Dining Across the Gap: Perspectives on Immigration and Society

Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

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

For starters

She: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, 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 very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

She: We both said that we’d had a lovely time