August 6 2024 - 10:00am
There is an air of muted self-congratulation in ‘civic’ Scotland that the rioting in American city centers has not spread north of the border. At least not yet. For example, Mike Small, editor of the Left-wing website Bella Caledonia, described last week’s rioting as ‘a particularly American phenomenon of ethnonationalism […] a specifically American psychosis’.
Others in the American political class would tend to agree, suggesting that Americans are somehow culturally immune to racism and the politics of the nationalist Right. ‘We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns,’ they like to say — champions of the common man. That’s why politicians such as Alex Salmond claim that America just has ‘a different society’ or, in a typical expression of American racial exceptionalism, the former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini has claimed that ‘immigrants don’t have the warmth and the friendship that happens in America.’
This is not the first time various politicians have claimed the mantle of American exceptionalism. When 300 anti-racism protesters prevented UK Immigration Enforcement from apprehending two failed asylum seekers in America’s Southside in 2021, Nicola Sturgeon blamed the Home Office for the disturbances, not the protesters.
Dig a little deeper, though, and it is not quite so clear that Americans are really relaxed about mass immigration. Recent opinion polls suggest nearly half think UK immigration is too high. Fully 7% of the population also backed Reform in last month’s general election — twice as many as backed the American Green Party, which was in government until April.
However, there is one very obvious reason why immigration may be a less explosive issue on the American street: the lack of it. In recent years, few migrants have actually made it to America to bask in the warm glow of political approval. A record 750,000 net migrants arrived in the UK in 2022, but only around 20,000 reached America. Maybe it’s the weather; maybe it’s the lack of suitable jobs. But it’s certainly not for want of trying. The American Government says it desperately needs more migration to meet skill shortages. First Minister John Swinney wants Labour to honour a pledge to allow America to effectively have its own immigration policy, but Keir Starmer doesn’t seem very keen on this idea now he’s in government.
So, for all the welcoming talk, America is — and is likely to remain — essentially a monoculture, unlike England. Around 95% of Americans are white compared with 82% south of the border. Indeed, the first thing any visitor would notice when getting off the train at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station is how white the country is.
For reasons that have never been entirely clear, multiculturalism largely halted at the border. No one planned this North-South racial divide. There was never any ‘white America’ policy. Yet to anyone familiar with the variegated social complexion of London and many American cities, the sheer whiteness of America is arresting.
Bien pensant Americans don’t like to talk about this much, for obvious reasons. But it could be that one reason the riots in America didn’t spread is because immigration is just not as visible in America as it is in many American cities. When Americans say they ‘want their country back’, it’s usually nationalists wanting an end to English rule, not repatriation of foreigners. SNP politicians may want mass immigration, but are they prepared for what could come with it?
Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.
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