{ re: The Poles Are Coming! }

[delga]

As ever, I wrote this last night, then was thwarted in my attempts to post by the lack of a working net connection. Pain in the back end. Anyway, this morning I am writing a commentary on my ballade, and I missed a meeting with my personal tutor (that's been sorted out though). This afternoon I have four hours of Traditions in Poetry: Donne, Jonson, Marvell. We'll see how it goes.

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In a HILARIOUS scene from the documentary, the presenter asks a handful of people where they’re from:

“I’m from Lithuania.”
“From Lithuania.”
“Lithuania.”
“I’m from Lithuania.”
“Market Deeping.”

HAHAHAHA. OH DEEPING, HOW I LOVE YOU. Considering the size of the place that bloke probably knows my dad.

But yeah, in general, it’s an interesting documentary so far, especially in terms of the willingness of these immigrants to work hard. That’s what The Dad says whenever we talk about it: they have a solid work ethic. Whilst The Mother will complain about things like people living on the dole and the ‘mess/waste’ people bring with them*, Dad tells me about his eagerness to work when he first came to this country, and that work ethic is still a part of him. But, anyway, Dad’s protests aren’t as vehement as Mum’s, but what the distinction he makes is that he was willing to do work whilst he feels that a lot of the people he meets aren’t willing to work. This is a similar concern to The Mother’s but Dad’s justifications is different because what he’s saying is that he is able to criticise because he has been in that position and he’s ‘earned’ a right to criticise poor behaviour. My Mum talks about immigration issues with a dismissive vocabulary which – she doesn’t realise – is actually more about social fear than anything (kind of like the 80s issues with prescriptive grammar in schools? I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about but anyway, the Conservative educational policy was linked into social issues about language concerns, and prescriptive grammar became a focal point for dealing with social anxiety because speech markers – much like now – were a way of establishing class boundaries).

Um. ANYWAY. My point is: ha, Deeping! Bless.

The documentary then did something that I thought was quite thoughtful in some ways. They talked to a local councilman whose views on immigration have changed. He used to be for it, he’s now against it. Why? Because in exploiting the immigrants, ghettos have been established. As immigrants come in their masses, local people have moved out. And because the immigrants don’t understand local systems – refuse collection and separation, for example – these ghettos become dirty and unsanitary. It’s not that immigration needs to stop, it’s that it needs to be controlled: there needs to be basic education about how our society works. There needs to be a way of welcoming people into the wider community. That’s exactly what the councilman did when he welcomed Ugandan Asians (my family are Kenyan Indians who came into London; we just happened to move to Pboro afterwards; even then, we didn’t move to the city, so we don’t really count in the general body of Pboro immigrants – we count back in London).

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not anti-immigration. But I understand what the councilman is saying. I have a slightly different take on it (see below) but to my mind, what he said was the root of what I believe. Because I sincerely believe that immigrants are important to the British economy and to British culture in general, whilst I feel like a lot of Pboro locals are more disgruntled with appearances rather than actual core issues like health, education, fair working rights. But I’m in a patronising position where I want to help these people. You look at Lincoln Road and, seriously, you would not want to live there. It’s ugly. It’s run down, it’s unkempt. Why, then, are we willing to let others live like that? Money needs to go into these parts of the city. But it doesn’t. Because who wants to pay for the ‘outsider’ over themselves? You can answer that one for yourselves. So does the problem lie with the immigrants, or with the locals? Who is more entitled? (By the by: I hate questions like that. But I also hate some of the local perspectives, so.)

