Can we talk about immigration in a way that doesn't suck?

We are having the wrong conversation — this is the right one

Image: photo of a painting my parents got from India, hanging in my house. Artist unknown

When do you know that the time has come to pack your bags and flee? Many of us who have been tensely watching the rise of, let’s just say it, fascism, over the past few years, have been asking themselves that golden question.

One month after Trump was elected for the second time, the Dutch parliament voted in favour of a motion to register the ‘cultural and religious norms and values’ of Dutch nationals with a ‘migration background’. This would include my daughter and me, who are dual Dutch and UK citizens. Dutch citizens without a migration background (defined as being born abroad or having a parent born abroad), in this scheme, would not have their values or religion recorded. The ostensible reason for this is that monitoring us foreign types would ‘help integration’.

To put this in some context, in the Dutch election of November 2023, the party that won the most votes was the extreme right PVV (‘Party of Freedom’) led by Geert Wilders. For years, Wilders has built his platform around policies like banning mosques and the Quran, a total freeze on asylum, a ban on dual nationality (disproportionately affecting Muslims), and similar gems. ‘Less Islam’ in the Netherlands has been his rallying call. In 2014, he famously led a chant for ‘fewer fewer fewer’ Moroccans in the country.

Now the PVV and Wilders are a powerful force within the coalition government (the Netherlands has a system of proportional representation that always results in coalitions), which is made up of five of the most hard-right parties in the country’s fragmented political landscape.

Going after people with a ‘migration background’ is barely veiled racism, as the majority of those in this category have a ‘non-western migration background’ (14% versus 11% who have a ‘western migration background’). Muslims are the main target, though anyone brown, or for that matter, anyone a bit eastern European, can also count themselves as various shades of unwelcome.

The plan to monitor the values of people with a ‘migration background’ has been parked for now, after three parties who originally voted for the motion scratched their heads and realised that, oh yeah, it was outright discrimination and violated the Dutch constitution.

But still, for me, it was a pretty glaring sign that the time to pack our bags was approaching.

This question of bag-packing was particularly salient because, during the Second World War, Dutch Jews were required to register their religion with the population registry. As Jewish commentators have pointed out, this sterling integration effort was what enabled 75% of Dutch Jews to be rounded up and murdered in concentration camps — the highest number in western Europe.

I’m not saying that anything like that is on the cusp of happening again, but that’s the whole point, you don’t necessarily know you’re in it until it’s too late to get out.

Of course, I’m aware of the absurd irony of the bag-packing idea, when the threat we would be fleeing is anti-immigrant hatred. We would essentially be making ourselves even more of the thing that everyone wants to get rid of in the first place.

My husband, daughter and I are all lucky enough to have EU passports, but it’s not as if the rest of Europe is a beacon of hospitality. We live about a ten minute drive away from the German border. That country has just seen an election surge for the extreme right AfD, which came second in the polls. The AfD’s manifesto proudly states: ‘Islam does not belong to Germany’, wants to deport German citizens (the ones with a ‘migration background’ of course), and contains uncloseted Nazis.

Trump 2.0 doesn’t signal the beginning of a new global fascist era, it is only accelerating one that started years ago that many have been struggling to wrap our minds around. And hatred of some racialised, foreign-ised ‘other’ is at its core.

Musical borders

If I were to pack up and leave, it would probably have to be to ‘go back to my own country’ of England. That’s where I was born and raised and still have strong roots, my parents still living in the same east-London house where my brother and I grew up. The first thing I did after staggering out from post-partum carnage was get my daughter Esmeralda (Essie for short) a British passport along with her Dutch one.

However, the joy of Brexit means that my husband Erik, who is Dutch, wouldn’t be able to move with us. We’d have to wade through a costly, prolonged and stressful bureaucratic migraine to potentially be able to get him a spousal visa.

Apart from the small raising-my-child-without-her-father matter, I’m not sure how comfortable I’d feel back in the fatherland anyway. Unlike many places, the current government there is not technically at the extreme end of cackling cartoon villain. However, this is a government that recently released an entertainment video clip of five random people being deported, described by one Guardian journalist as ‘torture porn’, purely to advertise its anti-immigrant credentials.

Admittedly, Labour prime minister Keir Starmer did cancel the previous government’s scandalous Rwanda plan, which spent millions trying (and failing) to send people seeking asylum to the east African country. However, this government is also doing deals with the Tunisian government to help its coast guard stop people crossing the Mediterranean. This is the same coast guard that the United Nations says has committed ‘physical violence, including beatings, threats of use of firearms; removal of engines and fuel; and capsizing of boats.’ Tunisian president Kais Saied is himself clamping down on immigration and stands accused of attacking migrants and Black Tunisians.

