Subject: RE: HOW MANY FOREIGNERS DO YOU LET IN?
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 02:42:07 -0400


I agree with Sangeeta that this is somewhat more interesting of a debate
than the usual citation-swapping and has certainly helped me formulate some
of my own ideas on the issues raised but I do have to say that there are
ways that this kind of discourse/provocation is gendered and I find myself
frustrated when members respond to Eric w/thoughtful, well-substantiated
posts and yet some of their basic points are repeatedly overlooked.
Unfortunately, my email won't be particularly thoughtful since it's way too
late in the evening for coherence but here are a few thoughts about the
discussion:

Eric wrote:
>Only yesterday, I translated at work a short news item saying that a Dutch
minister sees a looming imbalance between jobs and people to fill them and
suggested taking on some 7 million (I seem to remember) foreign workers over
the next 50 years to fill up the Dutch workforce. This idea is fine on
paper, but it doesn't take account of the factor I mentioned previously: how
many foreigners can a country absorb before you get social problems?

Eric, your question surprises me because it seems you have already answered
it. I would assume that there is a correlation between the need for 7
million workers and Dutch emigration? As David Cummings pointed out
>actually more people leave the UK then enter each year...some problem. Also
I have pointed
out that the EU needs immigration for the economy to expand.

This is *such* an important point that is still being overlooked despite
David's reminder. It reminds me of the debate in New Zealand a few years ago
where particular politicians (like winston peters) were voted in partially
because they drew upon anti-Asian immigration sentiments. The fact that the
NZ gov't had actively 'recruited' wealthy SE Asian immigrants was erased;
the fact that more NZers were leaving NZ than Asians were entering was
erased. Conservative white NZers complained that Asians were "taking over"
"their" country during one of the more active moments of Maori sovereignty
agitation. The focus on racialized immigration (apparently the white South
Africans who were also emigrating to NZ weren't a problem) not only
contributed to a kind of divide and conquer mentality (Asians as threat to
Maori sovereignty) but projected the country's internal racial anxieties
onto an 'invading' racialized other which needless to say deflected
attention from the repercussions of the invading, non-racialised British-NZ
'norm'.

I've strayed a bit from the politics of UK immigration but my point is that
Eric your emails suggest a transparency to whiteness so that western
Europeans and Brits remain fixed and rooted in their homogenous cultures
(when Dave points out Brits are migrating and I would add even though we all
know this that the UK had its own 'diaspora' although colonist discourse has
naturalized white presence in the most far-flung places of the empire) and
all other immigrants become racialized, marked, almost contaminating. This
is reflected in the subject line of your email. And it has been mentioned
before. I appreciated Amandi Esonwanne's point:
>As far as I know, the aborigines of America and Australia did not put any
numerical restriction on European immigrants.

I realize Eric that you are translating for the media which of course will
not raise these kinds of questions--are more Dutch emigrating? Why is it
that the formulation of UK immigration in your email is concerned with
racialized migrations--when I would not be surprised to see that white
Canadian, US, NZ and Australian immigrations to England are also very high.
When Clinton was voted in all the media hype was about Haitian refugees to
the US--deeply ingrained in the discourse of (HIV) contagion but the
mainstream media never dared to mention that 90% of these refugees were sent
back--thanks to the Clinton/Bush/Reagan interdiction agreement. Ok it's late
and I am losing coherence. But the point is that what you are translating
brings up far more interesting questions through its *erasures* than the
usual white transparency-homogeneity/racialized contagion discourse that you
are circulating. Liz DeLoughrey




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