I tried to step out of my echo chamber yesterday. It failed.

Guy I used to play football with years ago, he voted Brexit. We’d disagreed a bit on Facebook.

He canvasses for Labour, and put something up pro Corbyn’s policy on economic equality. His friend, who I’d never met, said she liked Jezza but couldn’t see past Labour’s ‘policy of mass immigration.’

I politely butted in, saying that for me inequality is a more important issue than immigration. I said that it lets the genuine elite off the hook when they blame immigrants

I tried to be fluffy and respectful, trying to avoid the shouty ‘how wrong you are’ style that FB political debates cans often become. But just saying, you know, blaming outsiders is usually a right wing thing.

The far right in London started out being anti-Welsh migrant workers, became anti-Jewish and then morphed into being against black and Asian people from the commonwealth: more recently anti economic migrants from Eastern Europe or Africa, or people fleeing the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. For Trump, Mexicans.

I also said that Tories have missed so many immigration targets over the years, it’s odd they have managed to brand themselves as ‘tough’ on immigration. I didn’t mention UKIP at all as but assumed that as they are batshit crazy and started out as a right wing fringe of the Tory party, this wouldn’t be of interest to anyone contemplating voting for the Corbynator. I read their manifesto and it’s drunk, simultaneously blaming immigrants, whilst promoting policies like increased military spending and cutting aid, which make it likely to cause people to want to leave their country of origin in the first place.

The thing is that since Brexit I’ve really tried genuinely to understand the position that immigration is of such concern to people; I’ve looked around me for signs that immigration is making the world a worse place. I haven’t really found any.

I learnt in Mr Bryant’s GCSE geography class that Britain has an ageing population and needed people of working age as a result of the demographic transition model. Which is why immigration was needed in the UK and across Western Europe.

I’ve lived in areas with loads of immigration, and seen how people from other countries – and their music and food – has enriched Britain. Not just in the last few decades, but over the centuries.

The climate of fear caused by terror must be a factor for some people who have drifted towards a vague and dark fearful right, where immigration and terror are linked. It’s all Muslims, thinks Trump, all billion of them, a category fail almost as stupid and dangerous as ‘all infidels are targets’.

To me it the terror is real, but fuelled by botched and often illegal overseas government sponsored military escapades, which provide a place and an ideological space for a deluded bunch of violent young men to survive and thrive. ISIL are patriarchal, parochial and parasitical; that they use the technology they disagree with to meet their aims shows how muddled their thinking is. It is a truly evil ideology which we should obviously take seriously. But clearly not the result of immigration.

The idea that these simple-minded and deluded young men should allow Britain to abandon our commitment to human rights and tolerance is so ridiculous: human rights is a much better idea, and terrorist ideologies thrive where human rights have been abandoned.

As it happens, my surname is so Yorkshire it’s also the name of a brass band; but it’s actually French Huguenot – people seeking religious asylum here in the 18th century, and aside from the Romans, Norman French, Angles, Saxons, Vikings immigrants you get to hear about in school, there were a whole load of other immigrants who made Britain what is is, from the Dutch engineers who reclaimed East Anglia and made the Thames the shape it is today, to the Portuguese Jews who introduced the chippy to Britain.

From Frisian fishermen to Hanseatic hustlers, Britain and Europe have always been linked more than we would care to acknowledge; not least because people changed their names to sound more English.

Not without reason: during the First World War a Scottish pub called Strachan’s was attacked because it sounded German, and so many German bakeries were attacked that there were shortages of bread. Does the baying mob (and the politicians and media encouraging them) sound familiar?

The more we learn about history from actual DNA evidence, the more we realise how connected Europe has always been: the Victorians got it wrong, basically, even though they influenced British history books and thinking with their history and obsession with racial purity. From our fishermen to our royal family, Britain has always been a mash up and all the better for it. In my opinion.

Indeed, the irony of the isolationist argument is that it contradicts the data: to say ‘United Kingdom Independence Party’ you have to use words which are German, Norman French, Latin, Greek, Danish and Roman in origin, because that’s who we are.

And there are so many other things to spend your worry-time on than immigration: catastrophic species decline, global warming, the global assault on human rights, violent conflict, vile acts of terror across the world, illegal invasions and incursions which kill many more and create the breeding ground for more terror, antibacterial resistance, ongoing conflict in the middle east, global poverty, tribalistic intolerant rhetoric in the political mainstream, the denial of science snd the assault on truth, road safety deaths in developing countries even, all bother me more than migration.

I don’t think I’m particularly left wing, but I’ve marched against poll tax, and the fascists and the racists in the East End: just because it seemed to be the right and decent thing to do. I’ve come from a steel town which was failed for decades by politicians of all hues. I’m sceptical of all claims.

But there’s always a least bad option, and I believe that the best parties to deal with the things that concern me are on the ‘progressive left’, that most people would benefit from voting out a party which seeks to dismantle the NHS and increase privatisation of services. I want free healthcare when I’m old, and I’m happy to pay taxes for this, libraries and the like.

Aside from May’s incoherence, she seems to represent the party of big business, and rather than benefiting the majority, which was the initial point.

I have friends with very different views, and some of them vote very differently to me.  I always thought it was good to have people who are different from me in my circle. The Voltaire thing, I disagree with what you say, but say it in front of me and we can all be friends, hopefully.

I was therefore surprised when my comment was deleted; to his friend he explained that the tories miss their immigration targets, and that immigration has been a ‘failed experiment’.

I called him out on it. I said that sounded more Enoch Powell than Labour.

And he deleted me as a friend on Facebook; so there the debate ended. He said we could still be friends in real life.

It’s been bugging me ever since; I just wanted to say to [name], if you get to read this: I don’t think that  immigration has been a failed experiment at all. I think the colonialism that predated it, based in deliberate racial inequality and the exploitation of human and other resources, that was the bad bit. The slavery, maybe or the gunboat diplomacy, the dividing up of the world by people with better weapons who thought this gave them – literally – the divine right to rule the world. That was a failed experiment.

Not the immigration, the movement of people, which followed it.

We are all immigrants somewhere down the line, and have been since humans learnt to travel. Our genetic code and our location needn’t tally, and mostly doesn’t. This is partly why I choose to reject an identity politics based on nationalism, isolationism, or immigrant blame.

On the one hand, I don’t want to focus too  much on immigration, because to me the big problems faced by our species so obviously need international collaboration with the cleverest people working together on them, looking beyond national interests.

For this reason I still can’t quite believe that we left the EU, or that people bought Trump’s isolationist rhetoric for that matter; and I still find it bizarre that people on the political left would consider a swing to the political right because of immigration.

But I’m still curious, and genuine. I want to know why immigration is a failed experiment? I promise not to defriend you… even if I disagree with what you say.

Happy voting anyway…