Thank God for immigrants

This week, of all weeks: Thank God they came here and chose to make it their home.

Photo by Lucas Gouvêa on Unsplash

I don't want to talk about the policy. I don't want to talk about the rhetoric. God knows we've heard enough about it the last few days. Today I would just like to state - so that it's written down somewhere, and so that others who need to hear it might have someone say it - why immigrants are vital. Not as resources. Not as an idea. Not even as people. But specifically as immigrants.

There are plenty of other places where you can read about how dreadful they are. On any given day, you will be able to find an article about why they are bad in nearly every newspaper. Those that don't will talk about the extremist parties who say they're bad or the mainstream politicians who pretend to think they're bad in order to secure populist votes.

Immigrants as a problem. Immigrants as a curse. They are responsible for everything: economic woes, social atomisation, low working conditions, poor public services. There is no modern ailment which cannot be lain at their door. They are the perfect foil for right and left: a simple compelling villain whose malevolence explains a complex world.

They take our jobs but they also take our benefits. They are part of an aloof international elite, but also a member of a global under-class. They are powerful and influential, but also subhuman and dirty.

What exactly is it that we want from them? To be low skilled or high skilled? To be rich or poor, controlling or marginalised? To take jobs or not to take them? To become part of our culture or stay out of it? No-one can say. No-one knows. There is no clarity in the resentment against them, just a nebulous sense of entitlement and thwarted ambition. Villagers seeking a scapegoat in the dark, without torches to light their way.

It's easy to imagine why immigrants are despised. They are the outsider. The human mind has a weakness toward the concepts of 'us' and 'them' and our current era has unleashed that binary in all its untamed godforsaken savagery. This is why so many of these contradictory defamations - elite and subclass, powerful and powerless, labour and capital - echo those used against Jewish people last century. The outsider can be anything you need her to be in order to simplify the world and justify your preexisting anxieties. This is an old, old process, which we have seen play out many times before. In our era, it plays out predominantly against immigrants.

But it is also easy to imagine why immigrants are loved. We never mention it, of course, because we only allow ourselves to discuss immigration as a problem to be solved. But immigrants are loved. And this is why.

Very often, the relationship between the immigrant and the host country is light. We can't face up to this fact in the UK because our debate is fundamentally irrational. We seem to imagine that people are desperate to come here, while simultaneously engaging in the kind of mean-spirited rhetoric which would put any sensible newcomer off doing so.

Truth is: many immigrants come to work. That's it. Not because of some great lifelong love affair with Paddington Bear or the monarchy or crumpets, but just to work. Often they'll send the money back home to help their family. But also, more selfishly perhaps, they might use it to jump a social class in their country of origin. You can work as a cleaner in Britain for a decade, say, then buy a decent property back home and pay for your kids to go to law school.

That's a really sensible thing to do, by the way. This type of immigrant - without need of safety, or desire to stay, or love story to bring them here - is spoken about without any admiration. No-one celebrates them. Even the immigration groups don't focus on them, because there is nothing in their history to tug the heartstrings. But they are ambitious, enthusiastic and hard-working. They want a better life, and a better life for their children, and they are willing to do backbreaking work in order to secure it. They show all the attributes which we praise in others but condemn if it's demonstrated by an immigrant.

They nearly always go home after a while. They never came to put down roots - they came to work and make money to improve their life in the place where they do have roots. But no-one imagines what life must be like for them while they do this, as they rise at four in the morning to get into offices before the start of the working day, so that white-collar workers can find a nice clean space in which to complain about how immigrants are wrecking the country. Or in abattoirs, cleaning the sludge of dead animals off the floor, or in care homes, looking after the people whose families are too busy to help them, or in any of the other jobs we do not want to do and ask others to conduct for us.

In so far as these people are ever discussed it is with resentment, because they have not put down roots and integrated into British society. But of course, we do not actually want them to integrate. If we did, we would not be introducing onerous financial requirements for residency or extending the years necessary to acquire it. We would not be seeking to limit and prevent their presence in any way available to us. We despise them for not putting down roots, even as we work diligently to make sure that it is impossible for them to do so. We do this because we have no idea what we want.

Sometimes the relationship with Britain is much stronger.

