Conversing Across the Gap: Viewpoints on Migration and Society

Introducing the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Conservative, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

She: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. 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, windfarms and hydro

For afters

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look 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 implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the station

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