First Pro-Immigration Film This Year

While the government and media are counting people according to their economic worth and doing the sums on service provision, a new film produced by WORLDwrite, to premiere this week, aims to make people count.

The film The More the Merrier interweaves compelling archive with inspiring argument to present the case for an open door policy.

Immigration and emigration represent striving for a better world, yet from the 1905 aliens act onwards the UK began to shut its borders. The film suggests that while attitudes to immigration have been de-racialised there has been more closure than ever before and situates today's anti immigrant sentiment within a culture of limits. Ideas of over population, finite resources and segregated communities have replaced old fashioned racism.

The film incorporates rousing arguments from the Battle of Ideas immigration debate and features Bruno Waterfield Brussels, correspondent for The Daily telegraph, who argues, "anti immigration sentiments represent a closure of the historical imagination" and quoting American writer P J O'Rourke he points that if the whole of the world's population moved to one place they would cover a space the size of former Yugoslavia at the same density as Manhattan, and, he says, "Manhattan is a pretty good place to live." Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants Your Country Needs Them, explains internal migration outstrips migration overseas today and this has "not for example caused China to collapse." Legrain ridicules the "points system" and argues immigration controls today represent a form of global apartheid. Illustrating these points Sadhavi Sharma, a young Indian student obliged to go home, explains why she wants to stay and has more friends here than in Bombay.

WORLDwrite Director Ceri Dingle explains: "This is a positive pro immigration film, not a tragic story, not an exceptional case but a fresh appraisal of the debate with a much needed historical perspective. The title of the film says it all."

The More the Merrier will be launched on Sunday 20th April 2008 at 6 p.m. in the new Vibe Lounge and gallery above the Vibe bar at 91-95 Brick Lane, London, E1. It will premiere along with a further short documentary, Cash Back, highlighting the vital role of remittances (monies sent by migrants and diasporas back to countries of origin). Speakers will include Philippe Legrain, (Author Immigrants their country needs you) Claire Fox (Director Institute of Ideas) and a representative of Open the Borders -- a spiked-online campaign.

http://www.worldwrite.org.uk



Author Information

Vivien Regan
WORLDwrite