The Migrants

My thoughts now on mass migration....and a poem written before The Deluge

A change of plan this month. I have been working on a rather complicated essay and have got bogged down in my material such that it is not yet ready for publication. So instead I have this short piece about our current migration crisis in the West....including a poem - The Migrants - that I wrote twenty years ago (although published more recently).

My poem was written before the floodgates had opened so wide that they now threaten to engulf a somewhat wearied old European civilisation with increasingly assertive new arrivals who have not even been required (for reasons of cowardly political correctness) to embrace its values of or feel any gratitude towards their bountiful hosts. And before similar floodgates swung wide on America’s southern border that – whilst the consequences are less completely corrosive than in Europe – have put America’s famous Melting Pot under stresses that have been too fast and too furious to be constructively absorbed.

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Most Westerners will feel an instinctive empathy for genuine asylum-seekers fleeing for their lives. And they will be happy for their country to do what it can for these people – always within the bounds of realism. I think too, that very few Western people are implacably opposed even to economic migration per se. I always keep in mind that if I had grown up in some god awful country that is what I would try to do myself. What rankles with people about the bleeding heart pro-immigration lobby and their parasitic ‘human rights’ lawyer enablers is the wholesale disregard of the interests of the wider host population. What rankles is how the virtue-signalling vanities of this university-educated (or as I often uncharitably rephrase it; university sheep-dipped) middle class have imposed costs borne primarily - not by themselves personally but by the non-‘opinion forming’ classes lower down the social scale. What rankles above all perhaps is this chattering class’ foolish and reckless assumption that the civilisation that has succoured them will still be there however much they mess with its cohesiveness and however much they undermine it with their ‘globalist’ sentimentalities.

In Western Europe particularly, liberal establishment attitudes about immigration are stuck in a 70 year time warp. They have been warped by a combination of nanny-state welfare systems invented in the post war era – and now no longer remotely fit for purpose – and ‘human rights’ institutions also established in those entirely different post war circumstances. (These Western inspired, supposedly ‘international’ institutions are so abused and gamed ‘internationally’ that it would make for comedy if it was not so tragic.) This toxic combination has – in varying degrees – hobbled whatever weak-willed attempts (such as there have been) by Europe’s conservative political class to bring some sanity to bear.

My poem was written at a time when these toxins were already coursing through our political arteries but before the floodgates were entirely breached. The timing of this breach was, I think, a result of two newer factors emerging. One was simply a case of new geo-political events (and demographic stresses) unfolding. And the other was the exponential feeding through into those arteries of ever greater numbers of those aforementioned bright young ‘educated’ things. These people – no doubt self-styled ‘radicals’ in their undergraduate days – have now become the establishment, occupying virtually all positions of power in our legal, governmental, charitable and media institutions.

I hope you get something from this poem....that it manages to conjure much in few words which is - to my mind - the essence of a good poem. I have to confess that I have my own reservations about the poetic form despite having myself written and published a small oeuvre down the years. The digital age has, I think, resulted in way too much of it. I daresay that some great poetry is still being written but the pretty miniscule and niche public appetite for it in our time has meant that there is no effective filtration mechanism to cause the best to rise to the top - by means of wide public recognition - and the rest to be quietly ‘shredded’. (In this way it is unlike novels and music with their much greater reading and listening publics.) And it often occurs to me that even the poetic greats – like the W B Yeats one that I borrowed from for the title of my Substack – it is always the same tiny fraction of their most magical lines that everyone remembers.

Here anyway is my poem The Migrants. It does not deal with any of the above mentioned political issues – not overtly at least. Rather, it was my attempt to enter into the psychology and motivations of three different kinds of migrant. And not just those of our current time of migration in crisis but also from those earlier ‘melting pot’ days in America – how much myth and how much reality I’m never quite sure - when we tended to think of immigration as overall a positive thing.

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The Migrants

New blood spills from the aeroplane

bouncing on the runway like spring rain.

Passport waving out-thrust arm

fancy shoes pointed West

Gene Kelly, video obsessed

dancing peasant with the happiness gene.

Tie straight, collar clean

mad for the chance to twirl his cane

at girls in some teeming town

Sun-parched backwoodsman mad for rain.

Radio waves from some man-made star

scan the graves on his ancestral hill

blaspheme their ancient gods but thrill

some restless, misplaced entrepreneur.

Economic migrant, refugee

Song of Myself, if I could just break free.

Dodging fangs on snaking queues

ruffling official smoothed-down hairs

this hyperactive candle-stick man

melts into his promised land.

Through a gap in the teeth of an ugly regime

springs a frightened woman with a blackened name.

Fleeing violent tribal clones

in a howling saliva storm she grips 

her baby’s hand. And clutching straws

of sleazy chaperones, she drags

her aching limbs to the borderline.

But her mad-eyed preacher snakes in too 

leering a smile at any fool who

will let their very nemesis through.

If you think any of your friends might like this poem why not share it with them.