Pete Martin: Welcome contribution to immigration debate

IMMIGRATION has gone from being the "elephant in the room" in this election to a jumbo-sized issue.

On one side, words like "bigot" are being bandied about. On the other, you'll hear that a hard line on immigration isn't racist – it's only "common sense". The view is common – but is it sense? What is the evidence on the impact of immigration?

The London School of Economics has published a study on the impact of immigration on the UK job market since the 1970s. Using 35 years of data, researchers found increased immigration had no impact on the wages of indigenous males. This counters the "popular" view that an increase in the supply of "cheap labour" suppresses wages. (A version of the complaint that "immigrants steal our jobs".)

The research shows immigrants do not readily displace indigenous workers. They are imperfect substitutes. At the bottom of the market, they may lack language skills. At the top, they may have high-level skills under-supplied by local workers. There may also be "soft" reasons demand for indigenous staff stands up, such as negative perceptions of accents or racism.

In an area where strong feelings are more common than facts, it's an important finding. The LSE study also shows immigration makes marginal economic activity possible. Jobs that would otherwise go undone, get done. And that enhances productivity and output. From eras and countries when immigration was not constrained (for example, the US last century), the evidence suggests immigration brings significant economic benefits.

Yet economics have only been part of the debate. Rational, if ill-founded, worries about jobs are mixed with emotive pleas to protect the British way of life. As well as potential for tragedy, there's a real irony here. The idea that our cultural values can be preserved in aspic can only be based on ignorance of our cultural past.

Such blinkered laziness presumes our post-war, secular, social welfare world represents some kind of inherent, lasting Britishness – fuzzy and warm like a John Betjeman poem. Yes, it's exactly like the works of a man who changed his name from the Germanic Betjemann during the First World War to hide his origins.

In truth, we are all of immigrant stock – even if you trace your cultural roots back to the Angles who founded "Angle-land", now known as England. They're the tribe whom Pope Gregory punned as looking like Angels… and they came from Germany too..

Indeed, if you find anyone who still clings to some simplistic view of British culture, point them towards a very British institution called a public library. From 1,000 years ago, we can check out the earliest works in Old English – now only intelligible to scholars. Wilt u, fus hle fremdne monnan,/ wisne woboran wordum gretan Roughly translated this means: "Will you, so smart, with a stranger,/ Share truths, swap words with the wise."

From 500 years ago, we might more quickly work out the Middle Scots of a poet like Henryson. (Ye ar the lanterne and the sicker way/ suld gyd sic sympill folk as me to grace.) Moving another century closer to our time, you already know how every schoolchild feels about Shakespeare.

But, even when we understand the changing language, the words are echoes of alien worlds, of societies and mindsets so different from our own.

Never mind the terrifying police state and Taleban-like religious tyranny of the age of Shakespeare, simply look at the great Scottish novel Gillespie, written just 100 years ago. It shows a God-fearing peasant society grappling with a new, ruthless mercantilism. It's a culture that would be as remote from the experience of most urban Scots as the Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf wrestling with monsters.

So, which of these worlds do we long to preserve against the influx of different traditions? Like any silly Cnut (the real-life King of England around the time Beowulf was written, a Viking of Polish and Danish descent), you can't hold back the tide of cultural change.

As much as Britain has been an aggressive, infective agent in world history, our homeland has been a Petri dish of competing ideas. It's that Darwinian stew which produces a powerful, living culture.

So today, the challenge is not immigration or "cultural influenzas" such as racism or radical Islam. The problem isn't even the denial of objective evidence or the distortion of society, which narrow-minded ideas seem to demand – never mind the perversion of decency that can follow.

The real threat to our open, fair-minded society is ignorance. Dangerous mindsets are sustained by lack of knowledge and lazy thinking and, from here to Afghanistan, the challenge remains educational.

Of course, sometimes the rational vacuum is produced by the sleight of hand which swaps the pedagogue for the demagogue. It doesn't matter whether it's theology that seemed like common sense to wandering tribes in distant times, or a weltanschauung that seemed spot-on to a man with a funny wee moustache in the Weimar Republic. Time spent bending our minds and our knees to the irrational denies us the opportunity to understand our own world.

Recently, I caught a TV promo for an up-coming series about physics. At prime-time. On a populist channel. "Wow," I thought. "A hard subject on the telly!" Unfortunately, I'd misread the word "Psychics". It was merely more nonsense about communing with the after-life, designed to deceive and delude, if not defraud the public.

In a similar way, just as the Rich List shows the hyper-rich getting richer, you have to wonder whether the immigration debate is all smoke and mirrors too. Our poorest residents backing an Old Etonian against our poorest immigrants is troubling.

There's no logic in it. Just look at the 20th century. As a recent trip to Berlin reminded me, immigration raises sombre questions about human nature. Regardless of economics or cultural considerations, can we really let ourselves be tempted towards that terrible path where people are judged by their origins? You know where it tends and how it ends. Let's not go there.

Scots have often been emigrants, and hoped to be received kindly wherever we landed. It's time to return the favour with true Scottish hospitality.