Hacker News Reader

Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

It was about brown people. Always is. They aren't bothered by white immigrants.

I'm not sure that's entirely true in the UK. The Polish plumber taking British jobs is a fairly common trope in far-right discourse. I believe this is prevalent across Western Europe in general.

How I long for a Polish plumber. Hard workers, better skilled, better value.

I think that was true 10 years ago, but now it seems to have evened off a bit. Generally speaking (in my circles and the circles I see around me with family etc) there’s an acceptance of the “polish plumber” as a hard working person getting by these days.

This happens to each race in turn. First they're brown people coming to steal our jobs, then they're hard workers and some other race is stealing our jobs, then they're white or white-equivalent.

It's likely down to the fact that once the proverbial Polish Plumbers left, a lot of people realized that there's nobody here who actually wants to do that work, no matter the price. So we have no nurses, we have no truck drivers, we have no electricians. And the list goes on.

And it's impossible to import these people anymore, because a) the wages in the UK are low - lower than in most of the EU and much lower than in the US, and b) many of these professions are not really classified as high skill, even if they take a lot of practice.

I’m not convinced that the adherents of the UK and Western European far-right count Polish people as white, despite the typical Polish skin color. This is like how Italian and Irish people were often not considered white in the late 19th and early 20th century in the US, and probably in the UK too although I’m less familiar with that.

English people are generally not racist like Americans and don’t perceive the world in terms of a set of racial divisions. We are Island xenophobes, like Japanese people. There is us and then there is everybody else. Western Europeans get a pass because they are rich.

British culture is very different from US with regard to race. It took me a long time to understand what the difference was.

In fact every culture I know (directly or am informed about) is different form the others. I wrote a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

I do not think people in the UK care about where immigrants are from, they care about whether they compete with them for jobs. This is why some groups of people wanted less EU immigration (predominantly unskilled) and more skilled immigration, and professional people almost universally want EU immigration and oppose post Brexit policies that have allowed more highly skilled immigration.

This doesn't mean anything. It's either about skin color or not. If they have another criteria by which they decided that us Eastern Europeans are subhuman, then they don't have a problem with brown people, they have a problem with us.

Now you just can't get a plumber at all. I'm not sure they really were "taking British jobs" after all.

I would think that the majority of immigrants that are not white are also not from the EU, but I don't know that statistics.

That is not true.

The leaders of both the Brexit campaigns (Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage) both clearly said that they wanted more non EU (so mostly non-white) immigration - provided it was skilled people. Government policy since Brexit has made non-EU immigration easier.

Remainers wanted less non-EU immgration and more EU immigration.

So somehow the people who wanted less white immigration and more non-white immigration are the racists?

This is one reason a lot of us Brown people voted for Brexit. not my main reason, which was mostly opposition to further integration (the commitment to "ever closer integration") and some aspects of EU decision making, legislation and regulation.

It's normal for racists to create excuses for why they are not racist, and more generally, fascists to create excuses for wby they are not fascist. You have to learn to see through it.

Like, in the USA, they always complain about illegal immigration but say legal immigration is perfectly okay. If that were actually the case, they'd want an easy streamlined legal process. But they don't, because the point of the legal process being difficult is to keep certain types of people out. They're actually not okay with the kinds of certain kinds of people which mostly correlate to the ones who can't get through the legal process, and use "they're just too lazy to follow the process and if they followed the process I'd be fine with them" as a memetic shield against criticism.

The first point is true, but

> Remainers wanted less non-EU immgration and more EU immigration.

This is not true. I don't think there's a consensus on what 'remainers' wanted to do with non-EU immigration.

Given 1) the remainers in both the major parties wanted the keep the status quo, and 2) no prominent remainer politician or any significant remain campaign called for easier non-EU immigration I think it is reasonable to conclude that remainers in general (not all) were opposed to more non-EU immigration, and the policies they favoured lead to (and the actual effect of Brexit was) more non-white immigration and less white immigration.

You keep pushing this strawman. Just because someone wasn't for something, it doesn't mean they were against it. Immigration was simply not an issue on the Remainers' minds. Immigration was the main Brexiter point.

> Immigration was the main Brexiter point.~

Evidence?

> Immigration was simply not an issue on the Remainers' minds.

Which implies being happy with the status quo.

EU regulation and UK border control by far and away were the two leading pre 2016 Brexit vote talking points, both up front on stump and in the social churn as dog whistles.

University of Oxford:

    Migration was a defining issue in the UK’s June 2016 referendum on EU membership. This page brings together resources and analysis informing the exit process and our previous analysis of the referendum.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/projects/migration-and...

