to be shocked that 'normal' people can be racist?

[MitchyInge]

unreasonable or just spectacularly naive to have discovered that there are people working with (or for the interests of) asylum seekers who begrudge and resent the help they receive?

am not about to start reading the Guardian or anything but I feel a bit sick after being privy to a semi-private discussion which ran along the lines of - ugh, I can't repeat it

admittedly I don't live in the most multi-cultural place in the world so perhaps am just not aware of all the issues

I do find myself agreeing with much of what katiematie says.
Seems like common sense to me.
I think the govt needs to encourage many people on benefits to do voluntary work in order to receive their benefits. This provides them with a much needed boost in confidence and a way to learn new skills.
I don't see what the issue of an underclass has to do with immigration.

Piglet - I ddint actually say that benefits create the problem - I dont think that they do. Benefits support people who lack educational and cultural capital - ie the wherewithal to work and the means to do so.

If all the benefits were taken away tomorrow those people would still find it very difficult to work and often people dont even live in the right areas to work.

mrsruffalo - presumably the people available to do the voluntary work would only be with no dependants/caring roles and not claiming disability? And how accessible will this voluntary work be - how will people get there for example?

I think these things are only common sense from a middle class educated pov - once you start seeing people as individual cases and unpicking the problems then it all becomes much harder.

The link to immigration came up because a poster said we dont need unskilled labour as we have enough of our own or some such.

Sorry Domstice Well it does create a cycle of dependency and an underclass of people who are reluctant to work they have kids who share the same view, and the cycle goes on and on sorry i am writing this in a rush as my dd 2.9 is quite demanding.

Well it comes down to whether you would rather have no safety net at all - like the US for example.

We would have far more of an underclass without one.

It all comes down to education to break the cycle/job creation/tackling social exclusion etc rather than taking away the safety net surely?

"Normal" people may hide it very well but it's always there and every so often raises it's ugly head.

For example, shortly after Akmal Shaikh was executed, MIL came round to say Happy birthday to me. However what she actually did was sit there, in my house, on my birthday, giving me evil looks and slagging off the Chinese (I am half Chinese) as if I was personally responsible.

She then went on to ask my husband when I wasn't in earshot (he told me later) whether my Mum eats dogs.

Nice. (Sorry, having a rant!)

Yep - it's alive and well everywhere.

Having said that though, I don't think objection to immigration and racism as always linked.

I am not a historian i did study Sociology at degree level too, it possibley started with the heavy industries being closed down post War era, steel, mines etc, this created a lot unemployment, men on the dole and unable to get jobs,fuled by the generous benefit system they stayed in that situation, thus their children did the same thing, had their children when quite young and thus on benefits developing a non work ethos, then those children had children and so the cycle goes on. So really there is not much incentive to work if one gets more on the dole as they would if they were in employment.

Also domestice, calculating benefits on actual poverty not relative like i think that this government do. People should be given the absolute minimum that they would need to feed and clothe and keep a roof over their heads not to be able to buy luxuries such as flat screen tvs to watch Jeremy Vile on. This should be for a certain period gradually reducing their income support until they do not have any for asay a year so that they have time to gain employment it just is not cut off straight away, like Maternity benefit is.

Take the Bardsleys made famous through Wife swap a few years ago, they were both unemployed on income support, claimed disability benefits for their asthmatic children, and they were smoking They claimed about £37000 a year, they did not see the point of working when they would get more in benefits, this is what i am talking about. Yes there should be a safety net but not a generous one which encourages this cycle of dependency.

People are generally not going to develop a work ethos if the job in question is low-skilled and low-paid. We need to create far more skilled, manual jobs.

A polish worker isn't really in a low paid job, because the value of the pay is worth far more if they save it up and take it back to Poland. The Polish are not prepared to work for low pay, hence once their pay became devalued as sterling became devalued, huge numbers of them left Britain. The British have done similar things in the recent past - going to Europe to do building jobs, living in temporary, shared accommodation and sendng money home, then returning when it was economically sensible to do so.

I think most people are at least a bit racist. It's not something many people would like to admit about themselves and I don't mean racist in the sense of being a card-carrying National Front bovver boy, but more that it's scarily easy to make assumptions about people based on what they look like and where they're from, especially if you're coming from a position of relative ignorance. If you recognise this and try to consciously avoid it you're probably doing about as OK as you can - it's the "I'm not racist, but..." brigade who are most worrying.

I think that many people are racist, but we have to separate people's attitudes to immigration from people's attitude to race.

Not everyone can have the same rights to obtain and benefit from British citizenship. Nationality does matter; we have a social contract with other British people that is different to the contract we have with people from the rest of the world. Without this social contract, we cannot have the NHS, free midwives and health visitors and so on.

So we have to decide who we give citizenship to (an Iraninan asylum seeker for example), who we allow to come here as an economic migrant (EU member country workers for example) and who we don't allow in at all (child sex offender, for example).

Everybody thinks that there must be a cap on immigration at some (hypothetical) point. Nobody realistically thinks that another 50 million people can move into England, and capping immigration is a matter of deciding how many more people can come here.

But we have to have a social contract or there is no point in existing as a nation; as such our primary obligations are to other British citizens. The place of birth, ethnicity, or skin colour of those citizens should of course be irrelevant.

Good post MillyR. With the weak pound, perhaps this is an opportunity to rebuild some of the manufacturing that supplies skilled manual jobs.

Haven't read the whole thread yet but i work with a lot of asylum seekers, economic migrants and refugees. I teach English and have done for over 10 years. I have heard comments from within the department which could be deemed racist. A teacher we had with us last year had an observation where she divided the learners up for an activiy and put the 4 black Africans in a group together away from the white Polish and other Europeans. When asked after why she had done it, she replied 'oh they don't like working with the blacks.' Um in the wrong job i think. Then she quite happily admitted in the staffroom that she would vote BNP but she wasn't racist, her 3rd cousin in law or something was Indian. Needless to say she doesn't work with us anymore. She used to tell me how much she liked the teaching though. My mum is a lovely person but can be horribly racist even though my DH is black.

Saramoon there can be quite a lot of racism between cultures, my Armenian friend does not like Albanians, and i think that this is so within the Armenian culture. I would not be surprised if that was said by the white Europeans not everyone thinks like us in the UK

It might not be the teachers view but what those migrants have said to her. Also Domestice has said regarding people on long term benefits, that there needs to be education and enforcing a work ethos, however its not going to work if someone gets more on income support than they do working

Piglet you may be right but a responsible teacher doesn't say "Ok you don't like blacks, fair enough, I won't make you work with them" - how would that make the Africans feel?

Yes of course cultures other than white British can be racist - doesn't mean it shouldn't be resisted.

yes Marin they should try and integrate them together instead of keeping them separate.