(*) the problem is a catch-22 situation where no real money is being injected into the places where these people live so it becomes somewhat ghettoised; then local opinion goes down, and the council gets criticised for putting money into the group, so less money goes in, more of a ghetto etc. etc. So what you get is whole communities living together, but segregated, like in London. So you’ll have Polish people, Portuguese people, Muslim Iraqis, African Muslims, Indians, Pakistanis living in their areas, not overlapping. Indians and Pakistanis less so these days because as the Eastern Europeans came in, they were taking up the spaces which Indians and Pakistanis had left behind. The Asian influx into the country is at that point where you can accurately identify yourself as a British Asian – we’re second and third generation born. So a lot of Pboro locals will be Asian, but the majority will be middle class and in some sort of business sector. You have two classes of Asian immigrants: those who came over with business/banking/medical/engineering degrees, and those who came over with bog-standard O-level type qualifications. My parents rank as the latter, even though The Mother has been in the UK since she was 8. If you consider that I, as second-gen, am basically middle class British, and look at Asians across the area (I can’t vouch for the north; things work differently there and the ghettoisation is much more ingrained and complex, dealing with workers’ issues that stretch back to pre-immigration, as far back as the 1800s), even the lower echelons of the Asian immigrants are now middle class. What I mean is, Asians in the area don't really fall into the 'outsider' category anymore.

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My ‘theory’ (it’s not really a theory, guys) is that until you leave the ‘ghettos’ you can’t break that social divide. Whilst you’re still living in these ‘Little’ countries (Little Poland, Little India), you’re not making an effort to integrate into the greater society. You aren’t picking up the language (and god, what a difference that makes – with the language you can get a job, you can get health care), you aren’t accommodating for social diversity. There are cultural issues – how much of your ethnic culture should you give up? Should you relinquish it? Should you maintain it steadfastly? – and answers vary. I personally believe there needs to be give and take, and I think the first step towards showing that you’re willing to try to adapt is to get away from the ghettos because that way you’re in the wider community, you’re showing you know the language and you know the customs. There is no reason why you have to drop your customs. We haven’t. But there’s no reason to eschew the host country’s customs, either. The closer you remain to your ‘original’ community, the more customs you retain which is both good and bad.

I’m not saying it’s easy to get out of the ‘ghettos’. Language is a central proponent of trying to get out. My family was lucky: my mum learned English when she got here – she found it superbly difficult, but she was young and now she speaks the language flawlessly, or about as flawlessly as anyone born here; my dad went to a English-speaking school in Kenya so he could speak more than passable-English when he came to England. The only thing my dad has had to conquer – other than his skin – is his accent, and of his family, his English is one of the clearest. My dad is one of ten children: four girls, six boys. Of those ten, two don’t speak English competently in any shape or form; five have very heavy accents; three have virtually no accent, and excellent speech. Of my dad’s sisters, three are in situations/marriages where they never have to speak English, and all four have a heavy accent. Out of my dad’s brothers, the youngest two are the ones with the best command of the language as they spent the most time growing up here. Uncle D. had a university education; Uncle B (Baby Cousin’s dad) was only a kid when he came here, and he lives in Deeping with us. Uncle A. is younger than my dad but he has a really strong accent; my Dad’s English is strengthened because he lives and works in a community where, when my parents first moved, there were no Asians. He had to speak the English he knew and he had to speak clearly. He owns a shop! He had to be able to communicate with the customers! So, yeah, my parents were lucky because of their language skills. But the eastern Europeans that are coming in often don’t know any English. So what happens when you need to explain to a doctor that your child is ill? How does your child receive an education in a school which cannot teach him/her in their own language? How do you make a police report if you can’t explain the crime committed against you? It’s not easy in the least. But it’s the first step. Get out of that ghetto. The effects are dramatic, even for second- and third-generations.