Keir Starmer has also taken advice on border policy from Italy’s Meloni government, which is leading European efforts to retain the Central Mediterranean’s title as the world’s deadliest migration route. This advice would include things like blocking efforts to save people’s lives at sea, criminalising those crossing by branding them all as ‘smuggling gangs’, and outsourcing border control to countries like Tunisia and Libya.

That’s the thing, borders are slippery things, don’t stay put. Erik, Essie and I regularly pop over to Germany for a little family day out. Within 20 minutes drive there’s a nice art museum and you can get a great schnitzel. Lately, both the Dutch and German governments have reinstated spot border checks. A thrill of panic always goes through me when I realise I’ve forgotten to bring mine and Essie’s passports and, since I don’t drive, I don’t have any other valid form of ID on me. But, so far, we haven’t caught a glimpse of a khaki uniform, barbed wire or even the tip of a machine gun. You wouldn’t even know you had crossed the border except the petrol suddenly gets a lot cheaper.

Instead, Europe has moved its borders thousands of kilometres south, creating hell on earth for hundreds of thousands of human beings.

The UN has registered at least 25,500 deaths and disappearances during the Mediterranean crossing between 2014 and 2024. For every person who dies in the Mediterranean, another two die in the Sahara desert trying to reach it. This includes thousands of children. We have all seen the heartbreaking pictures of children washed up on beaches. What distinguishes those children from mine, or yours?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. As the activist and writer Harsha Walia sets out in her book Border and Rule, due in large part to European border policy, in Libya tens of thousands more migrants and refugees face overcrowding, starvation, electrocution, torture, rape, forced labour and executions.

Essie and I being both British and EU citizens, we of course aren’t on the front line of this anti-immigration bullet dance. That’s all these other humans whose lives apparently don’t count because they have slightly different looking passports. But I can’t say that this knowledge gives me much of a cosy and secure feeling.

Perhaps it’s my brown immigrant and Jewish background (my parents raised my brother and me to the comforting mantra of: ‘don’t ever think that it won’t happen to you’, which only took a few years of therapy to work through), but the idea of my safety resting on politicians making other people’s lives increasingly hellish doesn’t fill me with confidence that I will not be next in line. This is especially the case now that the rise in authoritarianism has made it abundantly obvious how willing and able those in power are to change the rules at the flick of a pen.

Whose spoils are they anyway?

The vast majority of people who have to pack up and migrate don’t try to come to western Europe but prefer to stay closer closer to home. But of those who do attempt to come here, often risking their lives, why might this be? Where does the wealth that they are trying to access a tiny part of come from in the first place?

Do we think that the countries of western Europe became rich by competing fairly on a level playing field with other parts of the world? Or might it have a teensy bit to do with the violent theft of centuries of colonialism? Academics including the legal scholar Nadine El-Enany and the sociologist Gurminder Bhambra show that, for these European countries, the whole construct of national citizenship is just a way of hoarding the spoils of empire, shutting out the colonial subjects who created that wealth to begin with.

Those spoils of empire include an estimated $45 trillion that Britain drained from India between 1765 and 1938. They also include 40% of the province of Holland’s wealth in the mid eighteenth century, which can be traced to slavery.

And this theft isn’t consigned to the past. The entire global economy now, as we speak, is designed to suck wealth towards the dominant nations from everywhere else. Colonialism didn’t actually end, it just got restructured — as I’ve written about here, here and here. To give just one figure, an academic study led by

Jason Hickel

has found that, between 1960 and 2020, rich countries drained developing countries of $152 trillion by holding down wages, enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over.

Borders themselves are a central pillar in the scaffolding of neocolonialism. They hoard stolen wealth and keep wages low by stopping people moving around to find better paid jobs, while rich CEOs can move their cash around the planet at the tap of a button.

The knowledge that my ‘good’ passport gives me — at least for now — a measly bit of safety net that is built on top of millions of others being drowned under it, is not exactly my idea of a warm bath of belonging. As should be becoming all-too-clear by now, none of us are safe from this kind of political setup.

The next time you hear someone bleating on about immigration, you can tell them that they are having the wrong conversation. We shouldn’t be talking about immigration, we should be talking about borders, which are nothing more than very effective tools of violent theft.

Everybody deserves to have their needs met and to live in safety and freedom, no matter where they happen to be born or what bits of paper they carry. This is what I will teach my daughter and this is the world I want for her, and for all of us. No one should have to pack their bags, but we should all be able to if we want to.