WE ARE in a time where we are told that what concerns most people is migration.
Not just here in Ireland, but across Europe, across the world maybe.
Of course, when we say it is what concerns them what we really mean is that most people are worried about it, feel hostile to it, want, in fact, the immigrants to stop arriving in their country.
Here in Ireland it takes the casual, but sinister, refrain of people referring to ‘one of our own’.
How long you have to have been here before qualifying as one of our own has never been properly explained to me.
I remember being told a little while ago by an Englishman living here that a woman he worked with never used to talk to him but does now because now there are immigrants here from Africa and Asia so him being English is not suddenly, apparently, that bad.
Now Ireland is laced with irony when it comes to immigration and immigrants.
I’ve heard casual bigotry against Romanians — that was some twenty years ago — Poles, Nigerians and Ukrainians. They’re just getting started on the Indians who have come to work here in the health service.
One woman recently bemoaned the fact that Indian nurses were here because her own daughter was nursing in Australia.
I tried reasoning with her. I asked her had her daughter left because she couldn’t get a job or because she didn’t like the state of our health service or simply because she wanted to live and nurse in the sun for a while.
But prejudice doesn’t trade with reason or logic.
As a parent I can understand her sadness at her child being on the other side of the world but blaming it on a person who took a job her daughter didn’t want is simply nonsense.
It is genuinely understandable though that people who experience large migration into an area they are living in will find this an utter alteration to their daily life.
It is alright the leafy suburbs dismissing every concern or worry as that of knuckle dragging racists. People sometimes just don’t know what is going on.
We have seen here how badly the government communicates and how this leaves a void for bad actors to spread lies and disinformation and hostility.
I grew up in an immigrant area and on an immigrant street and I can wonder how those older English people must have felt when their streets became increasingly Irish. It was a big change for them, wasn’t it?
Not that I make allowances for the prejudice my parents faced but I do see that in those areas where it takes place immigration can cause challenges.
Wasn’t Brexit because those who had no direct experience of the changes wrought by immigration, in their workplace and home areas, talked down to those who did?
Of course, anti-migrant bigotry is always nonsensical.
The immigrant, remember, is always getting all the social welfare benefits that exist, and those that don’t, and is taking all the jobs, all while being lazy and feckless. Some gymnast the immigrant.
Those of us who come from immigration have looked sadly on at the rising discourse around immigration.
We have watched as people of privilege, people who have had all the advantages society can offer, family wealth, private education, economic privilege, societal access, have used any issues there might be around immigration to endanger the most vulnerable people a society has.
People with so, so, much resenting those with so little.
Anti-immigration sentiment seems such a dereliction of the human spirit, such a hardening of the heart against those most in need, that it is hard not to respond without despair.
But then those of us from immigration, from immigrant families, those who come from those who founded this very newspaper, those disadvantaged Irish who emigrated with nothing, only desiring a better life for their families, we know the truth about immigration.
Beyond the headlines and the demonising we know what immigration is.
We know that it is just people, good, bad, indifferent, people. That is all it is.
When they say island of strangers don’t forget that we were those strangers not so long ago and just because they say they like us now it’s only so they can dislike someone else.
See More: Europe, Immigration, Ireland
