ECONOMICAL WITH THE TRUTH
Dave Randle
The first
time I heard the weasel term ‘economic migrant’ it was being used by Charlie
Elphicke, Conservative weasel for Dover, as a PR tool to tar everyone trying to
get into the port with the same broad brush, be they refugees or workers; a
rebranding exercise for political purposes.
Classification
is the bedrock of ‘divide and rule’ and the cornerstone of hatred. It
overwhelms the diversity of reality with a solid one-dimensional symbol, so an
individual ceases to be an individual and becomes a representative of a
fictional undifferentiated mass.
Some people
even feel the need to ‘identify’ themselves as something or other: ‘I’m a vegan’,
‘I’m a diabetic’. Actually and above all, you are a rounded and unique human
being, who incidentally eats certain foods, or one that has a certain
difficulty. You are not defined by your diet or what is wrong with a couple of
internal organs, any more than you should be defined by race, creed or colour.
If it wasn’t
a topical politically motivated PR term, economic migrant could apply to almost
everybody who ever got up off their arse and went looking for work or a better
standard of living for their partners and families; in the case of those in
miserable, impoverished and war-torn places, the standard of living anywhere
else would seem to be better.
It would
apply to all the Irish and Jews who settled in America, and all the Europeans
who got there before them. It would apply to all the Cornish miners who took
their expertise to all parts of the world where it would be valued and
rewarded, and it applied to the Auf Wiedersehn
Pet type jobbing builders who set off to use their skills in the vital job
of rebuilding Germany when the trade in the UK was in serious recession.
It applied
during the popular music boom in the sixties, when top entertainers in Britain
were paying 90% of their income in tax theft, so headed across the pond to
where income was better and the tax was in more reasonable bounds. The ‘brain
drain’ from the UK to the States was economic migration from the poverty of
slaving for the NHS to gravy from sponsored US faculties.
In an
earlier ‘brain drain’, Werner von Braun and a whole boiling of nasty Nazis
grabbed America’s get-out-of-jail-cards with both hands and economically
migrated from slopping out and smuggling smokes to palatial offices and fancy
salaries, building up the arsenals of their ex-enemies, while living off the
fat of the administration’s heads.
Britain
economically migrated to all the once-pink areas of the globe and America has
been doing it ever since to ensure that fuel migrates in the opposite direction
and ‘regime change’ can keep the world safe for Macdonald’s and Microsoft.
These lines by Emma Lazarus adorned the
Statue of Liberty when it was erected:
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates
shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
Does it still say that now?
