Draft letter, feedback appreciated please! I was utterly dismayed to see the response by certain Green Party members to Natalie Bennett’s bold speech on the toxicity of the immigration debate. I wanted to make it utterly clear that the sentiment espoused is not shared by the majority of Green Party members, and are not representative of Green Party Policy. National leaders have shamefully scapegoated migrants as the cause of the housing shortage, wage stagnation and increasing pressures on the benefit system. If UKIP are to be believed the entirety of Romania and Bulgaria is about to move to Lincolnshire, hoovering up benefits and council housing in their wake. It is wholeheartedly false. Natalie Bennett was totally right to say “the government is scapegoating immigrants instead of acknowledging its own failings”. It is exactly that rhetoric that drives the discrimination faced in everyday life. As a second generation migrant I and my family know it all too well. It’s this migrant blaming that drives the hooligans who chased my father down the street shouting “f***ing Iraqi”. It’s the rhetoric that drives the policeman to spend 20 minutes asking where my father was from instead of finding out who had attacked our house. It’s the language that makes it okay for a border control employee to tell my Dad that she would “ruin his life”. Blaming this country’s ills on migration only fuels this behaviour. Highlight this is not scaremongering, it’s highlighting real lived experience. Green Party policy is emphatically on the side of a fair and humane migration policy. Our policy recognises that current governmental policy would rather chase Daily Mail headlines than treat migrants fairly. We wholeheartedly oppose current policy that separates families, that drives away international students from our universities and that deports vulnerable asylum seekers back to places of danger. Migration is an easy scapegoat for when government is failing in it’s duties, we as Greens reject that mentality.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 10:59:59 +0000
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