Of the perennial whinges of Britain's right-wing newspapers, the complaint that politicians refuse to talk about the deleterious effects of immigration is perhaps the oddest. They do so all the time. On June 10th David Cameron decried the "mass, uncontrolled" influx of recent years, saying that it changed communities "in a way people didn't feel comfortable with." Ed Miliband, Labour's leader, agrees. Enter, refreshingly, the Migration Museum Project. This is a campaign led by Barbara Roche, a former immigration minister, for something akin to a British Ellis Island, which would tell a more optimistic story. Though a permanent museum remains a distant prospect, a foretaste can be found in Hackney Museum in London where, until August 31st, an exhibit of photographs charts the lives of immigrants and their families in Britain. The country is depicted as occasionally hostile to, but unmistakably shaped by, the people it has ingested over the centuries.
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