To think it’s easier to want open boarders if you’re privileged?

[Theselfishsister]

Having an ongoing conflict with my sister regarding refugees, she’s very ‘let everyone in’ I would say I’m somewhere in the middle.

She’s given up spare bedrooms to refugees, spends weekends in Calais helping them and is posting everywhere on SM about letting them all in. As well as attending protests regularly for the last 4 years or so.

What strikes me is that her and her other friends going to all of the events are white, MC (although she is by marriage, we grew up very WC) and live incredibly comfortably. She’s a SAHM and her husband owns his own company, they have never needed benefits or social housing and her children are privately educated with all of them receiving private medical care.

A massive increase in people here are unlikely to ever have much affect on her life, she won’t have to fight for jobs or wait for a house or deal with benefit cuts when too much is paid out, as well as the increase in waits for Medical care and school admissions. Whereas for someone like me, this is obviously a more worrying factor and the thought of just opening our borders to everyone does scare me. As much as I would love to be able to take every person fleeing a great life, it just causes me worry and I don’t think I could support completely open boarders.

She obviously just thinks I’m a selfish heartless bitch for not protesting to remove our borders or similar. When I asked why she let refugees sleep in her spare rooms but never the homeless man on the road behind her (who’s been in the same spot since she moved there 5 years ago!) she called me a racist!

So AIBU to think it’s easier to want open boarders if you’re privileged or am I just a selfish cow?

"Virtue signalling of the highest order. So much sympathy for everyone else in the world and none for our own."

@MrsAriadneOliver is a good example She posted the above but going by her posts on this thread she isnt too bothered about disabled tenants needs. Until she can pit them against refugees.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/a3471859-local-authority-restricting-bungalows-on-age-basis#83915868

I don’t know what you mean helena I care a lot about this country’s poor which is why Ive done so much work with homeless people. I am also one of them.
Not allowing mass immigration is not going to stop homelessness, of course it wouldn’t, but letting everyone in will make the problem worse.

79,000 people in temporary accommodation already with no houses for them, but numbers of immigration in excess of 9 million is fine and we should let more in?

Every single person in the UK is either an immigrant, or is descended from immigrants.

Most of the people I know who are welcoming to immigrants aren't privileged.

It's true that many people who are privileged use immigrants - for cheap childcare, cheap labour, etc etc - but I wouldn't call that a "welcome", just transactional.

OP i said SOME on this thread not all

@SimplySteve

(And, of course, the best way to stop immigration - if that's what you really want to do - is to help create the conditions where people don't need to leave their home countries. That's one of the reasons why overseas aid is so useful to the UK, not as an act of altruism. )

archery do you think by taking their skilled workers is doing their home countries any good? We’ll have the good educated ones and leave the others behind? Or do you think that will be the fall of their country?

I’m for a points based system and skilled workers coming here, but I think it’s hypocritical that people who are for allowing all immigrants to come here, claim to care for the counties they came from.

@HelenaDove

You make me laugh!

im glad it amuses you You couldnt give a fuck about tenants though yet happy to use them to suit your prejudices.

Moussemoose

I don’t think you really understand what exactly living in an area where you are the minority.

This doesn’t mean there are a number of nationalities living in one area. There is just one immigrant community and the British are the minority.

This area isn’t in Lincolnshire, or Bradford nor is it in London so this area makes 4.

It has got a bit better since summer 2016 as after the Brexit vote a lot went home.

Still can’t get a coffee though.

I know plenty of very working class people who are kind and would give the shirt off thier back to someone who needed it more.... please dont be patronising. My husband was born on a council estate to a teenage single mum and hes incredibly left wing and believes in taking in more refugees.

But I guess by privileged you might mean educated? My husband is university educated and has a good job now.. but he was the first in his family and it was by no means easy for him to get where he is. I'm probably more middle class as my parents were wealthy... but again they were both born into very working class families in the north. My dad left school and worked from 16 to help support his family. By middle age he was earning a vast salary so I certainly had a fairly privileged upbringing... but both my parents are liberal, left wing bleeding hearts... none of these people were sheltered or are unaware of what it means to struggle... and yet they would welcome more refugees

@HelenaDove

Wrong, and wrong I’m afraid!

