When Americans think of a “threat” from immigration, we are thinking demographically. (Click below to meet the two gentlemen to the right.)
We think, rationally or not, of millions of low-skill workers, either taking public services from us or low-wage jobs. “They're too lazy to work. They're stealing our jobs.”
England is a completely other country, especially in its politics, and I sometimes wondered why until I came across the story of Yougov.
I was mainly looking for an interesting Seeking Alpha story, some hidden gem that just reported earnings. That's not Yougov.
Oh, it is of some mild interest that they're buying up U.S. market research outfits like Harrison Group and Definitive Insights, so that it now has more employees here than in Old Blighty.
No, the story of Yougov is the story of Yougov, and by extension of 21st century England's politics. Its CEO is named Stephan Shakespeare and what could be more English than that? Except his birth name is Kukowski, from Monchengladbach. (Why, he's more English than Queen Victoria! 'So your father's German, you're half German and you married a German.')
Stephen took the name Shakespeare from his wife, Rosamund. His name is designed for business.
His partner, until 2010, was co-founder Nadhim Zahawi, an Iraqi Kurd. Was because Zahawi is now a member of parliament, a Conservative member of parliament (Shakespeare ran unsuccessfully as a Tory in 1997) representing (wait for it) Stratford-On-Avon. (The future Sir Nadhim, no doubt.)
The story of Yougov is a story of immigrants taking the main chance, and using that chance to become a new English aristocracy. Yougov made its bones by getting Labor's winning margin correct in 2001, and the company reminds me a bit of Markos Moulitsas', a liberal lion who also co-founded Vox Media. The difference is that, while Moulitsas turned a passion for politics into a functioning business, Shakespeare and Zahawi have turned their passion for business into political power.
Shakespeare's equivalent to DailyKos is ConservativeHome and it's a very different beast. It's mainly a top-down effort to keep a hand on the party tiller, to direct people in the ways they are meant to go. (Kos, by contrast, is a bottom-up effort to discern, and then disseminate, liberal actions and thoughts to a community.) I guarantee that Shakespeare is more likely to get a meeting at Number 10 than Kos is to the White House.
It's partly the difference in scales that leads to all this. England is about the size of Louisiana (the whole UK is the size of Oregon) yet it packs about 50 million people into that area. British immigrants are more likely to have education and skills than, say, Mexican immigrants to the U.S., and they represent a smaller proportion of the whole – England remains a white and British nation.
So people like Shakespeare and Zahawi are more keen on fitting in, more likely to have the skills needed to fit in, and far more likely to bury their immigrant past than their American counterparts. This also, paradoxically, makes them more keen to support, and seek support from, existing institutions, especially conservative ones, than American immigrants.
Thus, while this country is moving to the left fueled, in part, by an explosion of foreign-born faces on our streets, England is moving to the right, fueled by much the same thing. Their austerity will be much more difficult to dig out than ours was, and we'll probably get out of our economic troubles in better shape, because our immigrants think first of making a living, making their way, and seeking economic power than fitting in and seeking affirmation through politics.
