The Invisible Immigrant

Last week in Cuppa I took a rather light-hearted look at my conversion from hard-headed American coffee consumer to an assimilated, cardigan wearing drinker of England’s favourite hot drink, tea.  Along the way I touched on a few of the different tastes and practices I’ve had the opportunity to learn about, often adopt, during nearly a decade living in the UK.  Since then I’ve been pondering theidea of taking a broader, but just as light-hearted, look at my life as an immigrant to the UK.  There’s certainly plenty I could talk about that’s been charming, bemusing and even occasionally frustrating as I’ve made a home here.  Over the past few days though, it’s been brought home to me that my life as an immigrant has been comparatively easy.  In particular, a posting over at The Planet Harris inspired by the recent ruling forcing the BNP to open its ranks to non-whites along with last night’s Panorama programme on the BBC have had me thinking.  For my UK-based readers who didn’t see the show I’d strongly recommend you watch it via the increasingly ubiquitous i-player.  It tells the story of two British-born undercover journalists of Asian heritage who spent 8 weeks living on an estate in Bristol.  The racial abuse, both verbal and physical that both suffered appalled me.

Bristol’s not really that far from where I live and even if it was at the other end of the earth I know that there are people locally who are just as virulently and violently racist as the thugs I was watching on my TV screen last night.  The thing is, even though I’m an immigrant, as a white person I don’t have to deal with the xenophobic racism that confronts people who aren’t white whether they were born here or not.  In fact, until I open my mouth and utter more than a few words, there’s no obvious marker of my non-British birth.  People assume that I am English and I blend in without meaning or even wanting to.  I am, in other words, invisible as an immigrant in the eyes of most of the people around me.  Occasionally I’m confronted by some, usually drunken, manifestation of xenophobia or anti-Americanism.  A drunk man with an eye-patch once heard my accent saw my cowboy boots and demanded to know if though I was Clint Eastwood.  Telling the pirate ‘no’ seemed to satisfy him.  More often I’ve been in situations where I’ve realised I’m better off telling a questioner (again, usually a drunken male) that I’m a teacher rather than disclosing the fact that I hold a PhD and teach at a University.  This is more class antagonism than anything else.  What I have never had to deal with is people assuming on their first sight of me that I have no right to be here and then acting on  that assumption.

In fact, for all of the anti-American sentiments that I’ve come across most people consider me and those like me as a kind of exception to the normal process of immigration.  I suspect that this is mainly due to the the fact I’ve spoken English my entire life, albeit with a strange accent, as well as my white skin.  This trend seems to hold even more true for Canadians and people who come from certain Commonwealth countries although in these cases there are  institutional, and legalistic forces at work.  I should also acknowledge that my educational and professional positions combine with my nationality and genetic background to buffer me from most of the harsher realities so many immigrants encounter.

The thing is, I don’t have any better reason to be here than someone from Indonesia, Mongolia or Brazil.  I certainly, according to the law, don’t have any greater right to residency.  For me the system has functioned in just about as ideal a manner as possible.  I lived here mainly on a series of student visas.  Later, I was married and granted temporary residency.  Last year I applied for and was given indefinite leave to remain in the country.  It’s true that at that point I had to study for and take the multiple choice Life in the UK test but even then my situation was better than it is for most.  All I had to do was memorise a series of facts, dates and statistics about UK law and society and then answer twenty-four randomly selected questions on a computer screen.  Yes, I was nervous, I’m not exactly a relaxed individual at the best of times, but the fact is that I am pretty good at memorising a series of facts and then being quizzed about them.  In the end the test took me just over 6 minutes to complete.  That’s counting the time I spent rereading the questions and double-checking my responses.  No one else taking it at the same time finished in under 3o minutes and some were told to stop after the allotted time ran out.

I don’t think these people had such an obviously hard time with the exam because they were stupid, nor do I think the system of testing was intentionally biased against them.  However, based on the conversations we had before it started with one another and the people invigilating I was the only person who wasn’t at a de  facto disadvantage.  You see I was the only native speaker of English in the room which gave me an advantage the other people lacked.  As short as the test is, one its stated aims is to ensure that anyone who takes it has a certain, basic competency in English.  The idea is if you can read the questions well enough to understand them, then your English skills are of a standard some group has deemed necessary and acceptable for daily life.  People with little or no English can opt to spend a few hundred pounds on an English course that uses the material on the test as its primary subject matter.  If they pass the course they don’t have to take the test.  The thing is, the test itself cost £25 pounds when I took it.  If you’re an immigrant earning subsistence wages and struggling to send money home, support a family, pay for an education or some combination of the three which option would you choose?  It was also fairly evident that at least half of the other people people who took the test when I did had no idea they had another option.  Their English wasn’t good enough to allow them to negotiate the bureaucratic labyrinth of government websites and official publications and reach the realisation that, rather than repeatedly spending £25 pounds to fail the test, they could cut their losses and take a language course.   As I’ve said I don’t think the life in the UK test was designed to penalise people, but I also don’t think that it’s statistically surprising that I was the only white person taking it.  An American acquaintance of mine who also works within the academy took the test two months after I did and his experience was exactly the same as mine.

Apart from some time I spent living and working in London during 2001 the expense of applications for various visas and the time I spent studying for my Life in the UK test represent that biggest difficulties I’ve had to cope with as an immigrant to the UK.  They’re pretty minor.  During 2001 while waiting to receive a work permit I’d been granted I did get some first hand experience of  unscrupulous employers who tried to exploit my position with little or no regard for what was legal or decent.  Luckily I knew the work permit was on the way and was able to resist a few truly nightmarish propositions.  I know other people weren’t so fortunate and how easy it it can be to  feel like you have absolutely no recourse but to accept someone’s offer to exploit you.  I’m also in no doubt that this kind of plight is one faced by immigrants in my native USA.

What this all comes down to is that there’s no reason for some immigrants to face the institutional and social difficulties that I simply haven’t had to worry about.  This is especially true when somebody has to deal with racist abuse where someone like me, with white skin, does not have to.  It’s hard enough to be an immigrant as it is.  Most, if not all of us, are torn between the world we came from and the world where we’re trying to make a home.  Borders and time-zones have bifurcated our lives and created distance, geographical and temporal, between us, our families, friends and places that we love.  Economic realities aside there are a host of social and emotional difficulties that all of us foreigners have to face and do our best to resolve.  We’ve migrated because we saw good reason to do so and generally, from what I’ve seen, we don’t take our position in a new country for granted nor do we expect preferential treatment from anyone.

I’ll be making a trip to the supermarket later today.  If all goes according to plan, next month I’ll be cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for my English family in what has become an annual ritual.  Nobody accuses me of trying to destroy British traditions or upset the English way of life when I buy the ingredient to cook the fresh Mexican food growing up in California taught me to love.  I’ve never been sneered at when I buy a turkey to observe my ‘foreign’ holiday which, I freely admit, holds more meaning for me than Christmas.  I’m pretty angry about the fact that groups and individuals  are subjecting people who I see as no different from me at a fundamental level to abuse on the basis of their skin colour.  More of us should point out the skewed logic that pretends to a veneer of reason and respectability by claiming that all racists are doing is objecting to the preferential treatment given to certain immigrant and minority groups.   That kind of argument is actually a call for special privileges to be granted to the group(s) they belong on the grounds of some misguided theory of racial superiority.  It’s ignorant, it’s wrong and it allows racism a back door into proper social and political debate rather than starving it of oxygen in the vacuum where it belongs.   I can’t vote in the UK but I can make my opinions known. . . . This immigrant suspects that he’s just blown his invisibility.