Migrative

At the start of this year, my aunt died.  A couple of months previously she had celebrated her one hundredth birthday.  I did not know her well because she lived most of her life in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan.  I first met her in my mid-teens when she returned to the Britain for a visit, her first trip back in thirty years.  In her seventies and eighties, she returned a few times to see old friends and to visit her sister, who is my mother.  I remember her sense of humour, for example, asking advice of my daughter, then in her early teens, on whether she should get a navel-piercing or a tattoo to celebrate her ninetieth birthday.  She told us some entertaining stories about her escapades in London in the 1930s.  It turns out that young women in her day used similar tricks to charm their way into bars and get drinks bought for them when underage as they do nowadays.  In the early 1940s she met, fell in love with, and married a Canadian soldier, who was later injured fighting in Italy.  At the end of the war, she emigrated from her home in South London to Canada, disembarking the boat at Halifax and moving to Rouleau and later Moose Jaw, where she spent most of her life, and finally, five years ago, to a retirement home in Medicine Hat.

Last week, as I was walking along the main road that runs south from Borough Market, I saw a blue plaque fixed to the wall, memorialising the birthplace of John Harvard.  Like my aunt, he travelled from Southwark to North America, although he went three hundred years before her, and not as a war-bride but as a minister of religion.  Unlike my aunt, he died young, aged thirty-one and is mostly remembered now because in his will he left some books and a few pounds to establish a small college in Massachusetts. 

Audrey and John were just two among many British people who departed their home country to live and work elsewhere.  For various reasons the British refer to such people as expatriates rather than emigrants, whereas those who move from elsewhere to Britain are always referred to as immigrants rather than inpatriates.  (In Ireland, they are called ‘blow-ins’, a term which cleverly bundles together the concept of inbound settlement with a strong sense of the prevailing weather conditions).  Describing those who leave and those who arrive using different terminology, suggestive of varying evaluative stance towards them, reminds me of the quip made by a former prime minister of New Zealand, Robert Muldoon.  He was asked for his views about New Zealanders emigrating to Australia and replied that it was a good thing, since it raised the average IQ of both nations.  That remark perfectly summarises the British view. 

Britain has been exporting people for hundreds of years.  Many went to North America, others to southern and eastern Africa, the Indian sub-continent, Australia, and New Zealand.  We sent people to lands where we wanted to establish trading relationships, preferably on terms that worked in our favour, and to lands that we considered to be empty, that is, available for our people to occupy and make use of for themselves.  We either pretended that there were no pre-existing residents (terra nullius, isthe Latin legal term), or that since the pre-existing residents did not have a documented system of land ownership that resembled ours, they would not possibly object to us introducing our own.  These are purely post-hoc justifications for the forcible occupation of other people’s land (what contemporary Israeli settlers refer to as “the facts on the ground”).  Such colonialism is nowadays regarded as indefensible among most thoughtful people.  The interesting question is why it was ever considered acceptable, not least because those most intimately involved in the process would have always known, at first hand, the true scale of the costs, measured in human suffering, of their actions.  

Britain is not alone in having a colonial past.  Two to three thousand years ago, the Greeks established colonies all around the Mediterranean.  Many of the early Greek philosophers lived in cities located in what is now Turkey, and many Greeks remained until the 1920s, when they were encouraged or forced to move, in the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  The Romans created a vast empire, with self-governing provinces under their military control.  If Virgil’s account in The Aeneid is to be believed, Rome itself was a colony founded by exiled Trojans, themselves displaced by Greek adventurism.  While my knowledge about Asia is more limited, I understand that the Chinese have long engaged in colonial expansion, and so too, more recently, the Japanese. 

Five hundred years ago, the Iberian nations sent troops and priests to Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean, carrying with them a range of illnesses, notably smallpox, that wreaked destruction on the native populations.  I have recently seen scholarly estimates that in 1500, the population of Mesoamerica was twenty million, double that of Spain and Portugal combined, which is why the Aztecs were easily able to resist European attempts at invasion.  However, as a contemporary religious author observed, when “the Christians were exhausted from war God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox”.  It is thought that the ‘Indian’ population fell to around two million by the 1570s, and to below one million by the 1620s.  Not quite terra nullius, but near enough to make no difference.   (Question: if decimation is the killing of one tenth, what is the technical term for a disease that kills nine tenths?)  The story in North America is similar.  European apologists for colonialism might like to talk about superior intelligence, higher productivity, better land ownership systems, and manifest destiny, but the reality is that the Europeans triumphed primarily through the spread of viruses to which they had already acquired some immunity.

If colonialism was one of the principal spurs for migration, slavery was another.  Europeans were responsible for the involuntary migration of significant populations around the globe, shipping millions of Africans to the Americas and, once slavery was abolished, designing indentured labour contracts to entice hundreds of thousands of Indians to travel to southern Africa and the Caribbean.  There is a sound economic rationale for facilitating the movement of labour from places where there is a surplus to places where there is a deficit, but when the labourers are given little or no choice about their migration and are given few if any employment rights upon arrival, then the moral costs far outweigh the economic benefits.  Today in Britain, there is considerable popular opposition to the idea of allowing ‘voluntary economic migrants’ to enter the country.  It turns out that we lost our enthusiasm for the idea once the element of compulsion had been abandoned, and once the labour shortages occurred at home rather than elsewhere.

That the history of migration is full of terrible stories is not a reason to think that contemporary migration is similarly tainted.  On the contrary, to the extent that diseases, especially viruses, can be countered by the application of standard treatments, and to the extent that movement is voluntary and non-coercive, it is possible today to celebrate the migrative impulse as central to human flourishing.  Even for those of us who have not moved far – I live less than sixty kilometres from where I was born and grew up – the migrative behaviour of others enriches our lives.  When I think of my close friends and neighbours in Britain (n=40) I estimate that around sixty percent were born in Britain, but more than a third of that group are the children of immigrants; the remaining forty percent are people who have moved to Britain to live and work.  In other words, nearly two thirds are either first- or second-generation immigrants.   My sample might well not be representative, but its diversity certainly makes my life much more interesting than it would otherwise be.  (To be clear, I am not saying that I like my immigrant friends more than I like my British-born friends, rather I like the fact that I have a mixture of friends, who come from all over the world.) 

Some animals are instinctively migrative, for example the birds that fly south from Europe to Africa each northern autumn, returning the following spring.  For other animals, migration is imposed on them by their human owners, for example the nomadic pastoralists in Africa, or European farmers who practice transhumance.  I do not think humans are instinctively migrative, rather we differ amongst ourselves in our appetite for relocation.  There are, to borrow Elena Ferrante’s novel title, those who leave and those who stay.  Aside from a year living in Melbourne, I have been someone who has stayed, but I admire those who leave and arrive.  

Two other people I know died recently.  One, the wife of a close friend, came to London from Jamaica.  The other, the mother of one of my friends, came to London from Sierra Leone, via Arkansas.    They both departed the place where they had grown up and moved far away; for love and for work; much for the better, not for the worse; making successful new lives for themselves and their families; contributing significantly to the life of the country which became their new home; and without ever losing a sense of love for the place where they had been born.

I do not want to move away from London, and certainly not to live in the Canadian prairies as my aunt choose to do seventy-five years ago, but I know that she was happy in her life there.  I am sure that the friends she made in Saskatchewan were glad of her arrival, just as I am glad that so many of my friends, or their parents, were prepared to leave their homes and move to Britain.  Whether temporary or permanent, so long as it is voluntary, the migrative impulse can be a source of much human happiness.