I, Immigrant

I don't really think of myself as an immigrant because we share the Queen and so forth, but technically that's what I will be at some point.

Britain and at least this part of Canada have wildly different attitudes to immigration. In Britain, immigration has always been and remains a dirty word. I think this is due to two main factors. Throughout a large part of the twentieth century, immigration ran alongside population explosion. Furthermore, the notion of immigrants is generally associated in British culture with racial difference. What I mean by this is that had we opted for Kevin coming to Britain rather than my coming to Canada, he would not have been viewed as an immigrant.

West coast Canadians have a very open attitude towards immigrants. I think partly they are very used to it, as I have said before, Kevin's family are fifth generation Canadian and it wouldn't be possible to have many more generations than that without actually being first nations - native Canadian. On the immigration sponsorship form that Kevin had to fill in, there was no option for someone who was born in Canada, the lawyer told us to write it in.

Canadians know that the future of their country's economy is dependent upon immigration. And very soon Europeans are going to have to face up to that same fact.

Not long ago the birthrates for the European union countries were published in the Guardian because Angela Merkel was worried about the German figures. The birthrate needed to sustain a flourishing economy is 2.1. The German figure if I remember correctly was standing at 1.37. Every single one of the EU countries were below 2, including the traditionally catholic ones.

Germany and Britain have had different approaches to immigrant workers. Britain has for the most part refused to give way to pressure to segregate workers, for example by providing schools in the languages of ethnic minorities.
Germany on the other hand have had policies of providing precisely that, on the understanding that the workers will return home when no longer needed. They withhold the currency of language and thus stop the ability of immigrants to rise economically above a certain level.

When I was doing my MA, we had visiting speakers from the educational systems of other European countries to explain policies in those countries to us. The speaker from Spain outlined a barrio culture where women specifically were denied access to the language of the country so that they had no control over their own lives.

The population of Britain is expected to rise to 65 million over the next ten years, but this will be solely as a result of immigration. In spite of our bad attitude, it was ever thus, we are a mongrel nation.
Canada, with half the population of little island Britain, is already struggling and must increase immigration, the beauty of which is that to a certain extent you can control who you let into a country.

At the school where I worked in Portsmouth, we had quite a few asylum seekers, more, it turned out, than any of us realised.
Two of the girls whom I taught were Kurds, one from Iraq, one via Syria. The Iraqi Kurd was attacked in the corridor because she was Iraqi. Attempts to explain to the kids who attacked her that this was like doing the same thing to a German Jew who had escaped Hitler during the second world war, fell on semi-deaf ears.
As a staff we were given the task of explaining the difference to the students between illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.

The school, as all schools in Britain now must, had a citizenship co-ordinator, a very committed colleague who prepared a package of teaching materials for us all and a period was scheduled for the school to be off timetable.
In spite of this, even some members of staff couldn't really see the difference.

I could not tell you why our two Kurdish refugees were treated differently by the state, but they were.
Y, the Iraqi girl, maybe because of her early experiences at the school, did not play well with others. For some reason which even now I could not explain, towards the end of her time with us, mine was the only subject in which she was flourishing and I was a lone voice speaking out for her remaining in the top ability band. I was on strong ground. In the British education system we were heavy with data and everything was data driven. We had clear data to show that you needed a higher CAT score (Cognitive Ability Test) to achieve in Modern Foreign Languages than in any other subject, thus if she were achieving in my subject, she couldn't be put down. I became the only subject teacher that she wasn't setting out to aggravate, on the contrary, she would write down extra questions to ask me at the end of lessons.
But to the best of my knowledge, she wasn't being threatened with repatriation.

The other girl, L, was always under threat. She came to us with virtually no English. She was, contrary to school policy, put in a lower set. In that set I taught her French. She quickly acquired English and was moved to the top band. Now I was teaching her German.
She opted for German in year 10, and she was then in the class I loved more than any I had ever taught in my teaching career. When I knew I was going to resign and come to Canada it was harder to tell them than my own kids.
I had made the decision that instead of teaching them in two ability sets, we would teach them in gender sets, and I believe this was one of the best management decisions I ever made.
Teaching that group was what you go into teaching for, I looked forward to their lessons, they would work hard and over and above, they had me on their MSN and would e-mail me homework. We worked those two sets hard and they responded. It was just great to have the privilege to teach them.

Then one morning, at 5am, L's family had a visit from the police. They were taken to a detention centre close to Gatwick airport. We didn't hear about this at first, to L's teachers she was just absent, not unexpected, her mother was seriously ill.
The family were only, allowed to contact a religious advisor, no-one else. L and her sister (their mother still did not speak anough English), when asked who they wanted to speak to, instead of asking for a muslim, asked for a Jehovah's Witness. In Portsmouth, they had received assistance from Witnesses, themselves a group who had experienced persecution in Hitler's Germany.

This was the way that the school found out they were being detained. We were utterly shell-shocked. I can still remember the moment when a story became reality. One of our most beloved and hard-working pupils had been taken by our own government's agents and was to be returned to a country where her brothers and father had disappeared without trace. Where most likely they would be tortured and killed. Shock. And then the school moved into action. MPs were lobbied, TV, radio, newspapers were contacted. A couple of days before the scheduled deportation, L was returned to us, our Headteacher was allowed to go and collect the family from detention. I remember L coming round to the classrooms to show she was back, thin as a rake, the family had been on hunger strike during the detention. The reality was that it was at that point, the poor state of L's mother's health which had stayed the detention, but it was the actions of the school that made the Home Office aware of this.

Even now, although L and her family continue to live in Britain, they only have a temporary reprieve. The school made it a high profile case, but by now I would imagine that none of us would know the fate of L and the remains of her family had we not acted.

Immigration is a hot potato, no doubt about it, but soon, we are going to have to have some global joined-up thinking about this. During the whole L case, I was both immensely proud and horribly let-down by my colleagues and by my country. I understand that each case is a complex one, but I deplore lazy thinking and I equally will not accept that just because it is difficult, it is impossible, but some pretty ingrained attitudes need to be changed.