America has a very strange relationship with immigrants. A nation built on immigration will eagerly elect politicians that denigrate them at every turn, and you can see the symptoms of that mindset out in the wild every day. While I’m an immigrant, I have a very different experience of this than many immigrants do: I am white and from the United Kingdom. My English accent is a fun fascination to be enamored with, and any other concerns regarding my immigration status seem to disintegrate at the sound of it. This is not the case for many immigrants, including ones I have worked alongside, and interactions I have seen them put through do not show America in its best light.
There are various small annoyances I could complain about, such as people cutting me off when I’m mid-sentence to ask where I’m from when they realize that I have an accent, or the bizarre fetishization of the English accent that regularly makes me uncomfortable. But these pale in comparison to what others go through, so I instead want to focus on a small phrase that, while apparently benign, I think belies how some Americans think of their country and those who inhabit it.
“Welcome to America.”
A perfectly friendly thing to say. There is a problem with this, however. I regularly hear this from people who have only ascertained that I am a foreigner by birth, my country of origin, and nothing more. “Where are you from?” “The UK.” “Welcome to America.” A perfectly pleasant exchange to have with the immigrations official on my first arrival (if such an exchange exists), but it falls a little flat when delivered to someone who has lived here a considerable time.
I have lived in the States since 2014. I have a house, a spouse, three cats, and (until recently) an established job. I’m not new here. Moreover, with the information that many people have acquired when they welcome me to their shores, it would be entirely possible that I had lived here since I was five and had become a citizen, and yet they take it upon themselves to welcome me now.
Now I know that some of you think that I am being unreasonable: these people are just being nice. And I try to take it that way in the moment. But it does suggest something about how they see the country.
- They feel that, as a natural born citizen, the country is theirs, and it is their role to welcome (or presumably not welcome?) anyone who was not originally from the area.
- It shows that they see the country through the assumption that anyone who has come from elsewhere did so extremely recently. Even when they, for example, have approached me standing in a store with a well-worn manager’s badge on and a comfortable attitude about the place, they assume that I might need showing the ropes.
This same sense underlies a lot of the negative response to immigrants. They are new here, won’t assimilate, and are not contributing, goes the assumption. And that is used to fuel political rhetoric and scapegoating against immigrants: few people think of immigrants as being established citizens who have lived and paid taxes here for decades, but many of them are.
As I say, I am in the questionably fortunate position to be seen as “one of the good ones.” On occasion someone will try to refer to me as an “ex-pat,” an expression that seems to have been coined with the intention of separating “good” from “bad” immigrants (shockingly, skin color seems to play a major role here). I tend to jump down their throats over it, for better or for worse. I am an immigrant. Immigrants built this country. Immigrants keep this country running and are often not repaid for it properly. I, like most immigrants, pay taxes but get no vote (which I think was a big issue behind independence, but never mind). Immigrants are all around you, they’ve been here a long time, and that is the wealth of this nation.
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