Nesrine Malik, The Guardian.
Britain has been stripped of the spaces that allow for true social integration. But it’s easier for politicians to blame ‘outsiders’.
Every few weeks, another announcement. Immigrants must do this to earn the right to stay in the UK. Others must do that if they are to be allowed to work in the UK. The demands grow more punitive and absurd, like the whiteboard of a meeting where everyone agreed there were no bad ideas. Voluntary work! A decade to receive citizenship! Hear me out: English A-levels!
These are all real policies and pledges. Migrant NHS doctors for example, labouring for long work days beyond what they are paid for will now have to prove that they “contribute to society” to earn permanent settlement in the UK. The benchmark for that contribution is volunteer work (sorry, more volunteer work) in the community. The five-year route to settlement is now being extended to 10, to make absolutely sure that in addition to being in work, paying taxes, making national insurance contributions and paying a hefty charge to use the NHS, you’re not taking the piss. The latest demand is that some migrants must be able to speak English to A-level standard because, according to home secretary Shabana Mahmood, “it is unacceptable for migrants to come here without learning our language, unable to contribute to our national life”.
I should pause here to explain the English requirements that are already in place, and who this concerns. The migrants this policy applies to are in the “skilled worker”, “high-potential individual” and “scale up” categories, which allow companies to recruit talented individuals for skilled roles. There is already a test which proves that these individuals can broadly get by – it’s called a job interview. Besides, the visas associated with these categories already require people to be able to speak English to GCSE level. Is it now important that applicants must be able to analyse the form of an extract from The Woman in Black? I’m not quite sure. I do not have an English A-level, like the vast majority of people in the UK, who somehow have not crashed the economy for lack of that qualification.
You see, A-level English capability is obviously not a serious or carefully considered benchmark, but an opportunity to say some strong stuff about “coming here and not speaking our language”. Like so many political interventions, this one is based on elision, on invoking a lumpen grunting blob of immigrants who can’t and won’t speak English, won’t “play their part” and must be constantly subject to new crackdowns to prove their worth and their assimilation.
There is an entire industry surrounding the UK’s existing residency and citizenship requirements, from tests about Boudicca and Elizabethan poets to English-language tests where you must converse at a high level with an examiner, as well as other written and spoken exams that feed into UK embassies and visa processing centres across the world. But we have now entered the territory of unreality, where there are ever-more announcements whose sole purpose is to give a sense that a crisis is being handled.
The supposedly unifying thread of all these new policies is “integration”: this mythical concept that has taken on the quality of a religious ideal. But let’s talk about all the ways integration happens, and whether, in fact, it is even something that is on offer for all, not just migrants. Integration is based on facilitating interaction and enmeshment in a society. It depends upon the children’s centre that links parents to others in the community and pools advice and resources. It depends on the libraries that provide literature and history and local knowledge. It depends on youth clubs and midwife visits and community centres and public-sector workers who are not so burnt out at the end of a day working in under-resourced schools and hospitals that they have no bandwidth to volunteer their work in their communities.
Yet all of these services have been hollowed out by years of austerity, pushing people back into their own small networks and atomised lives. How integrated do you feel on a regular basis? Do you have an extended society of neighbours and drop-in centres and free spaces that haven’t been sold off for development where you can spend time with other people? I doubt it. Britain really is that island of strangers, yet the sense of social alienation that is now a quintessentially contemporary British experience has been forged by economic and political decisions, not immigrants.
At the same time, we have started building our own bubbles, exacerbating this sense of isolation. We don’t all consume the same media any more, and mobile phones and livestreaming have allowed for the creation of infinite personalised silos of existence. Modernity and austerity combine to fracture collective experience but, well, who would want to reckon with these histories? What political establishment has any interest in the hard work of tackling what can be done to address that fraying of the national fabric, when you can erect some ideal of an integrated society that does not exist, and lay its arbitrary expectations on immigrants who must now alone prop up the delusion that the problem isn’t in the place they are coming to, but in them.
The role that has been assigned to them is symptomatic of an impoverished conception of national identity and patriotism. One that is increasingly brought to us in displays of loyalty to the flag, and not much else. In place of true social integration, we have fascist-coded notions of national identity imposed from above, while what lies below remains fractured and ravaged, creating fertile ground for the far right. But do not fret. Hear me out. What if we had a cricket Test match: two teams of migrants, over an entertaining five days, proving that they can make a contribution to our national life. Whoever wins gets citizenship. With this, Nigel Farage will be finished.
