We are all old xenophobic Brits
When I saw that the elderly defeated Millennials in the Brexit, my immediate reaction was something like, “Those fucking old Brits are a bunch of xenophobes. They stick to the old ways and don’t accept people different than themselves.”
Don’t think it’s that simple though.
Lots of old people voted because they complained immigrants are taking their jobs.
This means they believe the economy simply isn’t producing enough value to support an influx of (mostly) low skilled workers. When these immigrants enter the country, they will be willing to work low-skilled jobs for lower wages, therefore displacing low-skilled British workers.
This is not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things.
Because this means those low-skilled British workers can be trained new skills and be re-allocated to produce value elsewhere. But for this to happen we have to meet 3 criteria:
- ) The elderly have to be able to actually learn new, economically viable skills
- They have to have enough money to survive the period of time they need to learn and find employment
- The job has be at a location they are willing to travel or re-locate to
There is no guarantee any of these criteria can be met, and even if they are, it is a very disruptive process. The free market just isn’t that efficient yet. People are used to old habits and will not accept this.
I tend to believe that people tend to be more open and accepting now than any point in history… unless they feel a threat to their livelihood.
In the case of elderly Brits who are barely making ends meet, immigration was a threat. And they felt that voting to leave the EU will create a better situation for themselves.
It’s very difficult to empathize or ‘think of the bigger picture’ when you don’t feel secure yourself. For instance, when I’m siting comfortably in my bedroom I support protecting endangered animals. But if I my family and I were stranded in a forest and we were hungry, I wouldn’t care whether the animals I hunt were endangered — I would hunt them into extinction if it meant survival for my group.
So we can’t exactly blame the Brexit on old xenophobic Brits. I believe their vote was just a symptom of the situation they were put in. If we were put in the same situation, would we have voted the same?
