‘GO HOME!’

I got told to leave the country because apparently, as an immigrant, I had no right to an opinion or a vote in the EU referendum.

Last night on the bus home I tweeted a silly joke:

This morning I woke up to a few retweets, which is nice, but also a string of replies telling me to leave the country. I was confused until I saw that someone had quoted my tweet and written this above it:

“Well you do and he is so if don’t like it sod off back to South Africa. Why have you even got a vote?”

Normally I wouldn’t respond (there is no point in arguing on Twitter) but this time I did, just saying that, actually, I am a British citizen, have lived here for twelve years and paid tax the whole time. Was I not allowed an opinion? The reply to that was illuminating:

“You’ve filled in some forms and paid low rate tax briefly but that will never make you British or entitle you to decide for us”.

Now, I want to be absolutely clear that, as a white South African who has English as his first language, I am often given some sort of pass by these people. I have never been subjected to any real prejudice because of where I’m from; I have never felt discriminated against for being foreign. I have even been told that I’m “not really an immigrant”, which just isn’t true. If anything I think this underlines the generally racist nature of much of the anti-immigrant brigade — in the end, for them, it boils down to skin colour and culture, not actually where you’re from.

This brings me to my actual point. I don’t really care about some knob on Twitter being mean to me, but what the above conversation reveals is the intense xenophobia at the heart of much of the Brexit argument. This is why yesterday the Daily Mail front page was about criminal EU citizens in the UK — ignoring the other 3 million or so EU citizens who contribute greatly to the British economy by living and paying tax here.

This is why Boris Johnson and the campaign continue to highlight the idea of 70 million Turkish people theoretically joining the EU, despite the fact that this is unlikely to happen and Turkey is, if anything, turning its back the EU.

The Leave leaders know that the spectre of immigration is a vote winner and that it appeals to people like the dickhead who chose to question my right to vote in this country. To these people there is nothing immigrants can do to integrate, to make themselves worthy of citizenship or the vote. No matter how much I engage in civil society, no matter how much tax I pay, no matter how long I live here, or how many visas and Citizenship Tests I must get through, I will never count as one of them; this will never be my home.

It is these beliefs that the Leave campaign is tapping into. Like the Trump campaign in America, the Leave campaign is running on xenophobia, hysterical nationalism, and apocalyptic levels of selfishness.

It is crucial that we don’t let these people win, because if we vote to leave the EU this is the country we will be living in from then on. A country run by people who are happy to mine the darkest seams of fear and prejudice that we’d hoped were buried deep in the past.