Letter: A little reminder for New Forest folk about who we are

A reminder of who we are... I hear quite a few working class folk complaining about the number of foreigners they perceive in this country. Let us just reflect on who we are. A couple in Southampton used to complain to me about the number of Polish migrants in their neighbourhood.

I came to know that her father was Dutch and his father born in Australia. I look pretty ‘white’ and am assumed to be of local origin. In fact I was born on the west coast of Canada, on land stolen from the Salish nation. My maternal grandmother’s family migrated to Britain from Switzerland. My father’s family were of East European Jewish heritage. I am married to a Bengali woman who lives in India. My son’s partner is Korean. Are we very unusual?

I know people in Lymington and Southampton whose relations live in New Zealand, the US, Australia, Ireland, Palestine, Portugal, France, Sudan, Germany, Denmark, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. Mixed origins and ethnicity are so common as to be unremarkable. For generations some occupations in the UK have been heavily dependent on migrants from South and South East Asia and Europe – notably medicine and social care. The UK chose not to train enough doctors, or to pay them well enough to keep them, and the same applied to nursing and care workers. Without the migrant workers these services would collapse. Everyone knows this.

Chinese and Indian students now keep our universities afloat with their fees. Migration and mixing of races have now become normal and inevitable. White Europeans on boats occupied most of the rest of the world without troubling themselves to get visas or permission from the localities they colonised. The present mixing is a result of what Europeans did over the last 500 years. Let us acknowledge and be positive about this mixing. We need sensible and humane rules about access to the UK, and for politicians and media to stop pandering to mobs on the streets by pretending that migration is the main challenge facing working people.

And the rich world needs to do far more to make life tolerable and possible in the regions from which most refugees come. The climate crisis must be mitigated and the West and Russia must stop fuelling the wars raging in Africa and the Middle East. As a footnote, the migrants buying up the houses and pricing the local folk out of Lymington arrive via the M3 in Porsches and Range Rovers, not inflatable boats from Calais.

Jon Ellis
Lymington