Britain’s Immigration policy should screen for cultural fit

Britain is talking about immigration. It’s on everyone’s mind, you hear chatter in pubs, around water coolers and in between bread and milk aisles in supermarkets. Immigration was as big of an issue three years ago as it is now. Cameron, Clegg and Brown debated it on national TV. The subsequent government decided to make migration of folks from outside the EU its scapegoat and hacked at it with a few major changes to the system. Refugee numbers are down; fake educational institutions issuing fraudulent Student invitations have been closed down or de-licensed. Citizenship or Knowledge of Life in the UK test has been revised to such degree that even most indigenous Brits would fail it on any given day (seriously, does anyone in the street knows what QUANGO stands for?!).

So, surely, we’re done with immigration and can move on.

Well, apparently not. If you take the most recent UKIP vote seriously, and you most certainly should, all efforts to successfully curb non-EU migration went down the drain in the eyes of the average Joe British. Immigration is still bugging people at large, and our current government just doesn’t seem to get what the real issue it.

Getting under the skin of migration need not be rocket science. A simple round of focus groups will reveal the elephant in the room in its full glory. Taking the debate public is where things suddenly become most uncomfortable. At the end of the day, we’ve all been nursed with the cultural narrative of utopian multiculturalism, which has been the official party line in the UK at least until recently. British hearts just won’t acknowledge that things didn’t exactly work the way we dreamed they would.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room — the real issue with the UK’s migration policy, and a very candid discussion thereof.

It seems to me that the biggest issue with our migration policy and the public debate around it is that we look at newcomers to the UK through the eyes of the Exchequer only. We look at migrants as potential streams of tax revenue and benefit expenses. We give out work and settlement visas to exceptional non-EU talent, entrepreneurs and wealthy investors, and explicitly barr them from claiming any benefits other than the NHS services.

We look up to migrants to top up our birth rates, which don’t seem to keep up with the ballooning pension liabilities that we owe to the ever alive and kicking elderly folks.

We let in a handful of migrants on ancestry visas — most of them from Commonwealth, but their numbers are negligible.

We make scant references to the benefits of cultural diversity that migrants bring the the UK, but by and large we look at migrants as potential assets or liabilities to the system. Money sacks or money holes.

This is where taking people in as migrants for settlement or citizenship is not that different from hiring employees into a big organization. A prospective hire represents an earning potential for the business, which is somewhat offset by the costs of training, salary and perks. Those with the biggest expected net value for the employer would get the job — at least in theory, and often in practice.

But where immigration and big business recruitment really part ways is the evaluation of what Human Resources professionals call “Cultural Fit”.

Big businesses, it turns out, are very peculiar about what type of individuals they want to fill the ranks of employees. Every big (and old!) organization has its credo, a set of values and principles that moulded into what it is today. For some companies, their principles and values are the source of their competitive advantage and inspiration for the employees. And the onus is on the applicant to demonstrate that they are driven and motivated by the same values as the prospective employer, not the other way round.

An important clarification is due here. When big companies refer to corporate culture, what they really mean is a set of values, principles and management styles that are excepted and encouraged within the organization. Diversity is, in most cases, fine and welcome, but HR will look quite closely for values fit on entry and only take in those applicants who, on top of having the right skills, demonstrate that they won’t end up being toxic to the company’s culture.

Allow this analogy to sink in a little. For multi-billion-dollar businesses that have to mobilize and direct people by the hundreds of thousands multiculturalism (or, rather multi-value-ism) is a failed doctrine. The general rule of thumb is that you can coach people into getting new skills, but you can’t teach them the right values — you have to screen the wrong people out on entry or risk destroying a well-oiled machine with toxic hires.

Now let’s transition from corporate recruitment to an immigration policy.

I think that we can learn a great deal from how companies select their hires and apply the learnings and lessons to the design of a truly useful and beneficial immigration policy.

