A MARTIAN who landed in Britain in the past few weeks—assuming he managed to get a visa—would take it for a place that dislikes visitors. Xenophobia has been the theme of the summer: enough bile has flowed about and towards immigrants to fill the English Channel. And yet, if he lingered, the Martian might find himself being asked how health care was organised on his planet, or how its retailers were coping with the internet. Sooner or later he would be stood a round in a pub.

Because, beneath the hostility, another view of outsiders has been on display: a respect that sometimes borders on reverence. This sentiment is intimately bound up with the suspicion and is just as perennial. One day it might even predominate.

The most egregious little-Englander stunt was the Home Office’s dispatch of vans bearing the slogan “Go Home or Face Arrest” to cosmopolitan bits of London. The supposed targets were illegal immigrants, but the vans offended not only British-born ethnic minorities but also various ministers in the coalition government. Even Nigel Farage, leader of the micro-Englander UK Independence Party (UKIP), denounced them.

Meanwhile Labour’s immigration spokesman inveighed against businesses hiring cheap foreign labour, partly retreating when his facts collapsed. Disparaging Britain’s overseas-aid spending, a UKIP clown referred to recipient countries as “Bongo Bongo Land”. The tireless struggle to deport foreign Islamists and repel Eurocrats goes on. Inevitably, every tirade comes with the glib rider that most Britons agree with it.

They do—and they don’t. Consider the different reception afforded some other arrivals. Mark Carney, the new governor of the Bank of England, was always likely to win friends with his plan for enduringly low interest rates. But his Canadian accent and foreign pedigree helped bewitch his audience. Normally tough MPs on the Treasury select committee fawned over him. David Cameron’s recruitment of Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s election manager, to help the Conservatives’ next campaign was universally regarded as a coup. (Labour also has an American adviser, the Liberal Democrats a South African.) The big news on the back pages has been the return of José Mourinho, a suave Portuguese football coach, to Chelsea Football Club.

In the British imagination, foreigners are scroungers and carpetbaggers—but they are also experts and sophisticates. Foreigners have secret knowledge. They age more gracefully. They eat better food and wear nicer suits. They understand that social democracy does not rule out the pluralistic provision of public services. They can speak more than one language. They are more grown-up about adultery.

There are a number of superficial explanations for this contradiction, none very convincing. One is that different Britons welcome and rebuff immigrants. Surveys do suggest that attitudes vary somewhat: Londoners and the better-educated tend to be more hospitable. Yet the view that immigration is too high is widespread, particularly among whites. Appreciation for immigrant virtues is broadly felt, too. Britons like the exotic food even if they decry the apocryphal pinching of jobs. Ipsos MORI, a pollster, found that 70% think immigration is a problem for the country—but, confusingly, only 18% said it caused trouble in their area.

Another possibility is that the respect and the revulsion are aimed at different sorts of foreigners. It is true that Brits are better-disposed to highly skilled workers and students (who often go home) than to the alien lumpenproletariat. But few have a bad word for the foreign nurses and porters who keep their hospitals running. And elite interlopers can find their glamorous otherness flips into a liability: successive England football coaches have been extolled as gurus, then excoriated as mercenaries.

Finally, you might speculate that the discrepancy is a product of economic doldrums and disruptive globalisation. But the drumbeat of spite has long been accompanied by a chord of warmth. Britons have wanted fewer foreigners for 50 years, even as the influx has varied (though they worry most when the numbers are high). They have always taken a shine to them, too.

Think of the American GIs who came during the second world war, at once resented as flash Harrys and lionised. Four decades earlier a sociologist researching attitudes to Jews—who inspired Britain’s first immigration laws—found new arrivals disdained as “dirty and disreputable”. But those who had lost the beards and sunk a few pints were “pronounced to be good fellows” and “command respect, especially among the habitués of the public-house”. Two centuries before that, Huguenot refugees from France were mocked for their affectations—and saw their fashion and recipes tacitly copied. They were “profitable strangers”, a mental category that has existed, quietly, ever since.

An island story

Bagehot speculates that this complex runs deep. An island nation, Britain has always feared (and occasionally experienced) invasion. But it has also earned its keep through trade, and done a fair bit of invading itself. Fear and curiosity are both natural responses. The empire that Britain conquered, then lost, seems to have reinforced that old duality. It bequeathed both a phantom pride and a reverse tendency to self-deprecation: a sense of being grander than others, yet spurned and surpassed by them.

Still, history is not always destiny, and may even be its own cure. Britain is still an island, but invasion is no longer much of a threat. The empire is slipping from living memory, perhaps taking the delusions of grandeur with it. These days lots of children are intimately familiar with immigrants, and polls suggest that acquaintance with them breeds acceptance rather than contempt. Improbable as it might seem this summer, newcomers could eventually experience more of Britain’s buried congeniality than its noisier gruffness.