market shall make you free, The

Spectator, The, Jun 24, 2000 by Michlethwait, John, Wooldridge, Adrian

For anybody who cares about globalisation, this conjures painful historical memories. The hallmark of the first great age of globalisation, from 1840 to 1914, was the ease with which people could move around the planet: nobody needed a passport, let alone the blessing of Jack Straw. And the first sign that things were going wrong was the rising tide of protests about `aliens' stealing people's jobs. By the 1920s, even America, the destination for so many of those in search of a better life, was being mightily selective about what sort of huddled masses it took in.

Ann Widdecombe is still some way from starting to demand skull-size tests at Dover to determine who should be let in. But it is surely time to revive the old liberal (with a small `I') tradition, not just of showing tolerance to dispossessed outsiders, but actually welcoming them. For most of its history, Britain has prospered by being a sort of oldworld United States - a haven for refugees and economic migrants. There is hardly an area of commercial British life that has not been enriched by foreign buccaneers from the Huguenots and the Rothschilds to Pakistani shopkeepers and (at least in his Wapping-revolutionary phase) Rupert Murdoch. There are no figures for how many British Internet companies have been started by foreigners; in Silicon Valley, Indians and Chinese account for one new company in every five.

Immigration has arguably invigorated the British mind even more thoroughly than it has the British wallet. The greatest English historian of the 20th century was an East European Jew, Sir Lewis Namier; the greatest philosopher an Austrian eccentric, Ludwig Wittgenstein. What would psychology have been without Hans Eysenck or Melanie Klein; or Tudor history without Geoffrey Elton, a refugee from Nazism; or the history of ideas without Sir Isaiah Berlin; or English literature without T.S. Eliot? Even Thatcherism would have been impossible without the work of another immigrant, the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek.

It might seem a little odd to lump together feted European intellectuals with 58 Chinese labourers stuck in a refrigerated truck. But that is the point about immigration. It is remarkably difficult to be choosy about whom you let in. The old saying about immigrants being a self-defined elite because `the cowards stayed at home, and the weak ones died on the way' rings a little hollow this week. But there are few better guarantees that somebody is going to contribute to a society than the fact that they have uprooted themselves to come to it. As an ageing country, Britain, like the rest of Europe, needs new, young blood. If only on the grounds of selfish pragmatism, surely it is time to open the gate a little wider, rather than slam it shut.

By contrast, the second arrival on our shores seems, at first sight, trivial. Next month, Mission Impossible 2 alights in Britain, and the hype has already begun. M12 (as the Tom Cruise vehicle likes to be known) is, to be frank, a pretty awful film. It has virtually no plot, other than to provide a backdrop for ever more spectacular special effects and long, moody pictures of the star's hair. Indeed, conspiracy theorists might argue that, coming so soon after John Travolta's even more lamentable Battleship Earth, Cruise's venture marks a two-pronged attack by the Hollywood arm of the Church of Scientology to destroy the cinema as an art form.