The baby-boomers finally see sense on immigration

Last week’s green paper on immigration and citizenship used a rhetoric that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, talked about ‘earned citizenship’ and restricting certain welfare benefits to those who have achieved full citizenship, after at least six years ‘on probation’. This is the same government that has overseen the biggest-ever migration into Britain and has been more positive about minority rights, multiculturalism and an ‘open Britain’ than any in our history. Grasping this apparent conflict requires an understanding of the learning curve of the liberal, baby-boom generation.

Most of today’s cabinet were students in the 1970s and 1980s. If their student union had been debating the motion ‘The nation-state is a bloodstained anachronism’, most of them would probably have voted for it. And why not? I was there too and we were growing up in the shadow of nationalism’s 20th-century horrors. Indeed, we liberal baby-boomers were children of a historic shift in Western political attitudes in which the ancient ideal of the moral equality of all humans came to be enshrined in both national and international law, most famously in the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Only 30 years before, a proposal that a clause on racial equality be included in the covenant of the League of Nations was rejected by all the major Western powers. Yet by the 1950s, after two world wars and the Holocaust, nationalism, at least in the West, had been partly discredited and the legitimacy of racial and even social hierarchies was shattered. For the first time, the idea of equal citizenship, both within and between countries, began to become a reality; indeed, it was one of the driving forces behind the generational upheaval of the 1960s.

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The baby-boomers finally see sense on immigration
Guardian.co.uk