Immigrants are faced with the burden of having to prove ourselves at once extraordinary and expendable. But the door is closed on us and the verdict of ‘guilty’ passed before we have even had the chance to make our case. One can learn a language and change religions or beliefs, but not the colour of one’s skin or place of birth.
The future of a national project and the survival of a language (not our own) are on our shoulders, but we have no voice in the making of that future defined by those who do not know, and cannot know, what it is like to want to flee from the past, to thirst for a new home, to have bombs fall on one’s head, or to be rejected by a society — and to enjoy the freedom of rejecting it in turn.
Immigration is about place but it is also about time. Often the future and the past of a nation, from cradle to grave, is sustained by foreigners in a very literal sense: think of all the women in so many parts of the world caring for the youth and elderly of countries and cultures utterly alien to them, at the expense of their own.
And so we are needed but not wanted. At the same time ours is the great privilege of not having to fear for the welfare of a collective national fiction. When we do not have a past to romanticise, the future becomes radically open. We can learn to live without attachments. We can, and have, moved on before and we can do so again. Because sometimes a home can be a prison.
When the future is uncertain, we can lean on the everyday kindness of strangers, lovers, friends who will welcome us, because where we are today, together, matters more than where we are from.
