And the Immigrant vote goes to…

So, you moved to another country and built your nest there. You pay your taxes, buy local products, your kids form part of the local education system, in other words, you are a part of local economy and society. With some tinny tiny differences, but still. You have even made friends with natives.

And then, that beautiful period comes when all the billboards of the town you live in are covered in semi smiling, semi serious faces of locals who want to represent you. Yes, even you, because, even though you are not one of “theirs”, you are still a part of the community. And democracy says that everybody’s equal.

Of course, you follow the political situation back home, and you have a clear attitude and opinion about it. After all, it is close to you and forms part of your background. But now, you already know enough about your not-so-new environment to be able to choose, or at least try to, since you know that election results will influence your life.

And then you start to read deeper in the electoral pamphlets, listen to debates and inform yourself about your options. Even though you may not have been born here, you feel that you are equal and expect the same treatment. This is the exact moment you get a reality knock-out (reality check is too mild a term for this). You realise that you, and people like you, are always put apart – you are part of the statistics on how many new immigrants came, how many are integrated, how many are in jails, how many take active part in the political life, how many are entrepreneurs, all kinds of statistics. And it is ok for a state, or a political party to do that – statistics show trends. But in the context of a political battle for power, immigrants become a direct or indirect tool. Political parties distract the audience from looking at the actual problems and providing realistic solutions in many subtle and clever ways. One of them is to draw attention to the newcomers, “The Others”. That’s how immigrants become tools in the power struggle.
Usually in the moments of crisis, this resonates more. If there are problems, it is easier to find somebody to blame, instead of rolling your sleeves and working on solutions. I am not saying that all political parties use immigrants and immigrant statistics for this. I AM saying that it is wrong, as long as states are states to all people living in them, and democracy is democracy for all, not a birth right.

So, after you have been sick and tired of the whole ordeal, you go to the voting post and vote for the Greens. At least you know what they stand for.

Belonging

I don’t think the title of this post needs much explanation. As social animals, people need to belong: to their family, to their football club, to their city or village, to their nation, etc. The way that we belong, and what we feel we belong to, defines us. We belong where our childhood memories are, whether they are good or bad. We belong where people understand us.

Belonging is not a conscious process, we cannot willingly chose to belong, at least not truly. It starts with our birth and is imprinted on us through our environment while growing up. In adulthood our choices influence the belonging. If we chose to work in one company instead of another, this choice will influence it, but will not be driven by the need to belong particularly to that community, at least for most people the motivation for choices in life lies elsewhere.
So, what happens when you cut all the bonds and move away from your home country? Of course, the feeling of belonging does not exist in the new foreign world. Its ugly step sisters insecurity, nationalism, criticism take over.
How many foreigners do you know who do not take every chance available to criticise the ways, customs and people of the place they live in? As the feeling of belonging is not there, fear and isolation build a nest for overtly critical view of everything that surrounds us. We cannot just embrace everything that is so new and often extremely foreign to us, even though we have chosen it.

But, after many years of living abroad, a moment of epiphany comes, when you realise that you no longer belong that much to your home country, because you have accepted the habits, ways and values of your new home. You start belonging nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Her majesty, the bureaucracy

In a hope that grass is greener elsewhere, millions of people leave their native meadows in search for that elusive green pastures of the better part of the world. They leave behind many things they will miss, many things they think they will miss but eventually they won’t, and many more things they know they will not miss at all. One of those things that you never miss, and in fact you want to get as far away from as possible, is the sister of all establishment, the wife of every political system and the vampire of all citizens of any state – bureaucracy.

Your hopes and expectations are highest when you have just arrived to your new destination – all is new and you see good things everywhere. Your grudge against the system you left keeps you positive and gives everything new you see around you a nice, optimistic glow. You start believing you are in a perfect place and you are unstoppable. And then – enter paperwork.

You go to one of the institutions, all nervous, with your heavy foreign accent and even heavier stack of papers to submit, and there it is: the scene you hoped you would never see again: a grumpy government clerk sitting behind a window that says “Information”, and after you’ve politely asked for “Information” you are being sent to another window/office/institution where they actually do have the Information. Your journey to the labyrinths of another state administration starts, and will be full of queuing, repetition, delays, random rudeness and , if you are lucky you will get your paperwork sorted. Maybe not in time, maybe incorrectly, but it will be sorted, because very soon you will be back to square one and will need to do it again.

This is the moment when you realise that some things are universal. The queen of them all is her majesty, bureaucracy.

Clandestino

“Perdido en el corazon de la grande Babylon” says Manu Chao. His album Clandestino was released in 1998, the year I moved to Spain. I went there with a return ticket and very little money to try my luck. It was a time when immigration to Spain was just starting and the administration did not yet cope with it well. People from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe suddenly started appearing in the streets of bigger towns. Most of them came from poverty, looking for a better future.

Spanish administration could not cope with it efficiently. The slow bureaucratic  system enabled a lot of Clandestinos.When I finally received my first residence permit and went to pick it up, it had already expired. While I was waiting to get “legalised” (such and awful word, as if human existence can be legal or illegal) I already had a job and paid taxes, spent the earned money and paid more taxes, yet I was technically “illegal”. During that time one fact became painfully obvious: governments and political parties will use emigration as a tool to justify just about anything. It is enough that there is a bit of immigration in a country for it to become socially and politically significant card to play.  There is always “us” and “them”.