Why should people care more about people who just happen to live in the same country as you? Genuine curiosity as it’s often said “charity begins at home” etc

Surely a person is a person - both at home and abroad deserve equally

@ClaireElizabethBeauchampFraser

She's absolutely nuts to want to let anyone in that isn't in need of refuge for their own safety or who can offer the country something in terms of skills.

So if you don’t believe in opening our borders you’re not a kind person?
By privileged I mean it wouldn’t affect you. People like you - You’re middle class, your husband is university educated and has a good job. What affect would mass immigration have on you?

Would you let your child starve to feed the kid down the street?

Why should anyone care more about their immediate family or close friends vs some random you don't know on the street vs other people you don't know anywhere else in the world?
Would anyone argue that they would cry over someone they don't know dying (say) the same as they would a close friend they know? Because they are all people.

archery do you think by taking their skilled workers is doing their home countries any good? We’ll have the good educated ones and leave the others behind? Or do you think that will be the fall of their country?

Theselfishsister people aren't chess pieces. They make decisions and risk assessments for themselves. We aren't "taking" them, the ones who try and come here have made the decision that, for whatever reason, they will do better here than elsewhere.

Why should anyone care more about their immediate family or close friends vs some random you don't know on the street vs other people you don't know anywhere else in the world?

You can’t compare family with British vs foreign. A random British stranger means the same to me as a random foreign stranger.

That’s the point of the post.
To you that is a ‘random British stranger’, to me that is my friends that are living in hostels, my streets that have changed, my job prospects that have and are disappearing, my son that was left to die by a failing overstretched NHS and my local schools full of refugees that may we’ll be men in their 30s.
It is easier to be liberal when you will remain unaffected.

I know what you mean op. I have a friend who had she been born now her family would be in a terrible position but was lucky enough to benefit from council housing and parents in low pay but flexible jobs.
Now they’d be zero hours and moved from pillar to post in private rented. She also went to one of the best grammars in the area - she’s be tutored out now. She went to uni fee free and was subsidised due to low income.
I see how kids growing up in the same circumstances just don’t have the same opportunity. Her views reflect the fortunate position she’s in now, without looking how it would be if she was born now.

I'm neither white not privileged, but agree largely with your sister. Christ knows what that makes me. Human, probably.

Something that frustrates me is how often immigration is blamed for things like the failing NHS when this is almost entirely caused by something else (aging British population).

Scapegoating is a terrible thing and historically l has never led anywhere positive.

I'm not the one advocating a hierarchy of the poor. I don't think need should depend on where you were born.

Need is need and poverty is poverty. We should all work together to help poor people and we should do this by questioning and opposing the wealthy.

But apparently I live in the wrong place and don't understand.

In an ideal world, everyone could be helped and no one would be poor.
But how can people want open borders when we don’t have things in place to support our poor communities and people?
How can we allow anyone in (who will then be homeless) when there’s already 1.2 million people here on the social housing waiting list?
Immigrants are not to blame for the failing NHS, but it’s failing and certainly can’t cope with more people on a large scale. Let’s not forget that it’ll be the same trusts that suffer. For example, my old area that had a huge influx of migrants in a very short time, this obviously had a knock on effect on the local services, but wouldn’t have made a difference to a surgery 30 miles away.
We should be opposing the wealthy, but until something can be done to ensure they pay more without buggering off to Luxembourg, it’s difficult to be for open borders.

Again OP, YANBU. I would be equally annoyed by your DSis's attitude and DARVO tactics of calling you a racist.

I know I will get flamed for saying this, but I see a lot of parallels between the asylum seekers/refugees situation and trans situation wrt boundaries, rights, being called a bigot, the woke/right on virtual signalling, and just being told to 'be nice' and suck it up. Food for thought.