I choose it for several reasons:

- I need a little change from the Iraq war discussion, it start to go round and round...

- Immigration is a big topic in EU, specially with the soon integration of the 10 new state members. The problems that comes with uncontrolled and unwilling immigration have a special sound in France since the 21 April. 

- The liberal dilemma is well explained by Tory MP David Willetts

'If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, "Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn't do?" This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US, you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.'

Horns of the liberal dilemma

The tragedy of the Chinese workers in Morecambe and the simmering arguments about freedom of movement in a newly enlarged European Union have focused attention once again on immigration. David Goodhart, one of our leading liberal intellectuals and editor of the progressives' journal, Prospect, offers a penetrating analysis and a radical prescription for one of the most contentious issues facing us

Sunday February 8, 2004
The Observer

Just as anxieties about asylum-seekers seem to be fading, along come two events to stir up our acute sensitivity about migration into Britain. The first is the tragedy of the 19 Chinese who died while cockling in Morecambe Bay, providing a glimpse of the shadowy world of illegal immigrants. The second is the tabloid campaign against the Government's proposed 'open door' policy towards citizens of the east European countries joining the EU in May.

Many decent, liberal voices have been raised in protest against the Government's apparent capitulation to this tabloid campaign, which highlighted the large numbers of gypsies who might turn up and claim benefit. There is an even better liberal case for the Government's change of mind. Moreover, the public anxiety about mass migration, while in some cases fuelled by xenophobia or racism, is usually based on a rational understanding of the value of British citizenship and its incompatibility with over-porous borders.

The abstract language of globalisation and universal human rights risks blinding us to some basic truths about our society. The national community remains the basic unit of human political organisation and will remain so long into the future. And when politicians talk about this community or the 'British people', they refer not just to a set of individuals with specific rights and duties but to a group of people with a special commitment to one another.

Membership in such a community implies acceptance of moral rules, however fuzzy, which underpin the laws and welfare systems of the state. It also confers immense privileges - physical security, freedom of many kinds, the chance to flourish economically, free education, free health care, and welfare benefits if you cannot support yourself.

National citizenship is inherently exclusionary. We place our fellow citizens in Bolton before the people of Burundi, otherwise we would be spending as much on foreign aid as on the NHS, rather than one twenty-fifth of the sum. If everyone in the world was entitled to the benefits of British citizenship, as is sometimes implied by human rights law, our schools and hospitals would very swiftly collapse. They would also collapse pretty swiftly if Britain had an open-door migration policy.

We do have such an open-door policy towards people in other EU states, but relatively few citizens settle here because they live in societies at a broadly similar level of economic development. For the billions living on less than $1 a day, a place like Britain represents a kind of paradise, which is why so many people are prepared to risk their lives to get here.

Migration today is different from previous eras in two respects. First, it is a lot easier and cheaper for people in even relatively poor countries to get to the developed world. Second, European countries like Britain have highly developed welfare states which compel their citizens to share their resources with strangers to a degree unimaginable in previous ages.

Such welfare states were established when European states were much more homogeneous - in terms of life-styles, values and ethnicity - than today. Notwithstanding strong class and regional differences, those societies thought of themselves as extended kin groups, 'a family,' in Orwell's famous words about England, 'with the wrong members in charge'.

Fifty years of peace, wealth and mobility, plus two big waves of immigration, has created a very different Britain marked by much greater diversity of values and lifestyles. Some people, especially older people, regret the shift. Most people probably broadly welcome it.

Welcome or not, greater diversity almost by definition eats away at a common culture and feelings of mutual obligation, yet a strong common culture is required to sustain a generous welfare state. This is what I have described elsewhere as the 'progressive dilemma' (see the current issue of Prospect magazine).

The best summary of the dilemma has been given by Tory MP David Willetts: 'If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, "Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn't do?" This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US, you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.'

The progressive dilemma lurks beneath many aspects of current politics: national tax and redistribution policies; EU integration and spending on the poorer southern and east European states; and even the tensions between America (built on political ideals and mass immigration) and Europe (based on nation states with core ethnic-linguistic solidarities).

It is also most painfully present in the debate about asylum and immigration. If welfare states demand that we pay into a common fund on which we can all draw at times of need, we need to be reassured that strangers, especially those from other countries and ethnic groups, have the same idea of reciprocity as we do.

Of course immigrants contribute, sometimes disproportionately, to the welfare state too. But public opinion tends to focus on the relatively small number, both immigrant and indigenous, who take out more than they put in. A recent Prospect /Mori poll asked, among other things, whether 'other people seem to get unfair priority over you when it comes to public services and state benefits?' Forty five per cent agreed that they did. It is a depressingly high figure which shows the anxiety people, especially among lower income groups, have about freeloading.

There seems to be something in the combination of relatively high personal taxation and the inability to see clearly where one's taxes are spent that makes people highly sensitised to being taken advantage of. Public policy sometimes makes matters worse: one of the reasons why asylum-seekers create such resentment is that the system currently bans them from legal work and forces them on to benefit for at least two years - it forces them to be 'freeloaders'.

There was also some good news hidden in our poll. When asked to name who they thought was getting unfair priority, 20 per cent named asylum-seekers and 19 per cent new immigrants. But Britain's established minorities - Asians and black people - were hardly mentioned. Absorbing outsiders into a community worthy of the name - turning the immigrant 'them' into the fellow citizen 'us' with whom we are willing to share - takes time, but it can be done.

It can be less easily done if a majority of people are troubled, as countless polls suggest they are, by the quantity, type and speed of immigration and if they believe that the Government has lost control of the flow of people into the country. That is why the Government is right to review the open-door policy to east Europeans. If hundreds of thousands were to arrive in a short space of time, it would stir up fears about migration in general, cause serious strains on the public services and hit those people at the bottom of the labour market (many immigrants themselves) hardest.

The government, understandably, wants to have it both ways on the migration debate. It wants to stress, rightly, the cultural and economic dynamism that comes with relatively high levels of immigration - and it celebrates the fact that roughly 200,000 legal immigrants come to Britain each year. But the Government is also aware that many of the costs of high immigration fall on poorer, white Britons. David Blunkett has bravely spoken up about the real conflicts that this can lead to and the need to shore up a common culture by better integration of some immigrant groups.

Taking a 'tough' line on asylum and immigration is not just pandering to the Daily Mail. It is a necessary condition of maintaining public confidence in a system of managed migration. How else might popular anxieties be answered? There is a case, as Meghnad Desai has argued, for introducing more 'two-tier' welfare, as is currently happening in Denmark. Certain kinds of migrants (the east Europeans, for example, for a transitional period) could be allowed residence and the right to work but access to only limited parts of the welfare state.

Such a two-tier welfare state might reduce pressure on the asylum system and also help to deracialise citizenship - white, middle-class bankers and Asian shopkeepers would have full British citizenship, while Slovenian temporary workers would not. If we want to combine social solidarity with relatively high immigration, there is also a case for ID cards on logistical grounds and as a badge of citizenship entitlement that transcends narrower group and ethnic loyalties.

Critics of the progressive dilemma thesis point to the fact that public spending and tax levels remain at historically high levels throughout Europe despite the big increase in diversity of all kinds over the past 30 years. That is true, but the sort of long-term decline in solidarity that I fear is likely to take decades to emerge. And if public policy takes no account of the boundaries of people's willingness to share we may wake up in a generation's time and find we have become a US-style society with sharp ethnic tension, a weak welfare state and low political participation.

You do not build a generous country by ignoring people's fears or pretending that they have the same affinities towards, or obligations to, a Slovakian gypsy as they do towards their own families, communities and fellow citizens.