My family was injected into East Ham in London, and has gradually dispersed from there. Whilst my cousins grew up there, I didn’t; I grew up in the Fen. I am distinctly ‘less Asian’ than them in certain ways which I see as being good and bad. My sister is younger than me, and in some ways I am ‘more’ Asian than she is because when I was young, London was still the family base, but as my sister grew up, our family was scattered a little more. By this I mean, I’m bilingual, but she isn’t really; some of my ideas about family – ideas that I myself am constantly challenging – are slightly more ‘traditional’ than hers; our music tastes are different from our ‘city’ cousins. (That seems like a weird thing to point out but: British Asians love R&B. They love that bass, and it fuses pretty well with modern desi music. They are not likely to endorse folk music in quite the same way. My sister and I have pretty diverse tastes in that way, and I think you can link it back to the fact that we grew up in the Fen, and our cousins grew up in the city before moving out.) My point is, the further you move from the Little Countries, the more ‘British’ you become, in the sense that you become less of an outsider. Visually you are an outsider; often you can’t hide that. But I’m not. My sister is not. My parents are not. People don’t talk to us and think of us as being not British. We aren’t outsiders; we’re part of the local community. We speak English the same way other Deepingers speak English; we have the same local concerns; we dress the same. BUT. We also speak Gujarati. We cook Indian food. We listen to Bollywood soundtracks and we wear saris when we go to weddings. Our family values are a mix of Orthodox and liberal values. We are blatantly less racist than the rest of our family. (I was going to suggest that there are comparisons between our household and my cousin’s in Nb., but there are slightly different class issues there. They, too, grew up outside London, but I’d say that V and P are ‘more Asian’ than my sister and I for a handful of reasons. Mostly, I think because their parents integrated differently into society. My aunt has Very Traditional ideas in some ways – woman should stay at home, raise kids – but they have different fiscal issues to us. That is to say, my aunt can afford to make that kind of decision, whilst my mum can’t.) The difficult part, though, is definitely ‘how much do you give up?’ because I sometimes lament my inability to connect with other British Asians (mostly City born). I just don’t think about the world in the same way that they do.

I have meandered somewhat from my point which is that I feel like the ghettos contribute hugely to the social divide. It’s not just a case of coming to the country and finding your own people, but about being visibly segregated from the wider community, and not mixing. If you’re segregated, you’re not sharing; if you’re not sharing, there is unconscious fear there, fear of the unknown. The more you know a person, the better you are able to judge them (in theory); the less you are likely to make generalised statements. The ghetto is by no means the only problem – society naturally breaks into groups, its part of human nature to establish ourselves that way. There’d always be something to fight over. But in discussing immigration (I refuse to call it a problem because I think that’s a case of only looking at it from one perspective), or issues that ‘the British population’ have with immigration, a lot of those issues are made and promulgated by the population itself as a direct result of social fear. You want what’s yours, you feel threatened by the outsider, and it makes you paranoid. Bluntly: it makes you stupid. It’s not easy to control your preconceptions – I try very hard, and I find that even in testing my assumptions, I’m making other generalisations – but I think it’s worth doing. It’s worth listening to yourself and recognising how you categorise people. It’s worth recognising how you perpetuate negative stereotypes. Even when you do realise that you’re being prejudiced, I think there’s a certain amount of leeway you can give yourself if you then decide to do something about it. And it’s not about you telling others what to do: it’s self-regulation, leading by example.

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This has become so tangential. I’m going to watch the rest of it now.

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The weirdest part of this documentary – after the fact that Peterborough of all places is being televised (‘I know that street! I WALK THERE ALL THE TIME!’ &c. &c.) - is the manner in which the opening ‘pull quotes’ all made the Pboro locals look like racists, whilst the show itself is actually more careful than that. On top of that, it’s bringing up issues like the lack of workers in Poland. So. I don’t know what my overall opinion is.

Also, the documentary in no way fully discusses what is a big issue all over this flipping country: exploitation of immigrants – gang masters and workers, the demand for lower prices at ridiculous wages. It only just brushes the indecency of the housing issues, and the work hours sans break, but nothing really about the kind of work that some of the immigrants fall into, or the dangerous situations that can occur. The presenter says that “those here are earning £7 an hour, far more with overtime,” but not a word about the gang workers who make people fight for wages, or the conditions they live in. In Bourne alone I’m pretty certain some of the factories are stocked full of illegal Portuguese. But the documentary hasn’t touched that at all, which is disappointing.

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The documentary ends with the point I started with: the immigrants have a work ethic. They’re willing to do these jobs. You know, I never even considered it, and if I did, The Dad would say I was over-qualified for it, that I should leave it.

