Immigration

‘Climbing into America, Ellis Island’, by Lewis W. Hine. Public domain, via Yale University Art Gallery

Dear kids,

They come over here, take our jobs or sponge off our social welfare, don’t learn the language, don’t learn how things are done, are rude, abuse our generosity, and do nothing but complain about how crap everything is here and how good everything is back home.

And that’s just the English. In Spain, Australia, you name it.

I hate immigration discourse, in large part because it trades in such sloppy, mindless generalisations. For a start, think about why a person from a (relatively) poor country should be labelled an ‘economic migrant’ with all the negative connotations that brings, while people from a (relatively) rich countries label themselves ‘ex-pats’, which brings with it something approaching  sanctimoniousness. Oh no, we are not immigrants, we’re just here to help the economy/the church/the poor, benighted locals.

And don’t get me started on the categories ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’. We treat such people as a bizarre combination of helplessness and scheming threat, pitiful and menacing at the same time. Really what they are is desperate. People don’t throw themselves onto the mercy of the road for no reason — they are like ‘us’, with the same hopes and dreams, the same mix of wonderful and bloody irritating, the same mix of get-up-and-goers and stickers-in-the-mud.

And the get-up-and-goers sometimes get up and go; they emigrate; they become immigrants. From the young men clinging to the fragments of their boat in the Mediterranean to the small business person in Leicester, to our very own ancestors who thought ‘stuff this’, threw away all they knew, and took risky journeys to the other side of the planet with no hope of return to build a better life for themselves and their families.

That last point raises an important caveat. I sometimes imagine the Maori people looking at our ancestors landing in New Zealand. At first, many of the chiefs welcomed Europeans, and welcomed a relationship with the British Crown, as enhancing their status, creating wealth, bringing peace. But there came a point when they started to think, ‘Jeez, there are a lot of you’, and started to push back, to which the Imperium responded with its usual  aggression. And thus the Maori lost their status, wealth, land and health under the onrush.  Maori, with a treaty, got off relatively lightly – Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans fared far, far worse.

So I do think that incomers have duties to locals: duties to learn their ways, respect them, engage on their terms. I also think that ‘local’ is always more complicated than it’s presented. And I think that nations who welcome immigrants are the richer for it. They bring in fresh energy and fresh ideas, they keep themselves flexible in an ever-changing world. Those who try to impose a single vision of what ‘us’ means stagnate.

I am an immigrant, trebly so – a pakeha New Zealander of Danish, English, Irish and French ancestry (at least!) who’s moved to Australia then England in pursuit of intellectual working challenges that simply were not available to me in NZ. I am proud to be so. But the funny thing is, I’m frequently not seen as an immigrant. English people sound off about immigrants to me not realising that I am one, because I — European (I refuse to say ‘white’), educated, well-off — don’t fit the stupid stereotype of a brown-skinned, poor, and ignorant ‘immigrant’. Oh, if only they knew the talent that those people bring, but instead they focus on skin colour, and read into that all sorts of stories, just as they see your gender, kids, and read into that all sorts of stuff without knowing a thing about you.

We are all immigrants to some extent. What binds groups of ‘us’ together is not skin colour, race or anything like that. ‘Race‘ has no biological basis except in the most trivial ways, and thus there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ this or that, as was wonderfully demonstrated by a white supremacist who discovered his African ancestry and went into contortions of denial. No, what binds us together in groups of ‘us’ is culture, the shared ways of life that we learn without even knowing that we’re doing so, that we come to see as normal and natural when our culture is just one way among hundreds of thousands of seeing the world.

If all that stuff about immigrants is not true, imagine what else is not true. Do immigrants sponge off our welfare system? No, they use it less than local-born people. Are they poor, unskilled? No, their wealth and education levels are often higher than their countrymen, because they needed to be to give them increased mobility. What traps immigrants in enclaves is often not their attitudes but ours. And that is a situation only remedied by getting to know people.

When you encounter difference, don’t be afraid. Ask. Engage. See the person beneath the skin and the clothes and the food and the accent. You’ll be amazed.

I love you.

Dad

PS: There’s some excellent work done on these issues by UCL’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration. On the history of New Zealand, the best by far is Michael King’s superb The Penguin History of New Zealand — human, compassionate but unflinching in the face of evidence.