Loving a country is like loving a friend. It is personal. It is not an instruction you can pass down from on high. It is an individual process which must emerge from within. It can be as arbitrary and mysterious as the things which make us love a human being: their smell, their glance, the things which amuse them. Immigrants who love this country love it for many of the same reasons that we might love it: the contradictions, the eccentricities, the strange sense of safety you feel sometimes here, like England was a bosom instead of a place, that unique and specific combination of continuity and change which typifies us.

Sometimes you will learn to love your country more by seeing it through their eyes. I remember a former girlfriend from Japan who gasped when she saw the scene in Peep Show where Jeremy wanks off to the picture of the Queen on a five pound note. "We would not…" she said, an outraged and delighted smile breaking across her face. "We would not treat the emperor this way." And in that moment I learned something else about Britain that I loved, a new thin layer of patriotism, a recognition of the things one could sensibly admire about this place.

And yet it's for this reason that immigration can ultimately be quite a lonely experience, even when it has been successful. Immigrants will often start to really inhabit a life in another country, really begin to meld with it, until the new country begins to stitch itself into their sense of self. As that happens, they will become more of a stranger in their own country. When they go home they'll notice that perhaps their accent has altered a little, that childhood friends have a certain distance from them, there is a kind of observation taking place about the extent to which they have changed.

First generation immigrants often have a liminal internal life, an isolation. They start to exist outside of our traditional categories: never feeling like they quite fit into their new home, but sensing that they have changed too much to fit in back where they grew up. They have transcended the boundaries. Immigration, for all its beauty, carries a certain sadness and that sadness often grows the more successful the immigration has been.

If people stay, and have children, or become part of a community, they begin to form the bedrock for new kinds of human life and new visions of society. Strange and beautiful new constellations are possible. Second and third generation immigrants often combine elements of their home life, with their parents and grandparents, and their public life, usually without thinking about it, partly out of loyalty and partly in rebellion.

Young Muslim women will often wear a hijab, but they will act with undistilled take-no-shit, get-the-fuck-out-my-way London swagger. They are a hit squad against social and political expectations. You don't have to approve of religious dress (I don't) or urban street smarts (I do) or their combination to see that this is a unique patchwork of heritage, something counter-intuitive and internally problematic and very London and maybe a little beautiful.

Imagine how much poorer the world would be without British Asians in general. I'm not talking about the subcontinent. I'm not talking about Britain. I'm talking about British Asians themselves, as a distinct group, quite apart from their other loyalties or their other identities. Imagine how much more impoverished we would be, in food and music and literary life, in social habits and intellectual and political history. Imagine how poor we would be, the vast riches which would have been taken away from us.

Opponents of immigration will tell you that they love British Asians, of course. Sure they do. They'd tell you that they don't want to threaten the status of those already here legally. But they would in fact eradicate the next stage of that process - whichever other group came here, and put down roots, and provided a new vision of what it is to be British. What it is to be human.

Immigrants yearn. They do so almost by definition. Things were not enough for them where they were. They wanted something else - decent money, or more opportunity, or freedom from discrimination, or security from crime, safety from tyrannical government. Sometimes they just wanted excitement, bright lights and full streets, as a complete rejection of the suburban world of their teens. Regardless, they yearn: for something, for someone, for someplace.

This is one of the reasons why areas with lots of immigrants are more successful than ones without. Partly it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course - immigrants go where there's jobs and there are jobs in successful areas. But there is something else. There is a specific kind of energy which comes from a population which aspires, from people who want things badly enough to uproot their life and go somewhere else and damn well try to get it. People who move. People who have the gumption and the conviction and the basic inner disposition to get up and move and get what they want, knowing full well that many of their neighbours back home will resent them and many of the locals at their destination will reject them.

Immigrants have a slightly different vibration, a different shimmer around their skin, a particular tempo, with which they progress through the world. They look and are vital. They look and are indispensable. And this is because they represent something specific in humanity, a part of ourselves that the entire world - from the US to Germany to the UK - now insists on seeing as a defect rather than a charm. They represent the wish for a better life and the inner conviction needed to secure it. They represent people in motion.

Thank God for immigrants. Thank God for the people who keep our economy going and our services running and who damn well deserve a better reward than to be called 'squalid'. Thank God for the people who come here and love it, despite all its flaws and its repeated demands that they leave, and show us through their eyes the things which are lovable about this country, but which we always took for granted. Thank God for the people who provide the energy we see out there, that unmistakable crackle in the air which emerges whenever a certain kind of person strides out to make what they can of their life.

Thank God for immigrants.