I pity the poor immigrant

This was always one of Bob Dylan's more puzzling lyrics; he went on "... who wishes he would've stayed home/who uses all his power to do evil/but in the end is always left so alone."

What on earth was the great man thinking? Probably he just wrote down the first thing that came to his mind; people often do when it comes to this subject. Like the woman who complained to Gordon Brown the other day, or, much worse, those responsible for the hate-filed and punitive new law in Arizona - the unmediated and unreflected product of the most primitive of psychic functions: rejecting the Other.

When I was a kid in London in the early 1960s you would often see signs like this in people's windows (the legislation outlawing overt discrimination wasn't passed till several years later).

My parents, bless them, struggling teachers buying their first house, made a point of only letting their spare room to blacks and Irish. I still remember quiet, studious Mr. Sen, who when not in the library at King's College would cook up endless curries, filling our house with what was an exotic smell in the monocultural Britain of fifty years ago. One of the gripes often voiced at the time was that "They stink the place out with their curries", but my parents never said anything of the sort; no negative value judgments were attached to Mr. Sen's curries - if anything, they served to remind us of the world's wondrous diversity.

Nothing - and particularly not immigration - becomes a problem in itself, until the fear-gripped mind labels it and categorizes as such. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi - who can be relied on to say what most decent people would be ashamed even to think - recently commented that he didn't feel as though he was in Italy any more but in some African city when walking the streets of Milan.

Why shouldn't they bring some life and color to the gray, dour streets of that most buttoned-down of Italian cities; why isn't their energy and vigor more welcomed? (You have to be tough and determined to make it from Dakar or Lagos all the way to Northern Italy.) Yes, there is a problem, in that most of them have no proper jobs or even work permits, and end up living working illegally or selling contraband goods - but that has no logical connection with their culture, language or skin color.

The history of human culture and civilization is one of emigration and immigration; unfortunately it's also one of negative projections onto other cultures, leading to war and conflict. It's urgently time for a more evolved reaction; we can only tackle the planet's huge and growing problems by acting and thinking as the single, unitary human race that we are.