I was, as it happens, in the hall when Theresa May talked about “citizens of nowhere”. I didn’t really pick up on the line at the time, probably because I was stressed, and nursing a light hangover. It was conference after all. I read the script afterwards, trying to find lines I’d missed while watching the speech live, and that’s when it hit me. Was I a citizen of nowhere?
Yes, yes, I obviously was. I was born in Nantes, in western France, but my parents were from elsewhere. My dad grew up in Normandy, and his mum came from Brittany. My mother was born in Marrakech, in Morocco, but her father spent his childhood in Safi, along the coast, listening to the waves crashing against the house as he went to sleep. They met not in France but across the Mediterranean, in Tunisia, where they were both living at the time.
My brother and I were brought up in the same place, of course, but he’s now living in Paris. Before that, he was in Shanghai for a little while. I, on the other hand, moved to Britain at 17, and somehow my life here led me to sitting in that big dark room, at the end of 2016, and listening to the prime minister talking about people like me.
In the years that followed, I ended up leaving the somewhere I called home – London – in search of glitzier pastures. I lived in Venice and I lived in New York, and maybe I’ll leave again at some point. It’s impossible to tell what will happen next. Well, it is and it isn’t. The only thing I’m certain of is that I won’t be moving back to France. I’ve been there, done that, got the beret to prove it: wherever I end up will not be where I started. Is that really so bad?
Is it really so dreadful that I happen to come from a long line of people with itchy feet, who keep moving across regions and continents? Theresa May probably thought so. The prime ministers that followed all talked about immigrants, one after the other, and sometimes the focus changed and the intensity was dialled up or down, but the result was the same.
I would sit at my desk, in front of my laptop, and I would force myself to step out of my skin in order to write about all these politicians who surely, surely, didn’t mean me. I first wrote about this dissociative state two years ago, in the pages of this newspaper. I spent three days at the Conservatives’ annual jaunt and it felt like an exercise in detaching my identity from my body.
There I was, in Manchester, surrounded by people who seemed pleased to see me, but who otherwise spent their time railing against the evils of immigration. It made me feel like an awkward ghost, or an interloper wearing a janky fake moustache. Did they mean me? Didn’t they? Even if they didn’t, could I ever be sure that they would never mean me? The question kept floating around my head, like a bleak mantra.
When Labour won the election last summer, I thought that perhaps I would be able to finally catch my breath. I never expected Keir Starmer to embrace open borders, but assumed that his government’s rhetoric would be different. It’s fair to say I’m not getting the last laugh. I read about his “island of strangers” comment as I woke up and somehow that made it worse: you shouldn’t be made to feel so unwelcome in the country you call home so early in the day.
As with heavy petting: hell, at least buy me a drink first.
In the end, it wasn’t even the worst of it. In the white paper’s foreword, Starmer wrote that Britain had become a “one-nation experiment in open borders”. “The damage this has done to our country is incalculable”. Now, there are some obvious questions to ask here. Sure, net migration has been exceptionally high recently, but who exactly would have Starmer turned away? Ukrainians fleeing for their lives as Vladimir Putin invaded their country? Hong Kongers terrified of what mainland China would be doing next? Afghans escaping from the mess the west left behind when they retreated?
No, he probably didn’t mean any of those, just as his predecessors weren’t really talking about me. Does that really matter though? That’s the question that kept plaguing me that day. For years there were good immigrants and bad ones, and it was either implied or said explicitly that, if you were one of the former, Britain was happy to have you. For how long will that remain true?
Lives are long and they are unpredictable. I have a good career now but that may not always be the case. I wasn’t born disabled but neither were the majority of currently disabled people. It seems unlikely that I will ever have so many children that I will need the state to help me financially, but I’m still in my early thirties. Who knows where life will take me next. Similarly, I doubt I will ever become a devout Muslim, as my grandmother was, but weirder things have happened.
In short: in immigration as in life, the line between good and bad is often thinner than we’d like. They may not be talking about me now, but they might do tomorrow. Again, though: does that matter? Isn’t an injury to one an injury to all? On the surface I have more in common with British, middle-class, metropolitan columnists, but deep down I will always be defined by my foreignness. This, in turn, can only ever bring me closer to all those people politicians do talk about, when they speak of citizens of nowhere and islands of strangers.
When Jo Cox said that there is more that unites us than divides us, she was talking about the immigration debate. Her words were kind and wise, and they apply to all of us foreigners too. Politicians may seek to divide and conquer, but I don’t believe we should let them. I got lucky in life but not everyone did, and those who didn’t do not deserve what’s being flung at them. It doesn’t really matter if they’re talking about me or not: we foreigners ought to stick together, or else we all risk getting pushed out, one after the other. We may be citizens of nowhere, but that doesn’t mean we have to stand alone.
