I read another article by Gary Younge, who I feel is one of the few well-known columnists in England who is not an Oxbridge-educated glorified navel-gazer. I feel most columnists are nothing but skillful phrase-turners instinctively prone to reactionary political positions and have nothing substantive to say. Younge's column talked about how parents of black kids who had been shot by the police in the U.S. stressed on how honest and law-abiding their kids were. While this understandable, it also feeds the narrative that some kids deserved to be shot more than others. Younge drew parallels between this and the Windrush saga, which had prompted the government to apologize not for creating a dehumanizing immigration dragnet but because the wrong people had been caught in the dragnet. The "good immigrants" had been caught.
I find the "good immigrant" narrative pernicious because it creates a class of supposedly good immigrants who are expected to prove their credentials by policing bad immigrants. Which is why you had the curious sight of Gujarati and Punjabi immigrants griping about Polish and Romanian immigration ahead of the Brexit vote. Some British people I spoke to also talked about how Asian immigrants had integrated but East-Europeans hadn't. To me the idea, that white nationalists would have a problem with white people from other countries but not with brown immigrants is bemusing. Tactical alliances can be easily abandoned once they have served their purpose.
All social hierarchies reproduce themselves by having each rung police the rung below it. Which is why well-educated well-to-do Brahmins are usually quite pleasant, because they have the lower castes behave as caste police for them. Brahmins and other higher castes can afford to be blind to caste while enjoying all caste privileges.
Technically, I am not an immigrant, but I look and sound like one. Anti-immigration rhetoric makes me quite uncomfortable because I don't see myself as more deserving than other less-educated and less well-to-do immigrants. That being said, I don't know if the solution is to have open borders. It is difficult for me to imagine the consequences of open borders and whether I would still want to live in an Europe with open borders. But, can you have closed borders and an immigration system that is not dehumanizing?
I find the "good immigrant" narrative pernicious because it creates a class of supposedly good immigrants who are expected to prove their credentials by policing bad immigrants. Which is why you had the curious sight of Gujarati and Punjabi immigrants griping about Polish and Romanian immigration ahead of the Brexit vote. Some British people I spoke to also talked about how Asian immigrants had integrated but East-Europeans hadn't. To me the idea, that white nationalists would have a problem with white people from other countries but not with brown immigrants is bemusing. Tactical alliances can be easily abandoned once they have served their purpose.
All social hierarchies reproduce themselves by having each rung police the rung below it. Which is why well-educated well-to-do Brahmins are usually quite pleasant, because they have the lower castes behave as caste police for them. Brahmins and other higher castes can afford to be blind to caste while enjoying all caste privileges.
Technically, I am not an immigrant, but I look and sound like one. Anti-immigration rhetoric makes me quite uncomfortable because I don't see myself as more deserving than other less-educated and less well-to-do immigrants. That being said, I don't know if the solution is to have open borders. It is difficult for me to imagine the consequences of open borders and whether I would still want to live in an Europe with open borders. But, can you have closed borders and an immigration system that is not dehumanizing?
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