There’s no doubt that immigration is one of the
main issues in the 2016 US Presidential Election, if not the main issue. The
Trump campaign kicked off with the unusual idea of building a wall on the
Mexican border, and the resulting dumpster fire has routinely dehumanized of immigrants and refugees. Immigration
is also a divisive political topic throughout Europe, especially the Brexit-ing
UK, and as far as Singapore. I won't rehash all the notable anti-immigration rhetoric, but I'll just leave here this gem from Fox News displaying their nuanced understanding of
Chinese immigrants.
There’s certainly no lack of pro-immigration
champions. We have all sorts of arguments for taking in immigrants: they add value to our
economy and actually create jobs, they bring in new ideas and cultures, that
America has always been a country of immigrants, that it's the compassionate
option. If you want a collection of pro-immigration arguments and stories, go
no further than Define
American created by Jose Antonio Vargas. However, I find some of these arguments fundamentally flawed and not unified, inadequately voicing a cohesive basic reason for supporting immigration.
I am not writing a policy piece – in fact I really
don’t intend this to be political. I just want to lend an international
perspective to reframe a dialogue that frankly nauseates me.
As a child of immigrants to America, I have seen
much of the American immigrant experience. As an American who has spent 5 years
of adulthood living outside the country, I have also seen much of the American
emigration experience, which I call (controversially) the expat experience. This piece explores the staggering differences between those two experiences.
In western countries, assimilation is the go-to word in expected immigrant behavior. Assimilation
is about adapting your language, choices and activities to fit those of the
people around you – you know, changing everything about you. Immigrant children
are expected to go to local schools. Eyebrows can raise up when immigrants gather
for group cultural activities, whether it's prayer at a mosque, a Chinese lion
dance or a cricket game. There are no shortage of stories of Americans feeling
uncomfortable in the presence of people speaking other languages, even starting
confrontations.
The phrase “go back to your country” has likely been uttered angrily to an
immigrant, or maybe just a visible minority, a dozen times since you began
reading this.
I wish there was good data on ex-patriates and their language skills, but I am not aware of such data. In lieu, I have my personal anecdotes from travels. I’ve met lots of impressive multilinguals, particularly in Beijing and Tokyo, but I’d argue that in no major city do a majority of expats successfully learn the local language. The percentages get a lot higher outside the major cities, but even in the smallest villages, I’ve met expats piss poor in the local language.
Hong Kong is a particularly extreme example - as a former British colony, English is an official language and still dominates in higher education and the professional world. Among places in Asia, only in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore do westerners put less effort into learning local languages. In my 4+ years in Hong Kong, I met two people
who learned Cantonese from scratch to a proficient level. And I met a lot of
people. The overwhelming majority of foreigners possess a core vocabulary of "hello,
left, right, thank you, shrimp dumpling."
In Hong Kong there
is no shortage of 15+ year long expat veterans who cannot converse in
Cantonese. There is no shortage of people born
and raised in Hong Kong to western parents who could not converse in
Cantonese – I’ve met easily 100 people in this demographic and not one was
fluent. The Kadoories, one of Hong Kong’s oldest and richest families, no longer speak Cantonese. Western children are expected not to go to local schools, even though
Hong Kong’s education system is great. Very often they’re multilingual in
French or German or Mandarin, able to communicate to anyone but the people
around them. A Swedish coworker who had been in Hong Kong for 7 years without
speaking Cantonese explained unironically of his resentment for Iraqi refugees
in Sweden, who lived in enclaves for years without learning Swedish.
The game is pretty rigged for English speakers all over, even in places without direct colonial legacies. There are English announcements in all the subways of Asia, from Tokyo to Bangkok to Changsha, as if there is some
UN decree. Nowhere in America are there even Spanish announcements. I literally spoke English every day I spent in Asia and never once did I worry about
making people uncomfortable. Often I’ve been that American engaged in loud
uproarious English conversation with friends on the public subway, and not once
has anyone dared complain or told me to go back to my country. Expats abroad
party hard, even when local cultures that don’t, and easily engage in drugs,
even when local laws heavily criminalize them. Many expats work for years on
tourist visas - not once have I heard an expat referred derogatorily as an illegal immigrant.
The truth is that becoming an expat is a
bestowment of privilege. You are assumed to be an educated professional and
granted an amount of freedom to make yourself comfortable. The assumption of a
white collar job isn’t necessarily true
– there's this
white minibus driver in Hong Kong. And experiences may
differ by place and ethnicity - many parts of Asia are deeply racist and sexist - but I think most expats will agree that their
social status elevated after moving abroad. The reverse experience is
precisely the opposite. A non-westerner moving to a western country knowingly
engages in a stripping of privilege, often profiled as a job stealer or an
uneducated migrant, regardless of background.
You might think now that I wrote this to excoriate expat
behavior. Not at all. I was an expat, and I took full advantage of my
privilege in Hong Kong. In fact I mean
to paint the picture of immigrants to the west in a sympathetic light. It’s
easy to judge an immigrant for their lack of assimilation, their inexplicable
clinging to their old country ways. But until you try, you might have no idea
how hard it is to assimilate. How hard it is to learn the local language. How
hard it is leave your culture behind, how greatly you desire to keep doing the
activities that have always made you happy. I lived as an American in Hong
Kong, where I have direct ancestry, for four years and I wasn’t close to
assimilating. I wasn’t even on the path to assimilation – I could have lived
there for 40 years and I would not have enjoyed drinking hot water like a
local, I would not have watched TVB programs like a local, and I would not have
stopped calling in sick on Super Bowl Monday. I think there’s nothing wrong
with that. Sure, I wish that more expats in Hong Kong could be more engaged
in local affairs, but I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with a society
that has diverse groups of people happily doing their own thing.
So if you’re a citizen of a western country and discussing
immigration, please consider the following tenets. Understand the degree of
difficulty. Embrace the diversity. Check your fucking privilege. Try to accept
immigrants not because they add to the economy, or because you live in a
country of immigrants – because this doesn’t excuse discrimination against
immigrants who don’t add to the economy or excuse countries without a legacy of
immigration. Try to accept immigrants because they are humans, and any one
coming with good intentions should be welcomed. On a global issue like
migration, we cannot narrow our focus to how it affects us in our little part
of the world. We need to be cognizant of the
underlying causes that motivate people to make dangerous and difficult journeys
to dangerous and difficult lives in a strange country. We need to address an
imbalance where an American college graduate can jump into an upper middle
class lifestyle teaching his/her native language in Korea while an Ivorian man
with a Master’s degree scrapes by driving taxis in New York. At the end of the
day, it really shouldn’t matter where you are born. And yet it matters so, so
much. Can we try to push this world in a better direction?
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