the two villages, and in its place built a wall. Once again, the two towns were in a state of war.

And from the forest above, the vicious old bear watched the Dogcastrian builders lay the final brick in the wall, and smiled.

Exit, pursued by a bulldog

Theresa May says the “best and brightest” EU migrants will always be welcome in the UK. The fact is, thanks to her and the Mail’s rhetoric, they’re already leaving

Couple looking sadly at house — “Our heart is not in Britain any more.”

The first thing I hear when Mathieu and Pauline welcome me into their home is an insistent buzzing-and-slushing noise. Mathieu apologises profusely and hurries to turn off the offending washing machine. Pauline shows me through to the immaculate kitchen and offers me tea: “Would you like an Englishy one? Earl Grey?”

Both French and either side of 30, Mathieu and Pauline are two of the 3 million-plus EU citizens who chose to build a life for themselves in the UK. But that life is over. In light of the Brexit vote and the events that have followed, they’ve decided, with heavy hearts, to move on.

They’re not the only ones. Net migration to the UK fell by 84,000 in the year to May 2017, according to the Home Office’s latest figures, thanks in part to the departure of large numbers of eastern Europeans. Over 300 nurses left the NMC’s register in December 2016, almost twice the number who did so in June 2016, which, combined with an unprecedented 90% drop in the number of EU nurses registering to work here, threatens an imminent staffing crisis. Universities, too, are reporting an alarming fall in applications from EU students, which will put a huge dent in their finances. Coffee chains and farmers are already complaining of problems recruiting workers. A Facebook group called Plan B, set up by a German national in February specifically for EU citizens thinking of decamping, now has more than 1,200 members.

According to immigration law experts Migrate UK, the exodus is because of the political uncertainty surrounding EU citizens’ status, and further labour shortages should be expected. Managing director Jonathan Beech says: “Until the government ends uncertainty among EU citizens by guaranteeing rights to remain in the UK after Brexit, we are likely to see a continuation of these trends, and potentially the start of a Brexit ‘brain drain’ from the UK.”

Of the people I spoke to, none could remotely be described “spongers” or “low-value” workers. These are young, healthy, skilled, taxpaying contributors to society, who speak impeccable English and are well integrated into their local communities.

Mathieu and Pauline moved here in 2012, just in time for the Olympics, not so much drawn to the UK as repelled by the culture in France. “The system is so inflexible there. There’s a lot of nepotism, racism, a pervasive culture of sexism, and there are too many strikes,” says Pauline. “In the UK, no one gives a shit that Theresa May is a woman, or that David Lammy is an MP,” adds Mathieu. “You don’t get that in France.”

“So you came here because it was more tolerant and open?” Hollow laughter ensues.

Pauline works as a contractor for the NHS, Mathieu as a software engineer, which gives them a combined salary of £75,000; that’s £11,000 tax and £7,000 national insurance that the government won’t be collecting next year. And since Pauline has undergone one minor operation and Mathieu has visited his GP twice, you could hardly call them a burden on the state.

So where have they chosen for their new start? “Canada. It’s not just Trudeau – even if it had been Stephen Harper, we’d have thought about moving there,” says Pauline. “They love immigrants in Canada,” says Mathieu. “And as English-speaking French people, we are their dream immigrants,” Pauline concludes, her eyes twinkling briefly.

Only Mathieu currently has a job lined up in Quebec, but it turns out they’ll earn more from one income there than they do from two here – their money will go further, too. “House prices! Oh my God! Our friend just bought a five-bed house there for £220K!” “The water’s free, the electricity’s very cheap, food is super-cheap, electronics … Jackpot! We might just end up thanking Brexit.”

Which brings us to the $64m question. When did they decide to up sticks, and why? “It wasn’t actually Brexit,” says Mathieu. “I was expecting it, to be honest. People are pissed off, the system is broken, inequality is growing, people don’t want to be under rightwing Angela Merkel, the problems in Greece. It’s what the government did after Brexit.”

The tone until now has been overwhelmingly of sadness, disbelief. But suddenly a tinge of anger enters Pauline’s voice. “I’m disgusted by the attitude of the Tory government. They’re using us as leverage. It’s been 11 fucking months. All that time they could have said, ‘You’re welcome to stay,’ but they didn’t. They could have condemned hate crimes, but they didn’t. They could have told Amber Rudd to shut up. They could have told the Daily Mail to shut up.”

