How do you write about immigration when you are the migrant they denigrate? The one they blame? The one they burden with their world’s sins? The one they wish to excise?  

What do you write about?  

How surreal it is to watch the communities that once embraced you slowly turn away from you? How exhausting it is to become the focal point for societal anger? How draining it is to have those anxieties play out within and through you? How infuriating it is to have to defend yourself, to feel as if you must even though that’s never been the case?

How can you write about these things, these emotions, without feeding into the moral panic? How can I have this conversation with the people we need to have this conversation with, without fuelling the cycle of anxious engagement that makes this entire conversation so profitable?  

I suppose it’s easy to say that I will tell the truth. But what truth? That the line between legal and illegal migration is thinner than most people would think? That there’s no such thing as “illegal” migration because every human being has the right to migrate, to move?  Or maybe we can talk about history? About how the patterns of migration we see today were inspired by the failures of governance of yesterday? About why it is we think of black bodies and brown skin when we think of immigrants, and white skin when we think of expatriates? Or why, each of us took the paths we took and why we had to leave home? 

No, maybe we could start with the political, I think. We could talk about why it is politically expedient to blame foreigners for the failures of governance. We could discuss why it is easier to talk about migration, instead of social housing, tax evasion, education and so on. We could talk about how blind ambition and the desire for power for power's sake make politicians blind to the long-term consequences of their actions. No, I believe the best approach is personal. I could tell you about how much my family has paid in visa costs and travel costs. I could tell you of the invasive questions, and the ways we must lay our lives bare, to be considered – not granted but considered – for a visa. I could tell you about the tears I shed every time I have to fly out of Nairobi and leave my family and friends behind to come to a society that has made it very clear that they do not want me, only my labour and capital.

 We could have these conversations…yes. But these conversations, even the way I have framed them above, are not for us.

Instead, they are about us; taking place in front of us, and in complete ignorance of us. 

Again, it’s an incredibly surreal feeling to have people talk about you and yours, like you’re not in the room - but then again, it seems I have assimilated a little too close to the imperial sun here. So I ask, how do we have a productive conversation about migration? Because that’s what this conversation is about – not about immigration (or the act of moving into a country), or migration (as the movement of people), but migration as the movement of belonging. It asks: who gets to belong, and who decides? Who is permitted to start anew, and who is forever marked as a guest, a stranger, an interloper? It forces us to ask harder questions about how we respond to the failures of governance, not just in the places people leave, but also in the places they arrive. Migration reveals what we value, what we fear, and who we are willing to sacrifice for comfort or control. Because while the United Kingdom is painfully sensitive to influences from the Global South, they are less attentive to influences from its fellow allies, particularly the United States. And yet, very few in the political centre are decrying American influence and the ways in which the system has become attentive to its concerns. Because some (Western, White) ideas are seen as good, some influences are seen as beneficial, while others (non-Western, non-white) are seen as only bad, only destructive.

So, if we are to speak honestly, we must admit that migration is not a one-way story of arrival or departure. While the Global North debates who to “let in,” it rarely pauses to consider what or who it continues to send out. Labour, capital, data, and dreams flow outward just as bodies flow in. The Global North extracts as much as they host. The same countries that debate the “burden” of migration are also the ones exporting extraction and exploitation to the Global South.  Thus, the conversation is unbalanced, fixated on the bodies that move north, never on the systems that compel them to move or the global structures that profit from that movement. So perhaps this isn’t a conversation about migration at all, but about the governance of movement. About how we, as a species, manage the flows of people, ideas, and possibility — who is allowed to move freely, and who must justify their movement to bureaucracies that treat mobility as privilege rather than birthright. Because human beings have moved. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes not. But movement is a part of our story. Movement is not an aberration; it is the human condition. But what does this mean for us, right now?

What does this mean for the terms of the conversation that we are having? Because the facts aren’t working because they aren’t listening, and quite frankly, they don’t care – or to be more charitable their capacity for empathy has been hijacked by their misplaced fear, anger and frustration. How do we have a complex conversation about this?

This will be part one, as I continue to think through what we can do and where we should be directing our energies to – cognizant of the fact that it is difficult to have a “family discussion” in a public square.