Observations of an Expat: I am an Immigrant

By Tom Arms

I am an immigrant. I emigrated from the United States to the United Kingdom on the 12th of December 1971.

I had studied for a year in Britain 18 months before and fell in love with the country and one of its citizens and moved back despite the dreary weather and traffic jams.

I did not flee a Middle Eastern War. I did not turn up at Heathrow claiming political persecution. Neither was I escaping a life of poverty in an African mud hut. In fact, if I had stayed in America I would probably be enjoying a comfortable country club existence.

Nevertheless, I feel an affinity with African, Asian, Hispanic, or any person from any race or country who left their homeland to seek a new life. It is not easy to leave the safety net of cultural familiarity, family and friends.

If you are born to a country your acceptance is automatic. As an immigrant, you have to constantly prove your worth and justify your decision to uproot your entire life and start afresh.

I feel I have succeeded. I started an international news agency which launched the careers of well over a hundred journalists. My children are all a credit to me as are the 200 boys—many of them now young men– who have passed through my scout group over the past 20 years.

I am not boasting. In fact, I don’t regard myself as particularly unusual. Immigrants in every country have outstanding records of contributing to their adopted homelands.

Think about it, by their very nature immigrants have proven through their actions that they are risk-takers. They are adventurers. They are focused, determined and prepared to work hard to achieve their aims. Such people are assets to any community lucky enough to have them.

Just ask the American shareholders of eBay, Google, Intel, Yahoo and Sun Microsystems. They are all grateful to the immigrants who started the businesses which keep them in their gated communities and on their expensive golf courses. According to the National Venture Capital Association, immigrants started 25% of America’s businesses financed by venture capital.

Here is another statistic for you, according to the US Small Business Administration, immigrants are 18 per cent more likely to start a business than native-born Americans. On top of that, those small businesses in 2015 employed 4.7 million Americans.

Donald Trump in America and the Brexiteers in Britain, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands… they all claim that immigrants are sucking their countries dry. Their views are echoed by a rapidly growing anti-immigration lobby throughout the Western world. Well, according to a report from University College London—one of the world’s top educational establishments—between 2004 and 2014, immigrants from the European Union put $15 billion more into the British economy than they took out. In fact,  the ethnic group which took out more in benefits than it put in was the native-born Brits who—over the same period—cost their country an estimated $700 billion more in welfare, education and health benefits than they paid in taxes.

And what about the millions of aliens that Trump plans to deport? Well, according to the US Immigration Policy Centre, Latinos spent $1.5 trillion in 2015 and the Asians $775 billion. Of course, most of these people are legal, but still, it is clear that if he has his way Trump will send a lot of money to the other side of his wall.

Opposition to immigration is not just based on cash. There is also a strong argument that they are undermining native cultures. It is true that people bring customs across borders. My family, for instance, make a point of celebrating the traditional American holiday of Thanksgiving. Every year we invite our British friends and thank them for making us welcome. Some have adopted the custom.

Successive waves of immigrants have all been vilified as cultural contaminants. In the US, the Irish and Poles were attacked as heathen Catholics. Italian immigrants were accused of stealing jobs. The Chinese and Japanese were lumped together as “The Yellow Peril.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French Huguenots swelled the population of Britain by a staggering ten per cent. But their craft skills are credited with laying the foundations of Britain’s industrial revolution.

World Review

So, it is Kamala Harris. No great surprise. She ticks all the right boxes and has been the front-runner for some time for the job of running mate to Joe Biden. She is part Asian (mother was Indian), part Black (father was Afro-Caribbean) and a woman. Biden is White (although he is Catholic). All the Democrats need is a LGBTQ evangelical Latino Protestant for the complete rainbow ticket. Traditional wisdom is that Biden should have considered picking his vice-presidential candidate from a swing state such as Ohio or Michigan. Solidly Democrat California should be a shoo-in for Joe. But in today’s divided America ideological positioning is more important than geography. Kamala is far enough on the left of the Democratic Party to secure the support of the Democrats growing left-wing. At the same time, she has impeccable law and order credentials as a former District Attorney and California Attorney General. Of course, Kamala is under more public scrutiny than almost any other US vice-presidential candidate in history. If Biden wins he will be 78 when he takes office which adds extra meaning to the definition of the vice president as “a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.”