“The Daily Mail is hate speech,” Mathieu interjects. “‘Enemies of the people’? That’s Hitler, that’s literally Hitler! In France you would get prosecuted for that bullshit.”

It was the rapid poisoning of the atmosphere, they say, that made up their minds. “People tend to look on us with scorn and suspicion now,” says Pauline, “and I don’t think that’s acceptable, when you have given so much and made so much effort to integrate.

“My boss invited me into a meeting, and he said to me, ‘Brexit is good news. It’s not personal – it’s not against you – we’ve just to get rid of those Polish scroungers.”

Mathieu reserves special venom for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: “‘We’re going to give money to the NHS. Oh no, you know what? We lied. We’re going to stay in the EEA. No, that was all lies, too.’ And the British people don’t care. I expected people to throw eggs at Number 10, to be honest. But nothing.”

Now it seems that lying is a habit the Tories can’t shake. “‘The NHS is not failing because of cuts, it’s because the immigrants came,’ they say. ‘The housing shortage is not because we’re not building enough, it’s because the immigrants came.’”

“We’re really concerned about the British people – it breaks my heart to see so many people going to food banks, to see disabled people getting their benefits cut to nothing,” says Pauline, unprompted.

The mood has turned sombre again. “We were invited here, they needed us,” says Mathieu, “and now suddenly they are telling us that everything is our fault.”

***

Daily Cunt "Enemies of the People" headline — … along with immigrants, liberals, the disabled, “luvvies”, academics, lawyers, gays, lesbians …

The decision to leave was rather more momentous for Melissa. For one thing, she’s been here longer, having arrived from Germany in 2009. For another, she’s older – in her late 30s. Last but not least, her partner is British.

Melissa came to the UK because she loved to travel, wanted to experience a different culture, and spoke excellent English. She first set up home in Norfolk, but a year later met Sean, an automotive engineer a couple of years her senior, and when a job opportunity arose for him in the Midlands, they moved there together. She works from home as a freelance translator, earning £30,000-£40,000 a year, most of it from German clients.

The main factor in their decision to go, she says, was the work situation; carmaking is one of the areas most likely to be adversely affected by Brexit. “If the economy goes too far south, Sean might lose his job. We feel like rats leaving a sinking ship.”

But money wasn’t the only consideration. “The language being used reminds me very much of what I learned in my history lessons in Germany,” says Melissa. “‘Traitor’, ‘enemy of the state’ – it’s very worrying.

“Because I work from home, I’m not exposed to much xenophobia, but I did get a few people giving me the Hitler salute.” It’s Sean who bears the brunt of the abuse, mostly from his staunch Brexiteer colleagues. “One of them once turned round to him and said: ‘You’re sleeping with one of them, so you’re just as bad.’”

The couple’s plans to move to Germany are now at an advanced stage. While Sean speaks no German, his skills mean he will have little trouble finding a decent job.

“The referendum result has been a massive, massive blow. Both Sean and I are heartbroken. We’ve lost some very good friends over this. It was not an easy choice, but we don’t see a future in the UK any more – the country he was born and I chose to make my home and was very happy in.”

Since Melissa does most of her work for German clients, the UK won’t particularly miss her talents, although Sean will be harder to replace. Mathieu and Pauline, too, foresee big problems for their employers. There are only two or three people in the country with Pauline’s particular expertise, and it would take 18 months to train a replacement. When Mathieu’s boss was headhunted by Apple over a year ago, he had to deputise – and he’s still deputising, because they haven’t been able to replace him. And that’s with easy access to all 28 EU nations. The prospects for the company are not bright; only a handful of the staff in his team are British – there’s little appetite for computer science degrees in this country – and several other EU nationals are considering a fresh start.

***

Lara is another one whose skills will be sorely missed; she’s a GP. According to an estimate made last summer, EU immigrants make up 10% of registered doctors and 4% of registered nurses, making the UK health service one of the world’s most dependent on foreign labour. And with the GP system already being described as “on the verge of collapse”, that’s a talent pool the UK can ill afford to lose access to.

Lara, in her early forties and of mixed French and Mediterranean heritage, will also be taking a British partner with her when she goes, and two children. Again, she says, it wasn’t the Brexit vote per se that forced their hand. “Initially, after the vote, I thought, ‘It’ll be all right, they’ll guarantee our rights,’ but they never did.”

