Post
by gordon » Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:55 am
I appreciate the notion that individuals should demonstrate involvement in their communities and the validity of this expectation in the naturalisation process. But what this thread fails to acknowledge is that would-be citizens are very likely already to be involved in their communities on some level, which (according to the paper) would simply need to be documented for a naturalisation application. This, I think, is where the comparative-advantage argument falls down: individuals undertake paid employment and, on their own time or on sponsored time, already do these other things that reflect their engagement with the community. In other words, I don't see where productive capacity in the economy would be lost (foregone) in this framework.
For instance, look at employers who have sponsored volunteer opportunities (eg take a day off from work in a month to volunteer); where is the additional productivity loss there, since it's already in place with some employers ? Or look at parents who already spend time after work with their children (or other people's children) in organised sports or outdoors activities - would their work productivity be diminished any further by their continuing to do these things ?
The problem will arguably come with those who work at their jobs and then spend the rest of their time either down the pub or shut away at home; it will be far more difficult for them to make the argument that they are integrated in a pro-active and contributory way to the society round them, insofar as the green paper is concerned. But such people, in fact, demonstrate the core problem with the volunteering issue:
From a broader perspective, the problem with the volunteering proposal is that it draws an artificial distinction between social integration and economic integration. There's a problematic implication that being paid for certain activities by its very nature obviates or negates the social engagement resulting from those activities, which is patently absurd: economic activities and employment presumably have some intrinsic social value. Adam Smith himself viewed the market as being moral and social, not just materialist. By doing their jobs, paying their taxes, perhaps even creating further jobs or making charitable contributions, economic migrants who meet the terms of their implicit contract in being let into the country, are in fact integrating themselves in economic ways that cannot be abstracted from the social. And that's a major dimension that has been radically diminished in this citizenship debate, since the benefits of that contribution are not wholly restricted to the individual migrant, to the exclusion of all others round him.
AG