Immigrants Are Not an Underclass To Do Our Dirty Work

Towards a compassionate immigration policy

5 min read

Just now

Amongst the litany of arguments that get made surrounding immigration, both on the pro and anti-immigration side, one argument that I really hate seeing is when people view immigrants as existing to do the jobs that native people don’t want to do. Usually, these examples are jobs such as caring for elderly people, plumbing, and other jobs which are often seen as being a bit gross or otherwise beneath the white population.

Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Zack Polanski, has garnered a little bit of backlash recently after he discussed the role of migrant workers in the care sector in Britain and said, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wipe someone’s bum”. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that what Zack is implying is that the “gross” jobs in society should be relegated to immigrants because ‘ordinary’ people are too good for this. It’s a similar thing to what Kelly Osborne said when discussing the issue of migrant workers and asked who would clean people’s toilets if we got rid of immigrants.

I really dislike this framing of migrant workers because it is a racist framing of the issue. We shouldn’t support migrant workers because they need to be effectively an underclass to…