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It is many years since I retired from medical practice, but even in those days I had many illegal immigrants among my patients. They had claimed asylum, and most of them were indeed fleeing from personal situations, not usually of political persecution, that were deeply unpleasant. In my view they were all illegal immigrants rather than true asylum seekers because they had not claimed such asylum in the first safe country in which they had arrived. They preferred to go somewhere else; mere safety was therefore not their first consideration.
Individually, I sympathized with them. Many of them were brave. They had endured hard conditions and even danger to arrive in Britain. Some of them had ridden thousands of miles concealed from authorities or had paid people-smugglers to bribe those authorities and were therefore not the poorest of the poor. I was nevertheless always aware that I had never faced such difficulties in my life.
“There are millions of stories of terrible hardship the world over: Are we our brothers’ keeper?”
All four of my grandparents were refugees, however, as was my mother. My grandparents in Berlin, who had extremely good reason to fear for their future, tried every embassy in the city for permission to enter its country. Only one allowed them entry: China, where they both died within a week of each other in 1944. They escaped Germany with three months to spare. There is a story so terrible about their escape that I cannot tell it. Suffice it to say that it would not be flattering to most people’s conception of human nature.
Most of the illegal immigrants I met wanted to work, but as soon as they claimed asylum they were not allowed to do so. They were thus faced with a dilemma: either accept the miserable pittance and conditions offered them by the authorities while their claim to asylum was slowly, oh-so-slowly, examined, or break the law a second time (they had all arrived without legal excuse) and find work.
Those who chose to break the law a second time and work were in far better shape, psychologically, than those who did not. Of course, the causative relationship, if there were one, might have been the other way round: that those in better shape psychologically to start with were the ones who sought work. But I do not really think so, for the fact is that those who accepted the legal conditions of their asylum application were turned into whinging and whining dependents in no time, having only very recently been brave adventurers. Those who worked were not only better off economically—they still had their subventions—but psychologically and even, loosely speaking, spiritually.
This is not quite the same, however, as saying that it was a good thing if they worked. Being illegally employed, they were easily exploitable, and unlike legally employed people, no minimum-wage laws applied to them. If there were enough of them it would presumably have driven down the price of the kind of work they were employed to do; but whether this theoretical possibility was borne out in practice, I cannot say for sure. Economists differ on this, as they differ on everything, so that most of us have only our prejudices to guide us.
The Welfare State in Britain has enabled many people to get by without working even for the minimum wage: The economic difference for them of working and not working is too slight for them to bother. I have met a few people who were no better off working than not working, but who nevertheless recognized the improvement in their self-respect (not self-esteem) if they worked, and therefore did so; but it is not, I am afraid, human nature that there should be many such people. If you pay people to do nothing or be ill, they will do nothing or be ill, at least when nothing better financially beckons them to effort. Moreover, if you act ill for long enough, ill is what you become.
Therefore, it is quite possible that the work that the illegal immigrants do would simply not be done at all without them, and it is no secret that such immigrants are employed in quite large numbers, even by people who believe that illegal immigration is wrong.
Whatever policy is adopted toward these immigrants, there will be victims of that policy. There is no political policy that does not create victims; and who would trust our bureaucracy to be able to discriminate between deserving and undeserving cases? (It is now out of the question that the bureaucracy should act in the national interest, because much of it now believes that the national interest is not a legitimate consideration, and that only universal human rights count.) My experience of the immigration bureaucrats is that they will go to endless trouble to rid the country of people of potential value to it, while preventing the removal of those who are positively inimical to its interests. It is as if they see the world in mirror-image fashion from how the majority of citizens see it.
Certainly, the undeserving are a precious resource to the bureaucracy taken as a whole: For the worse, the less deservingly they behave, from the national point of view, the more assistance they need. The last thing that the bureaucracy wants is for people to fall below the radar and require nothing of welfare agencies. What use to the bureaucracy are such people?
The national interest and normal feelings of humanity may conflict. I remember one case in which a woman from Zimbabwe, now residing in Britain, had brought her aging mother to England on a bogus tourist visa, and who then claimed asylum through her daughter. Her mother (who spoke no English) had fallen into a profound silence since thugs of the ruling party had come to her village and buried her husband upright in the ground up to his head, poured gasoline on him, and burned him to death—insisting that she watch, proceedings whose reality I was able to confirm.
Naturally enough, her daughter wanted her to stay with her, but from the national point of view her mother was nothing but a liability.
The problem is that such stories cannot be made the determinant of national policy, but they cannot be entirely ignored, either. There are millions of stories of terrible hardship the world over: Are we our brothers’ keeper? One thing is almost certain: The combination of mass immigration and a right to welfare and other services is a recipe for an explosion.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).