What we often forget is that it is precisely through migration that the world as we know it today was created – if the old tribes and nations did not move around this planet, the world would be a completely different place now. The newcomers were always greeted with animosity and very often violence. Even though we are much more advanced technologically, the territorial animal inside each of us is still that same one, both when we are the natives and the immigrants. The other person loses their human dimension the moment they step on the soil that we consider “ours”, even though this planet is not property of human beings or any other species for that matter. This one goes out to all of the clandestinos.

Stereotyping the stereotypes

Very often our world is divided between the developed countries and the developing countries. Somehow, people from those countries get identified with the same attributes, and the stereotypes are formed. During my modest existence I have seen both sides of this story. First  you will see the developed world citizen’s stereotypes of the developing citizens, and then the other side of the story:

Developed nations think

– People from developing countries are all spitting images of documentary films on poverty.

– Everything they see on TV is true.

– Their way of life is how everybody should live

Developing nations think

– Everybody in the developed countries is rich.

– Everything  on TV about developed countries is true and about their own country isn’t

– Their way of life is ok, but the grass is always greener elsewhere

These are  just a couple of examples of the stereotypes and the core of them all is the way that our own environment and the rest of the world are represented or misrepresented to all of us. Being born in one country or another does not guarantee you a better life, it may, or it may not. The grass is always the same shade of green, everywhere.

Just like a rolling stone

People aren’t stones. We’re more like sponges: we suck in everything from our surroundings until it becomes a fundamental part of what we are. It is not something that we are necessarily aware of. In fact most of us do not even know how conditioned we are by the fact that we live in a certain place, surrounded by certain people.

When you decide to move from the place where you grew up, many things happen. The connections with people in your life become stronger or they break, you become stronger, or you break. If you move to another city, you get to start over. It is difficult but the novelty of it keeps you strong and motivated. What you still have is all the skills you need to survive in that place. You know that, if something happens, your family, friends, neighbors, people who have participated in your life, will reach out for you and help. But when you move away from them to another country, your entire universe instantly shrinks to you and only you.  On top of that, there is all the things about that new place that you need to learn, from the procedure on how to rent an apartment, to simple, every day things like, whether you are expected to say hi to your neighbors or not.

A  rolling stone gathers no moss, they say. But for human existence it is precisely the moss that we gather like sponges that makes an integral part of us and our lives. When you decide to emigrate, you decided to shed that moss, but the full consequence of that will be obvious to you only when you reach your destination.

Why I became an immigrant

I was born in a country that does not exist anymore. It disintegrated right in front of my eyes during my teenage years. I was born a citizen of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 90’s I became the citizen of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; after that, my citizenship changed to Serbia and Montenegro and now I am the citizen of Serbia. All these changes happened because the country changed.

Yugoslavia was a lovely place to grow up in: safe and open. Everybody was some kind of middle class, with access to education, jobs and moderately easy life. There were no homeless people. The country was created in the early 20th century as a federation of several smaller nations, and after the WW II it became a socialist republic. Of all of the Eastern European countries it was the most open, something of which everybody was proud. My memories of that time are lovely and a lot of the values I believe in come from the naivety of the child who grew up in a place where fraternity and unity was cherished.

However, not all stories have a happy ending. Countries are constantly being born or die, they form alliances and break them, there are wars and conflicts. Yugoslavia disintegrated during my teenage years and it took a lot of time to realise that. From a point of view of a teenager, you could get sucked in in the new and trendy nationalism, in nostalgic Yugo-romanticism, or just simply be confused. Since my family was economically ruined, and, like most middle class families, we were simply struggling to make ends meet, I did not have time to mature into a nationalist or a Yugo-romanticist. I was just trying to be good at school and handle the typical adolescent pains with dignity. When the time came to finish high school and think of future, the values I grew up with prevailed – I wanted to go to University and study to become an English teacher or a translator. I wanted to travel and see the world. I wanted to work hard and build my own future. Sadly, I was living in a wrong country to make my wishes come true. It was impossible to travel, because there was no way to earn enough, and even if you did earn enough Serbia was closed off – it was very difficult to get a tourist visa to go anywhere; if you were young and unemployed, even more so – you were the dreaded potential immigrant. The second dream was even harder to achieve. With an impossible unemployment rate and average salaries so low that you cannot become independent from your parents, the future looked bleak.

When I try to remember the dreams and aspirations of a younger me, the one in her early twenties, I still feel the pangs of somebody who, although so young, sees no future. I could not imagine that I would be able to have a job that will give me enough to survive. It was that bad. And the only reason why I was in such a situation (and many young people shared the same destiny) is because I was born in a certain place.

You do not plan to emigrate, nobody wants to move away from their family, friends and their life. You do it because you are just like everybody else: you want a normal life, and you are just not lucky enough to live somewhere where it is possible. This is how the idea of moving somewhere else starts. For me, it was easier, since I wanted to see the world anyway, and I had developed an intense distaste towards nationalism of any kind – it ruined my young years.

The story of a jobstealer

If you live in a developed country, you are probably familiar with the fact that some people from abroad have moved to your neighbourhood. They speak a different language and look different. They have odd habits and the smells from their kitchen are sometimes strange. They tend to have a thick accent, and sometimes can hardly speak the language. What the heck, you think to yourself, why do they even come here if they can’t even speak the language? And in the newspaper there are sometimes articles on how they come to steal the jobs of your compatriots, how some of them steal and do other types of crimes. It feels that every day more and more of them are coming.

I am one of them, one of the foreigners who live in your country. It is awfully annoying that the stereotypes mentioned above exist, but I will not deny them, nor alienate myself from them. On the contrary, I will tell you how I came to your country to steal your job, and other stories.