Status-Q

Janet Daley, writing in The Telegraph about being an immigrant to the UK:

What does choosing to live in another country mean in today’s world? To my mind then (and now) there is no question that I had decided to become, for almost all intents and purposes, British. The whole point of my decision was that I admired the values and attitudes of this country. Why else choose to live here?

Residing in a country did not seem to me to be simply a matter of adopting a flag of convenience under which it would be possible to live any way one liked so long as the local circumstances facilitated it. In fact, the old countries of Europe were attractive precisely because they had established cultural histories and an inherited stability that the US – with its constant social churn and neurotic insecurity – lacked. You came to live in Britain because you wanted to be part of what Britain was.

The European Union’s “free movement of people” rule and its obtuse confusion over the assimilation of migrants seem deliberately designed to undermine any such notion of cohesive national identity.

What will preserve the integrity of a nation’s institutions if the collective memory of its history is lost?
You need not choose anymore. Your habits and social assumptions need not change. You can have it all: any number of nationalities; a whole wallet file of identity documents; a peripatetic working life that drifts in and out of what would once have been communities but are now simply transit stops in a migratory existence.

Maybe you think this is progress. I can understand the argument which says that it is liberating: a new form of personal freedom. For the young and unattached, this may be – temporarily – true. What bliss to come and go across defunct borders, working and living without encumbrance wherever you please, as if life were a permanent gap-year adventure.

But what happens after that? When the responsibilities of grown-up life cause people to long for rootedness and a real sense of hereditary belonging – what then?

And then there is the more urgent political issue: what will preserve the integrity of a nation’s institutions if the collective memory of its history is lost?