'Illegal immigration'

Terminology is all-important; not just because of its intrinsic meaning but often because of its loading. Thus if you peel away the layers of a term you use every day, you sometimes find a slightly unsavoury and prejudicial core. As with 'illegal immigrants'.

To start with, I have a fundamental philosophical problem with the term 'illegal' when it’s applied to human beings. Yes, it’s a matter of subtle semantics, but that’s what philosophers do. I simply believe that it is beneath the dignity of any human being to call them 'illegal'.

Only a deed can be illegal, for which civilized society has a system of justice, trial and punishment. Someone might knowingly enter a country illegally or overstay a ligitimate visa and thereby make themselves guilty de jure of 'illegal immigration', but even if they are convicted of that offence in a Court of Law, do we have the right to label them an 'illegal immigrant'?

The very term is loaded with the assumption that after committing the act of crossing the border illegally, or overstaying said visa, that person exists in a perpetual state of criminality, which is patently absurd. However, it suits the agenda of the fear mongers and right-wing populist politicians.

Every year, thousands of people leave their native countries hoping for a better life in the European Union. Inevitably, exclusion from the normal means of finding a job and earning a living means that some end up resorting to crime. The prevalence of thugs from the former East bloc in the Western-European underworld doesn’t do the image of the 'economic migrant' any favours either.

It seems, notwithstanding a hardening of attitudes throughout the EU of late, that the authorities turn more of a blind eye than 'manpower shortages' can excuse if Ivan and Olga want to earn as many Euros in a week of picking grapes in France, strawberries in England or tulips in Holland as they would in a year of sweating in a factory in Volgograd. They often come pre-equipped with a Western-European language, tend to learn the local tongue fast, and as long as they don’t otherwise transgress...

Indeed, without the injection of rolled-up sleeves from the East, several European agriculture-based industries would grind to a rusty halt before long. It just seems such a crying waste of skills to have highly qualified teachers, lawyers and economists picking chardonnay in Épernay while semi-skilled or unskilled people from developing countries - who probably have more hands-on experience in agriculture anyway - langush in assylum and refugee centres across the continent.

Certainly in my part of the world, the stereotypical clapped-out and overloaded Lada with Baltic plates has been almost completely replaced by late-model BMWs and Audis with well-dressed drivers who spend their honestly earned cash (plus VAT) in the High Street, and would cheerfully pay income tax if we’d only let them work legally. A run-around of 'what do you do back home?' at the local pub would have any corporate headhunter looking for a multidisciplinary team rubbing his hands and maybe, in the men’s room, washing them alongside a Ukranian veterinarian and a Belorussian schoolmaster who both spent the day sorting potatoes... Is it just me, or is there something really fu&#ed-up about that?

And then there’s the predictable bellyaching, frequently from society’s lowest common denominators (posterior-sitters who benefit most from Europe’s welfare states), that eager workers from the East (with a work ethic we could all learn from) are 'comin’ over ‘ere to take our jobs…' yea, yea. Talk to me again when you’re willing to give up your dole  handout to get up at 04h30 to milk the cows before a day of picking strawberries…

I’m neither denying, nor offering any solutions to the 'problems of illegal immigration' in their various guises throughout the world. That’s for wiser and greyer heads than mine to puzzle over; that’s why we pay them the big bucks. However where the EU is concerned, some logic somewhere tells me that arresting and punishing unscrupulous employers who provide pitiful working and living conditions, while rewarding and assisting those employers who want to recruit the same seasonal labour legally, is a better use of taxpayers’ money than chasing Ivan and Olga through the tulip fields.

And if ordinary people refuse to refer to fellow human beings as 'illegals', it might point the Boys & Girls in Brussels in a more constructive direction.  – AMB

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much, …”   Bro. Rudyard Kipling