Sunday, November 6, 2016

All Sides of the Border

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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