That was then, this is now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/europe/uk-brexit-mi...

Your first point was addressed by my sibling comment.

> Which implies being happy with the status quo.

At this point it feels like you are trolling. By your logic, I hope you are out in Angola distributing food, because otherwise you are obviously happy about people dying of starvation. See what I did there?

Brexit built it's entire campaign on "taking back control of the borders and restricting immigration". For Remain, the issue with Brexit was losing access to the EU single market and Schengen free movement zone, which were the focal points of their campaign. None of the sides campaigned against hunger in Angola, therefore by your logic everyone in the UK - including you - is positively happy about the status quo of Angolans starving?

I don't remember seeing any emphasis on immigration from the remainers. The remainers simply wanted to stay part of the EU for the economic and travel benefits. The Brexit campaign made immigration a focus point, and of course both Johnson and Farage had to provide some reasoning about replacing EU immigration. Once out of the EU, the only other immigration to replace it with was non-EU. So their argument was: we don't want to be in the EU, we still need immigration, so we'll replace it with skilled non-EU immigration.

Basically the UK replaced the culturally and economically close immigration from EU with culturally and economically far immigration from other countries, while also kneekapping itself economically...

And finally: "This is one reason a lot of us Brown people voted for Brexit. not my main reason, which was mostly opposition to further integration (the commitment to "ever closer integration") and some aspects of EU decision making, legislation and regulation."

Perhaps. Or perhaps it is the very common pattern of immigrants voting against further immigrants coming in. Notably, a very significant LatAm immigrant continent in the US are staunch Republican voters against immigration. Sure, they might come up with a variety of excuses why they are voting against their fellow countrymen being able to immigrate like they did, but ultimately it's quite clearly an attempt to burn the bridge behind them to close off further competiton for their own jobs.

> Basically the UK replaced the culturally and economically close immigration from EU with culturally and economically far immigration from other countries

Really culturally closer? What about former colonies with substantial English speaking populations and a a strong British influence on their culture. My South Asian ancestors all speak English as a first language, and had an education heavy in British culture, grew up with a common law based legal system, etc. Far easier to integrate (socially or into work) than people from most of Europe (Ireland being the main exception).

> they might come up with a variety of excuses why they are voting against their fellow countrymen being able to immigrate like they did, but ultimately it's quite clearly an attempt to burn the bridge behind them to close off further competiton for their own jobs

We are voted for more of our (or our ancestors) fellow countrymen to be allowed to immigrate. This is the exact opposite of your LatAm anti-immigration Republicans.

I can promise you that if you anonymously asked the majority of the rural Brexit voters (rural areas being where the majority of Brexit votes came from), they'll all say that they are culturally closer to white Europeans than to dark skinned non-Europeans.

The UK shares much more and much longer of it's history with Europe than with it's former colonies. We are talking about thousands of years going back to Roman times, instead the less than hundred that the general British colonial rule lasted. The Royal family has Danish and German blood.

Does this mean anything? Not really. It's all semantics.

The actual outcome is very simple: the UK demolished it's ties with it's closest neighbours and biggest single economic block, for some questionable ties with very far away countries. In doing so, it now has very little negotiating power on it's own and has to build many relationships from scratch, from a very weak starting position.

The financial situation of much of the population is dire. The only real reason why one would want to immigrate to the UK is the financial sector, which is still hanging on. If you voted for Brexit, I'd like to say "good luck, I hope you like the taste of the meal you cooked".

Kinda. I think it's slowly becoming more anti immigration in general.

Though with the London Mayoral election on Thursday, it seems like people want Khan out, using "ULEZ" as the excuse for not wanting a "brown" person. I know a fair few people who live in London and their only criticism of him is ULEZ, even if it doesn't effect them at all (massively brainwashed by Facebook)

Rishi Sunak, our current prime minister, is brown, and I don't think that's really come into play at all.

Sadiq Khan is Muslim which is more of a wedge issue, but I would say in my circles, ULEZ, and more generally anti car sentiment, is a huge concern.

In my experience as a Brit no-one really cares about skin colour but about culture, religion (if fundamentalist), accent, etc. It basically just comes down to "are you integrated". I don't think that it's unfair to expect people to fit into society.

That's pretty much what the immigration debate is all about. If a Nigerian millionare comes over, brings his family, whacks them in a private school, basically no-one cares. Bring more.

It's unskilled, uneducated people who have issues with integration that basically everyone wants to limit.

Looks like concerns around ULEZ were way overblown, given Khan's comfortable win. A lot of noise drummed up by a small minority of fruitcakes on social media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com