Integrating Immigrants

Immigrant Culture Test

I happen to think that the integration of immigrants into a foreign (to them) culture, any culture, is an important subject. Where immigrants do not become integrated they tend to form ghettos that are, in a sense, outside society and potentially destabilise it. Moreover, the immigrants themselves necessarily have a somewhat incestuous set of contacts and miss out on a lot that the society might offer them. So the subject is important from any point of view.

An invitation to take the the UK culture test demanded of immigrants to the UK recently popped up on my computer screen so I took it. I passed with about 70% correct answers. Now I am a UK national who has lived most of his life in the UK and a university graduate at a time when under 5% of UK residents went to university (although admittedly not a graduate in UK history, the subject of the questions). My historian friend Steve would probably have got 100% correct answers. All of which, in my mind, is totally irrelevant to the real question.

My point is that, at a realistic guess, around 90% of people who have lived all their lives in the UK and are thoroughly steeped in UK culture, good or bad, would have failed the test. So the much more important corollary is to know what on earh this has to do with integration into UK society.

Home Secretary Teresa May is recently quoted as defending the test, saying that it should be difficult on the grounds that UK citizenship is to be valued and not obtained easily. Amen to that but if ever there was a Parliamentary answer that was totally beside the point this was it. As I have no doubt mentioned before (several times), I despair at how politicians are allowed to get away with glib and irrelevant answers by their questioners. For the brief time I was in the public limelight in the 1990s, frequently in the press and on TV, I despaired also at how politicians were allowed to blatantly waste time talking platitudes or arrant nonsense at length in order to avoid having to answer another question. And this question happens to be important. It can reasonably be assumed that immigrants from outside Europe may have a slender grasp of English and come from cultures where corruption is a way of life and respect for individuals, particularly female, is scant, let alone any regard for so-called human rights.

It would be wrong to assume that immigrants from outside Europe necessarily do not respect western standards of expected behaviour but equally wrong to ignore that these standards are not part of their ingrained culture. Those differences seem, to me, to be the obvious factors that need explaining to immigrants from outside Europe. So where are the questions on those points? Totally absent. Again, most of those immigrants will have come from autocracies and the UK is supposed to be proud of its democracy. So how is that explained to immigrants? It isn't. The whole UK culture test is a grotesque farce and Teresa May should be pilloried for even tryng to defend it.