THERE’S an awful lot of rhetoric about immigration these days, isn’t there?
There’s a host of politicians on the right presenting it as the ‘problem’ of our times.
A parade of billionaires and millionaires directing people not to examine inequality or extreme wealth or basic fairness but to examine the immigrant.
Do not, whatever you do, question those who have the most.
Instead, you must direct any resentment or frustration you have at those who have the least, those who are the most insecure, those who may well have lived through the most traumatic events.
They are the ones you should question.
It’s a trick as old as the hills.
Even by telling blatant untruths about how much of a handout immigrants and migrants and refugees are getting, the very fact of them having very little, of being bottom of the pile, cannot be hidden.
It doesn’t matter.
Whatever you haven’t got is because of them. Even though they haven’t got it either. It’s a fantastic trick carried out by those who have, in fact, got everything you haven’t got.
Fastnet Rock in Co. Cork, sometimes known as Ireland's teardrop, is the last part of Ireland early emigrants for America ever saw (Pic: Fáilte Ireland)And much, much, more. And for anyone reading this Irish news site remember that everything you hear about immigrants now was once said about the Irish too.
Those of us who grew up in immigration have a story to tell, though, don’t we?
We can report back on what the realities of immigration were. Of course, individual stories will have many differences but there is a general theme there.
The immigrants themselves? Well, the ones we came from were usually young, all the men military aged and unvetted, with limited formal education.
What they came for, why they emigrated, why they were immigrants, was obviously complex but again there would have been general similarities.
They were leaving a conservative, somewhat oppressive society, and they were young and they wanted a bit of freedom. They very often had no choice.
If they had stayed there was nothing for them. No work, nowhere to live, no possibilities, no future, no room. They became immigrants for one main thing.
They wanted work and they wanted a family and they wanted a life. And what did they face? They faced discrimination and bigotry and resentment.
They faced the burden of being stereotyped every day. They learnt that every day now they would be Irish, be the Irish immigrant. Being an immigrant is a constant consciousness. The same things being said now, were being said then, about them.
But there’s more to the immigrant story than that. The immigrant story is one of sadness and sad songs and the ever-present rupture of having to leave home. All of that is true.
In these current days of anti-immigrant rhetoric, though, it is important to stress the other side of immigration too. Immigration is a story of richness.
As someone who grew up immersed in immigration, from a family of immigration, on streets of immigration, in a city of immigration, I can hand on heart report back on immigration as a societal enrichment.
Those who become immigrants do, whatever the hardships and the emotional pain, build lives and families. They get to become part of the places, the cities, they come to, as those cities become part of them.
They find jobs and they bring a mixing of culture and food and songs and that mixing only makes those cities better and more diverse and finer places to live in.
The 1980s city I grew up in without the Irish, without the people of the Caribbean, without the people of Pakistan and India, well, it wouldn’t have existed. And just as those cities gave us jobs and families and a life and football teams we gave them so much too.
Without us, how much poorer they would have been. In every way. Immigration is not, you see, as those who have directly lived it can confirm, a bad thing or a dirty word or a slur. Immigration, being an immigrant, is brilliant.
It is the story of all the great British cities. It is the day-to-day life, the reality, of what a city is. Without immigration what is a city? Could it actually even be a city without immigration, without immigrants?
Immigration is a good thing, a very real thing, a part of what it is to be a human thing.
Immigration is who we are. Every truthful Irish person will tell you that.
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