Incalculable Damage

Well done, Mr Prime Minister. I’d like to congratulate you on the effective anti-immigrant policies you announced last month. I’d particularly like to congratulate you on the hate in which you couched them. Policy is usually so dry – even to those of us whose lives they are about to devastate. It was really generous of you to spice it up with some good old-fashioned xenophobia. And let’s not forget the racism that we all understood it as. 

See, I’m a bit of an oddity. I’m a white migrant – so people keep earnestly reassuring me that it won’t impact me because I’m not the ‘type’ of migrant they meant which is a) not true and b) deeply revealing. I keep thinking about that poem First They Came by the German Pastor Martin Niemöller. Because yes, in this case, I’m not the ‘type’ of migrant the government is targeting. But when a state starts to threaten their most vulnerable – trans people, people seeking asylum, migrants, people on disability benefits… what kind of society is that - and who knows who is next?  

Now, in an interview that got nowhere near as many eyeballs as your big, dramatic announcement, you said that you “deeply regret” the parallels to white supremacist Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. You concluded that you should have, “held [the speech] up to the light a bit more.” I’ll just go ahead and use that excuse if I make any errors in my next expensive visa application. Specifically, you claimed that you - and your speechwriters - had no idea that the “island of strangers” phrase would be interpreted as echoing Powell. Well, I could have told you that and I’m not even from here.  

So let me tell the truth. It’s been effective as all hell. It’s made me want to leave. It makes me not want my children to be British. It makes me want to quit my job, where I spend all day improving mostly British people’s lives. It makes me think, screw it, I’m done trying to perform palatability for these people. 

But my husband – a whole British citizen – wants to stay. They call it the politics of division for a reason. That’s what it does – it further isolates and divides us from our families, communities and society at large. So, I’ll stay for now. I’ll endure the paranoia and sense that everyone hates me. I’ll grit my teeth and do the Life in the UK test, and laugh with my friends at the fact that they’re British and they cannot answer the questions. 

I’ve put 7 years of my life, all of my savings for all those years, and significant emotional distress into my immigration journey. But the question is whether I want that anymore. So well done. Your policy works. It promotes hatred – but not just amongst the British. Those who ‘earned’ that privilege by being born in the ‘right’ country – the country that invaded, brutalised, and extracted the resources from the rest of the world. You haven’t gained any voters because if they wanted to vote based on anti-immigrant hate they were always going to vote for the far right. But you’ve lost the vote of everyone I know. ‘Oh but if you split the vote, then the far right will win.’ At least, we’ve known all along who they are. It’s the human rights lawyers, the wolf in sheep’s clothing (see I even speak English well enough to use idioms!) that you have to watch out for.