Concrete Achievements

Tag: immigration

  • Glucksmann and Citizen Convention on Immigration

    The French presidential candidate Raphaël GLUCKSMANN has published proposals for how he would run the country – in book form, of course, this being France.

    A striking proposal highlighted by Le Monde today is a Citizen Convention on Immigration. This would be a design challenge (to say the least) but, given how toxic and deadlocked the immigration issue is in France and elsewhere in Europe, it might be a way to change the conversation.

    It’s the sort of issue for which citizen assemblies/conventions are well-suited – big picture, politically deadlocked, with a strategic or moral question at their heart.

    It’s not simple, though. Given how immigration is used as *the* core issue by anti-system parties, it would be a challenge to disentangle the actual question from side-questions about rural depopulation, economic changes, demographic shifts, and people’s sense of the past.

    But European mainstream politicians seem to have no solution to the immigration issue other than “copy the far right” and “hope it goes away” – this at least might move the conversation forward.

  • My phone setting is French and iOS 15 Siri used to read me English language texts in a…

    My phone setting is French and iOS 15 Siri used to read me English language texts in a very amusing “‘ow you say zees” accent. iOS 16 Siri just tells me “this message is not in French”. But I know that Siri knows English…

    On the topic of phones and language, I belatedly saw “Decision to Leave” last night and I think it’s the first film where on-phone translation is used to say something about a character rather than just for practical purposes. Soo-Rae (a Chinese

    immigrant in Korea played by Tang Wei) uses phone translation at particular moments because she is uncertain about how to express herself in Korean. But only for certain things, with (without spoiling the plot) a particular emotional significance.

  • Regulatory independence (inc on immigration) is the one unqualified benefit of Brexit…

    Regulatory independence (inc on immigration) is the one unqualified benefit of Brexit, bought at a cost in trade, rights and investment. So this might be a good thing. twitter.com/TheScotsman/st…

    The problems are
    (1) does the British state have capacity to make all these judgements consistently better than the better-resourced EU (maybe)
    (2) does the public like the idea of lower regulation on chemicals (doubt it)
    (3) do companies want to have two processes, one for

    the UK market with one range of chemicals and one for the EU market with a different range (almost certainly not, so an EU ban is an effective UK ban, but without a say for the UK.
    I suspect a lot of Brexiteers have in their heads that the UK is just in some hand-wavy way

    better at this than the Europeans, or ready to take a risk that will pay off. There’s certainly not much more democracy in obscure regulatory decisions shifting from Brussels to London.

    So even where Brexit is working as promised, the question is #WasItWorthIt.

  • Links from the week of 11 April 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 13 December 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Reading a couple of books from 2017 (that have been on the pile for a while) and…

    Reading a couple of books from 2017 (that have been on the pile for a while) and contemplating how policy books are « second draft of history » artefacts. So much of what is in them has either been overtaken by events or become a truism.

    (The specific books are Krastev’s After Europe and Mounck’s People v Democracy)

    Particularly after Biden and Covid, reading about the defining roles of the 2015 refugee crisis and Donald Trump feels like rewatching an episode of Tomorrow’s World about Minitel.

  • It has been depressingly educational to see how the media have taken one line in Macron’s…

    It has been depressingly educational to see how the media have taken one line in Macron’s speech that triggers their refugee crisis memories, taken it out of context from all the things Macron said about taking refugees and a better European strategy, framed it

    As the main point of the speech, and now Twitter is screaming that French voters have a choice between a male and female Le Pen. It’s notable that the only French media that made it the main theme was far-right rag Valeurs Actuelles.

    I would have liked to hear a different speech but this was not the speech Twitter thinks it was. If we allow this situation to be reframed for us into the 2015 refugee crisis it will become the 2015 refugee crisis and the far right will be delighted.

    Macron promised a new initiative with Germany very shortly. It needs to be of the right level of ambition and to focus on making the process more welcoming and more collective in Europe while protecting people from traffickers.

    The full speech is here: elysee.fr/emmanuel-macro…

  • Links from the week of 31 May 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Labour chasing anti immigrant voters?

    Labour chasing anti immigrant voters? twitter.com/paulwaugh/stat…

    Video on Twitter

    Is Brexit not enough? Destroying economic and social ties with our continent not enough. No, of course Brexit is not enough *because nothing will ever be enough*.

    If you chase after populists, you will become a populist, and people will vote for the real thing not the copy. (Juncker’s comment from a few years back, still true except in the case of the Tories where they cannibalised the far right. But Labour can’t do that.

  • Links from the week of 24 August 2020

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.