Are we really going to blame all our problems on immigration?

Here we go again? I know thinking is hard, but why are we so easily tempted by lazy reasoning?

The last time someone re-framed a complex socio-economic problem into simple terms that focus on blaming foreigners or “the other” we ended up with Hitler. Let’s not do that again.

…So I was responding to the #brexit #bbcdebate thread on Twitter and found myself unable to convey what I was thinking in 140 characters.

The tipping point for me was watching an audience member – an educated, young, white female person – explain that the reason no one would want to be educated in Europe is because Europe is rubbish and “we are better than they are so we should leave”. This was a real shock and it left me wondering how we got to this point.

The biggest issue here is that instead of thinking about our economic challenges in light of complex, global events such as the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the birth of fiat currency or even questions about market reform or the ability of free markets to self-regulate the #leave campaign is blaming all our woes on foreigners.

I guess problem number one was the referendum itself. I don’t understand how a complex issue involving politics, economics, history, ethics and a wide set of factors some going back decades can be reduced to a simple yes or no answer. I’m not saying referenda are inherently wrong but in this case it just isn’t doing the issue justice.

What I’m seeing is scaring the pants off me. I keep hearing people saying they want control back while it is not clear at all that control is even possible or indeed if it has even been lost (or that we even had it to begin with) and that the problem is the borders and immigration (i.e. too many foreigners coming here to push us down our council tax waiting list).

My belief is the root of most of our current challenges is inequality. Our system is struggling to deliver betterness for the majority and this is what is fundamentally leading us to all sorts of potentially evil places.

Re the debate, the point of this post is that the last time someone re-framed a complex socio-economic problem into simple terms that focus on blaming foreigners or “the other” we ended up with Hitler. This is real, and very dangerous because when you re-frame a difficult problem into an easy one and you add a simple emotional explanation the argument can catch-on very very quickly.

Currently I’m hearing a lot of re-framing. The biggest issue here is that instead of thinking about our economic challenges in light of complex, global events such as the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the birth of fiat currency or even questions about market reform or the ability of free markets to self-regulate the #leave campaign is blaming all our woes on foreigners.

The last time this happened and a population rediscovered its ancient inner hatred of the other it took us to a really really bad place. Let’s please not do that again. It’s our job as humans to try and keep the darker sides of our survival programming in check.

What I’d like us to do is firstly cancel the referendum then let’s all put our heads together and assess the situation correctly before we make our next move.

Failing that, please vote to #remain on Thursday!