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    Loathe Thy Neighbour
    Loathe Thy Neighbour
    Loathe Thy Neighbour
    Ebook69 pages52 minutes

    Loathe Thy Neighbour

    By James O'Brien

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    About this ebook

    Immigration is the thorny question that just won’t go away. It feeds a whole industry of commentators, pundits and politicians who take great delight in whipping us all into a frenzy, speaking for the ‘ordinary people’. But, when ugly prejudices are being fed by professionals grown fat on the fear and fury of their consumers, it is time to stop and ask whether the faceless group of immigrants really exists – or whether it just appeals to our basest fears. In this lively polemic, James O’Brien brings some common sense back into the discussion. Some people want to be frightened. They thrive on anger and division and upset. But many people don’t, and it is they who are most let down – most insulted – by the immigration debate. We don’t need to buy into this myth. There is no such thing as ‘immigrants’. There is no ‘they’. There is only ‘we’.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElliott & Thompson
    Release dateMay 1, 2015
    ISBN9781783960873
    Loathe Thy Neighbour
    Author

    James O'Brien

    James is a UX Designer and experienced Agile practitioner. He loves to create exceptional products and can often be found complaining on Twitter about the frustrations that get in the way. In the last ten years he’s worked with agencies, enterprise codeshops and independent start-ups, always preaching the importance of designing for the user. James lives on a rusty Dutch barge moored by Tower Bridge. He doesn’t do anything in his spare time because he lives on a rusty Dutch barge, so he never gets any spare time. When he’s lucky, he sleeps. He usually smells faintly of diesel.

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      Book preview

      Loathe Thy Neighbour - James O'Brien

      biscuit

      Introduction

      This may not be among the best ideas I’ve ever come up with. To suggest, even tentatively, that constant conversations about ‘immigration’ and the problems it purportedly provides might be a much, much more profound social problem than the issue itself will, in the current climate, seem to many to be an act of reckless provocation.

      The same result, with a lot less effort, could no doubt be achieved by painting a target on my backside and inviting all comers to take pot shots at my posterior until I take back the ludicrous assertion that our country would be a happier, healthier, more harmonious place if we stopped the immigration conversation altogether.

      Neither will my cause be helped much by offering a long-forgotten 1990s craze for optical illusions as our starting point but it is, at least, better than no starting point at all. Just.

      The ‘Magic Eye’ illustrations, by which the nation was briefly but comprehensively seduced in about 1991, left an indelible impression on me. The idea was simple: stare at an apparently random series of squiggles and scrawls for long enough, unfocus your eyes from what was on the page and instead concentrate on what was ‘behind’ it, and a full, detailed drawing of anything from an ocean liner to a lion’s head would somehow swim into your vision. Blink and it would be gone again.

      I never once achieved satisfaction. Despite looking at hundreds of them, hoping that this time the meaningless scribbles would coalesce into something recognisable, there never came the vaguest hint of the artist’s hidden intention. If it wasn’t for the fact that just about everybody else on the planet managed to get the hang of it, it would have been tempting to chalk the whole thing up as a lucrative con.

      There is something about immigration debates at the moment that puts me in mind of those Magic Eyes. It is a sense that if we stare for long enough at the thoughts of people whose positions are angry, critical and fearful then we might unlock what it is they see and somehow help them to a happier, more peaceful place.

      And vice versa, if it is actually true that deep reservations about and objections to immigration can be fostered in breasts untainted by racism or xenophobia, then staring at the squiggles – or listening to the radio broadcasts – of someone like me might help assuage all that unnecessary fear, soothe that unquenchable anger.

      It may seem a strange analogy, never mind a strange ambition, but two things are certain in this arena: facts offer no meaningful opposition to feelings, and conversations involving opposing attitudes to the ebb and flow of people across our borders rarely, if ever, leave interlocutors feeling better, happier, more at one with the world than they did at the discussion’s beginning. Ordinarily, we all feel considerably worse.

      If you are married to the notion that your country is heading hellwards in a handcart because of the presence in it of too many people from foreign climes, you will be enraged and often offended at even the suggestion that you’re wrong. Conversely, if you believe that most of the arguments against immigration are bogus and most of the more prominent arguers are, at best, self-serving charlatans and, at worst, fomenters of racial hatred, then you will be left depressed at the ease with which so many people who deserve neither of these criticisms have been persuaded into the same school of thought.

      What, plausibly, do you think would happen if we never talked about immigration again? If we treated a person’s geographical origins with the same insouciance we currently apply to their star sign? If, in other words, we no more considered immigrants to be responsible for our society’s perceived flaws than we do families with more than two children or people who choose to work harder than their colleagues?

      It’s not easy. You’re staring at my squiggles now but there’s probably no hint of a cogent image behind them. Sadly, I don’t have a Rosetta stone to unlock what seems obvious to some but downright treacherous to others: that the real enemies of a country’s happiness and health are not the people who come to it in search of improved existences, but the people who insist that they shouldn’t.

      But imagine if the demagogues and scaremongers

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