Lebanon continues its slide into chaos. The government has resigned. The riots continue. The world calls for political reform as a condition for economic aid and the coronavirus pandemic rages while the health service and economy collapses. Last week I wrote that the rapidly developing political vacuum was creating an opportunity for Iranian-backed Hezbollah. But even that now seems problematic. Hezbollah is seen by many Lebanese as part and parcel of the political establishment which created the current mess. Its stranglehold on the country’s Shia population in East and Southern Beirut and South Lebanon has provided it with 57 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament and 17 of the 30 cabinet posts.  Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, is being burned in effigy at anti-government protest rallies in Shia areas. The antiquated and unnecessarily complex political structures devised by the French have failed. Hezbollah is tarnished with the same brush. Israel is faced with the possibility of a failed state on its strategic northern border and civil war in Syria to the East. There is no obvious successor in Lebanon, which is even more dangerous than Hezbollah.

There is a possibility that the curtain is about to fall on the 26-year dictatorship of Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko. His recent re-election as president was a sad bad joke. He allegedly won 80 percent of the vote. He should have won more votes. After all, he locked up most of the opposing candidates. One of the few able to officially stand against him was Housewife Svetlana Tikhanivskaya who ran in place of her imprisoned husband. She has now been forced to flee to Lithuania. It is a wise move. Lukashenko is strongly suspected of having murdered at least four of his political opponents. In the meantime, the riots continue. They started in the capital Minsk, but have now spread throughout the country. The armour and balaclava-clad Sivloki police have arrested at least 5,000 people and three people are believed to have died either in custody or when the Sivloki opened fire with live ammunition. The EU is threatening sanctions. Putin is offering support, which may be what saves Lukashenko from the fate of so many dictators—swinging from a lamppost.

Is Donald Trump a crafty under-handed politician prepared to undermine America’s basic institutions in order to cling to power, or is he just a screw-up? He has made no secret of the fact that he thinks a postal ballot would result in electoral fraud and has floated the constitutionally impossible idea of postponing the November election. A successful postal ballot, of course, depends on an efficient postal service. At the moment the US postal service is anything but. In June, Trump appointed big-time Republican donor Louis de Joy as America’s Postmaster-General with the clear brief of plugging the huge losses in the American postal service. De Joy has taken on the task with alacrity; banning overtime and ordering postal workers to leave letters unsorted and undelivered if they don’t make the end of daily deadlines. The result is a growing pile of the undelivered post which is threatening the efficient running of a future postal ballot. Ronald Stroman, until recently the number two at the USPS, summed up the problem when he said that balancing the financial realities with public needs was a constant battle, “but the concern is not only that you’re doing this in a pandemic, but a couple of months before an election with enormous consequences. If you can’t right the ship, if you can’t correct these fast enough, the consequence is not just, OK, people don’t get their mail, it’s that you disenfranchise people.”

Two vital elements for any successful business are the rule of law and access to reliable information provided by a free press.  The presence of both those elements were key to the long-term success of Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party has dealt a major blow to the former British colony by removing the legal protections negotiated as part of the handover agreement. Now they are chopping off another political and commercial pillar with the arrest of Jimmy Lai, publisher of the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily. Mr Lai made his fortune with a chain of Asia-based clothing stores and in 1995 decided to spend it launching a Hong Kong tabloid. At first, Apple Daily took the normal tabloid route of purveyor of salacious celebrity gossip. But as concerns grew about the future of democracy in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai took his publication down a political anti-Beijing, pro-democracy route. This made him an obvious target for the ire of the Chinese Communist Party and he was arrested under Beijing’s new National Security Law. In the short-term, Lai’s arrest appears to have been a CCP mistake. Circulation of the Apple Daily increased overnight from 70,000 to a sell-out print run of half a million and shares in the parent company Next Digital jumped 1,127 per cent. After 40 hours in detention Lai was released and returned to a delighted newsroom to declare: “Let’s fight on. We have the support of the Hong Kong people. We can’t let them down.”

For most humans, sex is a private thing. And it turns out that our desire for privacy is shared by other members of the animal kingdom. At least that would seem to be the case following reports from the West Bank Palestinian zoo in Qalqilya. For two months at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the public was banned from zoo premises. The result has been a local baby boom. The ostrich has produced three times its normal number of fertilised eggs and the baboon population has exploded with more on the way. It will be interesting to see human birth statistics in 2021. Or will social distancing be a determining factor?

Stay Healthy,

Tom Arms