Conversing Across the Gap: Perspectives on Immigration and Society

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

She: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the station

She: We both said that we’d had a wonderful evening