The first lesson that we can take is that when it comes to social harmony in a democratic community, there must be unity of values. It is simply paramount. And it’s very simple to demonstrate what happens when values clash. Recall the ridiculous landing of Roma Gypsies in Central London, which caused a ruckus in National media. Brits value tidiness and aesthetics of public spaces, respect private property and regard defecating in public as unacceptable behavior. Apparently, the Roma Gypsy group that set camp in Chelsea did hot hold respect for private property and tidiness of public places in high regard and thought that defecating behind BT phone booths to be business as usual.

If the above example made you smile, think about FGM. A practice that has recently been written in statute as a criminal offense still goes on in the UK amongst immigrant communities. Foreign “cutters” travel to the UK from North Africa to perform botch surgeries on little girls only to leave safely having done the deed. The communities that practice FGM believe that it has social — and sometimes religious — value. They are happy to sacrifice the dignity and health of their daughters on the altar of a 7-th century understanding of honor laid against the cultural attitude to women as property. In their set of values, this is a good thing to do. In ours, it is the opposite. And yes, in this case it is us versus them, I’m afraid.

The second lesson is that values are incredibly difficult to change, especially in the age of social media, satellite TV and cheap international phone calls. Our values are formed over long stretches of time as we soak in the myriad of cultural experiences that our life throws us in. The famous American Melting Pot concept is ages old and is no longer relevant. That’s because it assumed that a) arriving immigrants are an invisible minority at any given point in time, b) the local values strongly emphasize cultural cohesion (think stringent 1800s), and c) immigrants are cut away from ties with the forsaken homeland making frequent cultural refreshes impossible.

These days an immigrant can move home to the UK and join an already established local ethnic diaspora, maintain cultural links with the forsaken home via Facebook, digital media and Satellite TV and resist the penetration of local values very effectively. Most importantly, in a society that does not prize and encourage unity of values, keeping your existing ways — no matter how radically different to the host majority — requires no effort whatsoever. Isolated 2nd and often 3rd-generation ethnic communities, and often ghettos, are a living phenomenon in the UK as well as in other Western countries.

And finally, the third lesson is that irreversible and persistent value clashes build social toxicity, resentment and rejection. Let us return for the moment to the Central London Gypsies story.

Fortunately, the camp was promptly removed by the authorities and our guests were issued one-way tickets home. The matter was dealt with swiftly, in a respectful manner (as it should have been!), and most of our “guests” never returned.

Imagine for a moment that the Gypsies refused to move, and we could not do anything about it. Imagine that they continued defecating in public and littering Chelsea up. It is as clear as day that at some point in time, folks in the street would start taking matters into their own hands, and instead of dealing with the Roma, our coppers would have to handle the local citizens. Our values, once again, would elevate safety of a terribly annoying and anti-social group of foreigners above our own outrage.

Fortunately, if a corporation makes a bad hire and later realizes that there is no cultural fit, there are always ways to get rid of the unwanted employee. Things don’t work like this with immigrants: once you’re in, in most cases you’re in for good. If companies knew that they had just one shot at sealing an employment deal without any means to correct a hiring mistake at a later time, they would become incredibly more choosy with hiring and cultural fit.

And this is exactly what I am advocating. Given that unity of values is the bedrock of social cohesion in a democratic system, that values are difficult to change and that untreated value clashes result in social toxicity, we have no choice but to become extremely choosy with who we let in. We need to design and implement some kind of cultural fit screening as part of the immigration process, in a way that’s fit for purpose, consistent and devoid of hypocrisy. Exceptions should be made for refugees and similar immigration classes, but the majority of applications would need to be vetted for cultural fit.

Of course, we need to be very clear on what it is that we screen against. We have to know, live and breathe our values and principles. Fish and Chips and Union Jack aside, we would probably define our values around those of a contemporary Western civic society with democratic governance and Human Rights (not religious rights) baked into its DNA.

And we would need to walk the talk ourselves first. For instance, I find it utterly hypocritical that the UK openly declares itself as a country where Human Rights trump religious rights while allowing state-funded faith schools to discriminate prospective pupils based on religious affiliation. In a situation like this, I find us lacking moral right to teach religious minorities about Human Rights and be remotely trustworthy.

From londonhumanist.com