She too lays much of the blame at the door of the immigrant-bashing tabloid press. “Basically, all these endless stories about EU citizens stealing jobs and being scroungers made me feel not at home. I was in shock. Surely this is not the country I’d spent the last 22 years in? It suddenly felt foreign to me.”

While she hasn’t personally received any abuse – her English is flawless, her dress and appearance unexotic – she has witnessed some unpleasantness. “One of our patients – ex-army, I think – started shouting at some of the other patients, Polish and Asians, in the waiting room. ‘Britain’s for white people, get out of my country …’ I don’t think anyone would have said any of these things before the referendum.”

So next year, instead of taking home £48,000 as a doctor in the UK, she’ll be earning a little less to treat French patients instead. It’s her friends and colleagues, she says, that she’ll miss most. “I have amazing work colleagues. Even though some of them voted leave because they felt the EU had an unfair advantage over Commonwealth people.”

***

Linda, too, will be taking a native Brit with her when she leaves. Aged 37 and originally from Turku in Finland, she arrived here in 2003. “I had basically loved Britain since I first came here aged 16 and spent a month in Devon on a language course. I travelled all around Europe Interrailing, but nowhere else felt so ‘homey’.”

She runs a small market research company with a British business partner, for which she claims a salary of £70,000. “We started the company five years ago, and have grown to a team of 10, mostly Brits.”

As with everyone I interviewed, Linda considered applying for permanent residency, but found the process too daunting. “I reluctantly considered applying for PR about four months after the referendum. Having looked at my 14 years in the UK, no five-year period was simple or straightforward enough to not worry that it wouldn’t pass the hostile approach of the Home Office. For example, I’ve studied twice while I’ve been here, although working part-time both times, and I’ve been ‘unemployed’ (while building the company and living off my savings).”

Crunch time for Linda and Ian was the Conservative party conference in October 2016, when Theresa May first signalled her willingness to lead the UK to a hard Brexit. “We’d toyed with the idea of leaving from the morning of the referendum, but I’ve spent almost my entire adult life here, and leaving at 37 didn’t really appeal. But it became apparent to us that under Theresa May, the environment would become hostile for EU citizens, and we realised there was really no future here for us if Britain left the single market.” Ian works in the tech industry, which, they fear, will fade to nothing in a UK cast adrift from the bloc.

The lack of support from the government, and the failure of the Lords’ amendment to article 50 on EU citizens’ rights, came as a further blow. “The uncertainty was taking an enormous emotional toll on me, especially as I was recovering from the burnout I got from the early years of building the business. The anxiety was pushing me back to depression and Ian felt it was important to get me out of the UK for my emotional well-being.”

Linda is in no doubt that Britain has become a less tolerant and hospitable place since the vote. “I would go as far as to say it’s hostile,” she says. “I came to the UK partly because I felt it was more open-minded and tolerant than the country I grew up in – needless to say, that illusion has now been totally shattered.”

Are there any circumstances under which they would cancel their plans, or consider coming back? A soft Brexit, maybe? “Nothing. I can never feel at home in England or Wales again. But if Scotland becomes independent, we will strongly consider moving there, as that was our original plan.”

So as soon as they can make the arrangements, they’re relocating to the Netherlands. They’re sad to be leaving their friends, but she also has more mundane concerns: “I will miss having Amazon Prime, and going to Boots!”

One of Pauline’s greatest fears is losing access to Marmite – “God, I love Marmite!” – but mostly, she says, they’ll miss the Brits. Well, some of them.

“In the UK you find the very worst of people,” chips in an impassioned Mathieu. “Uneducated, almost as bad as Americans. But you also have the best people – oh, my God, wonderful people – who are so logical, considerate, articulate … They know how to talk. They are perfect.”

The trouble, apparently, is that there just aren’t enough of them. “I still have emotional attachment to the people – but people are not a place,” says Pauline with a sigh. “Home is literally where the heart is, and our heart is not in Britain any more.”

The Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all promised, as part of their manifestos, to make the rights of EU citizens in the UK one of their top priorities after the election. Alas, it looks increasingly as though that might be a case of shutting the strong stable door after the horse has bolted.

• Names have been changed.