Is it that the immigrants are taking the jobs? Or is it that the jobs on offer don’t appeal? Or is it – quite simply – laziness? (There’s the rub.)

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A shallow, personal gripe: the Fen is not ‘mournful’! Greenery does not immediately a pretty land make! Fen earth is rich and deep, and it produces more of the agricultural wealth of the country. Not only that, but if you’re going to look at a field at any time that isn’t summer, of course all you’re going to see is the soil, you dumbass. IT’S SOIL COUNTRY. Lols.

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By the by! I read the budget. Some of it is good – alcohol taxation, cigarette taxation, road levies. Some of it is baffling. 70,000 affordable homes per year.

SEVENTY-THOUSAND.

One day we won’t be a country anymore. It’ll be the City of Britain. You cannot – you cannot – keep eradicating the farms. Eventually that is going to bite you in the ass.

And this is the reason why it’s a bad idea for me to tune into the news. (a) I get angry and (b) I get paranoid in what would be considered a fairly perplexing manner.

Comments

[hestia8.livejournal.com]

“Market Deeping.”

HAHAHAHA. OH DEEPING, HOW I LOVE YOU. Considering the size of the place that bloke probably knows my dad.

>>>Places with Market in the name always deserve love. Just because.

And this in itself is interesting – are they saying Lithuania because of national pride, because they presume (probably correctly) that the interviewer won’t have heard of their home town, or some other reason? Because if you asked me where I was from, I’d say London. (NB: it has occurred to me that this may be a London thing, hahaha)

But yeah, in general, it’s an interesting documentary so far, especially in terms of the willingness of these immigrants to work hard. That’s what The Dad says whenever we talk about it: they have a solid work ethic.

>>> Yes! And I wish I’d watched this show now. Because that’s the point – they’re coming over and doing the jobs that British people *won’t* do (I only saw the bit with the guy in the trailer, where he says he’d rather sign on). So frankly, British people, shut up. (that’s a mature way of making my point, non?)

Because I sincerely believe that immigrants are important to the British economy and to British culture in general, whilst I feel like a lot of Pboro locals are more disgruntled with appearances rather than actual core issues like health, education, fair working rights.

>>> I think that’s a massive part of the problem with the country and the world in general – it’s enough to *look like* you’re doing something about Problem X.

So what you get is whole communities living together, but segregated, like in London. So you’ll have Polish people, Portuguese people, Muslim Iraqis, African Muslims, Indians, Pakistanis living in their areas, not overlapping.

>>> Oddly enough, my Dad has been saying this for years (he’s very hard to fathom sometimes). And actually, he’s one of the less racist (which is a bit of a contradiction, I realise – like being a bit pregnant) men of his age I know – our next door neighbour was actually racially abusive to some people (I think they were African, can’t remember) who came to look at the house next door to him, and my Dad’s mate who is a cab driver isn’t shy about informing the world that he doesn’t like black people. Perhaps not so much ‘less racist’ as ‘less prone to being a complete bastard to people for no reason’.

So what happens when you need to explain to a doctor that your child is ill? How does your child receive an education in a school which cannot teach him/her in their own language? How do you make a police report if you can’t explain the crime committed against you? It’s not easy in the least. But it’s the first step. Get out of that ghetto.

>>> Dear used to know a bunch of Brazilians because of the fuckwit, and a good few of the male ones had wives who were if not banned then actively discouraged from learning English, leaving them entirely dependent on their husbands (to the point of not being able to go shopping).

We speak English the same way other Deepingers speak English; we have the same local concerns; we dress the same. BUT. We also speak Gujarati.

>>> *waves random flag of I make Gujurati O Level*

Bluntly: it makes you stupid. It’s not easy to control your preconceptions – I try very hard, and I find that even in testing my assumptions, I’m making other generalisations – but I think it’s worth doing. It’s worth listening to yourself and recognising how you categorise people. It’s worth recognising how you perpetuate negative stereotypes. Even when you do realise that you’re being prejudiced, I think there’s a certain amount of leeway you can give yourself if you then decide to do something about it. And it’s not about you telling others what to do: it’s self-regulation, leading by example.

>>> Absolutely. And far from being tl;dr, this was a very interesting post :)

One day we won’t be a country anymore. It’ll be the City of Britain. You cannot – you cannot – keep eradicating the farms. Eventually that is going to bite you in the ass.

>>> Have you ever seen 8 houses go up on a patch of land previously occupied by one tiny Methodist church? Trust me, they won’t take up that much space. And it’s not a new thing, anyway… and most will be in the south-east, I’m sure.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

(Apologies for the delay in commenting - I'm finally catching up on LJ 'admin'.)

are they saying Lithuania because of national pride, because they presume (probably correctly) that the interviewer won’t have heard of their home town, or some other reason?
I think it's more that the question implied which country had they come from. I mean, if someone asks me where I'm from I'll say South Lincs. because no-one knows Deeping. But a lot of the time people are asking about my ethnic origins, so I'll answer that my family is from India by way of Kenya.

(I only saw the bit with the guy in the trailer, where he says he’d rather sign on).
The teaser was SO WEIRD because the show overturned most of what the teaser was implying.

Perhaps not so much ‘less racist’ as ‘less prone to being a complete bastard to people for no reason’.
No, I think there are degrees of racism in the way that you're describing. (My parents are covertly racist for example. They hold certain views but they don't necessarily broadcast them.)

and a good few of the male ones had wives who were if not banned then actively discouraged from learning English, leaving them entirely dependent on their husbands
Exactly - because as much as some immigrants want the fiscal benefits of living in the West, they don't want the cultural significance. In my family it's more that the women never really had to learn in some cases because they were housewives and their husbands did all the English interactions. But, again, easier for Indians because you have Indian-owned stores, and all of my aunts live in areas where there are loads of other Indians. This is why my grandfather spoke passable English whilst my grandmother still can't. (In her defence, coming to England was her second migration; she's fluent in Gujurati, Hindi, Punjabi and Swahili. So.)

Have you ever seen 8 houses go up on a patch of land previously occupied by one tiny Methodist church?
Well, that's half my issue with it. I guess because I've always lived in a place where there's been a bit of a gap between houses it irks me in a different way. For example: estates freak me out. All that living in proximity! Aie.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

(Late reply! Sorry!)

Anyway - omg longest post ever!
! I know, sorry! I just... LOTS to say!

It's not something that I do consciously and it's not that I put myself in a 'social' ghetto
It's not even a bad thing. I mean, who are you going to make friends with? People with whom you have things in common, people with whom you share values. It makes sense. But a cultural community and a physical community work differently. In the former you're not being hampered by your associations; in fact, in a cultural community, you're maintaining your cultural identity in a healthy way. It's not a bad thing at all. But a physical community can be damaging because it's not just culture maintenance - it's inflexibility towards the 'host' culture.

I, personally, would like to have more desi friends because I miss that cultural community. The problem is that whilst I share some of that cultural identity, I also have a pretty Western/white/whatever you want to call it take on things which means that I spend a lot of time listening to people talk and then mentally disagreeing with them! So, that's poor on my part. (I went to a couple of socials arranged by university clubs - Hindu Society, Asian Society - and whilst I met a couple of people there, nearly all of them were in the typical subject arenas: business, accountancy, medicine &c. A lot of them were giving me attitude for being an Indian doing a humanities subject! I went to a lot of the meetings and socials in the first year but I found it really tiring because I was having to make such an effort and I was getting so little in return. It wasn't that they weren't nice people, just that I didn't fit in with them. I facebook with the few that I got along with but other than that all my friends are white. Not English, mostly European; I have more diversity in my friends back in Whitesville, lol. I think this is because of the type of people who take English/literature as a subject - I just haven't seen many coloured people on my course.) In short: it's not a bad thing, and you will tend to gravitate towards people who you have things in common with. :)