Migration, Belonging and Finding Home
This week, I headed “home” to a place I had never visited before: I flew to Southern California to spend some time with an old friend, to catch up and (as it happens) help her move home.
Something shifts inside me when I fly back to the US – the country of my birth, and first nationality. Despite having lived there for a minority of years, and not at all for over two decades, something loosens in my chest when I arrive.
I feel more comfortable, more confident and more like I belong.
I feel like I take up space less apologetically, and if something happens, that I have more of a call on government, the public, the police who are supposed to protect me – than I do elsewhere.
I feel that way despite not actually knowing as much about how things work in the US as I do in the UK, where I have raised my family and learned my profession.
I feel like I matter more here in the US. But why?
What makes us belong?
Have you ever stopped to think about your own nationality and the reasons why you belong in the place where you live?
If you are a migrant, whether recent or distant, or if you have suffered racial or cultural discrimination in your home, you might have asked yourself this, and you might even have an answer. Migrants and racialised people are accustomed to being told to “go back home” and if you think you are home, that is cause for reflection.
But my experience lecturing on the subject of migration and nationality for many, many years is that most people who are from groups that are racially and culturally dominant in their home area, cannot answer this question.
They enjoy a kind of privileged belonging that is most often invisible to them, until their assumptions are challenged – for example, when that sense of belonging is denied, or when someone they know is denied that privilege.
Nationality and belonging
Most people have at least one nationality, meaning they are recognised as a citizen of at least one sovereign state (or nation), although some people are born, or become, stateless.
Each country has sovereign control over the rules that they apply in order to determine citizenship of their state, and by and large, no state has the right to tell other states how these rules should work.
The (very silly) example I give here: if Scotland were a sovereign nation and the government were to determine that anyone can be a Scottish citizen if they drink a can of Irn-Bru and declare their allegiance to the hairy haggis, then this is a legitimate form of nationality law and Scotland is entitled to confer citizenship according to these rules.
More seriously, there are a few common ways in which countries normally confer nationality and they are:
- Jus soli – a right by birth on the soil: for example, I am an American citizen because I was born in the United States
- Jus sanguinis – a right by blood (or descent): for example, my children are American citizens because they are descended from me, and American citizen – despite the fact that they were not born in the US and might never travel there
- Jus matrimonii – a right by marriage: this one is uncommon in modern times, but in some places, a woman would automatically lose her nationality of birth and gain the nationality of her husband, on marriage
- Naturalisation – a privilege (not a right) conferred by states in certain circumstances, which permits people to apply for citizenship if they meet certain rules. For example, I am a naturalised British citizen.
Who decides? And what does that mean for the rest of us?
However – and this is really important – there is no fixed list of routes to nationality, and countries change these rules all the time. The decision to rule in, and rule out, citizenship for people with a connection to a country is very much a political decision, influenced by history, economics, cultural values and so on.
In a democracy, we decide. And yet most people remain unaware of the immigration and nationality rules of their country, and what that means for the people living around them, and their communities.
For example, in the UK, the government has stripped Shemima Begum, a British-born person, of her citizenship and despite the recent change in political leadership shows no signs of reversing that decision, even in the face of compelling evidence that she has been a victim of grooming and child trafficking.
Closer to home (for me), I have written previously about my own journey as a migrant to the UK, including the painful reality that despite being “good migrant,” I am not able to apply for my aging mother to live with us in the UK – despite the fact that she was once a British citizen herself, having been born in Macau (a Portuguese colony) and raised in Hong Kong (a British colony).
Her citizenship was stripped by a political act, the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts 1962 and 1968 – these acts were passed to prevent migration of black and brown people from the former colonies in Asia and Africa, following decolonisation in the 1960s.
Home is a feeling: belonging
Over the years, people have asked me “where is home?” and they mean very different things by that question, when they ask it.
Because I am a racialised person, people who do not know me well usually want to know what Asian country my ancestors might be from. I’m still a bit sensitive about being asked this, but I’m getting over it.
People who know me better, or who have had an opportunity to take in my accent – which is a sort of transatlantic Scottish/American twang – might recognise that I sit between countries, and nationalities, and could be asking a deeply coded question about belonging.
I usually say: home is where you feel you belong. Home is the people I love. Home can be more than one place.
Reflecting on what I’ve written above, the truth is that I don’t have a definitive answer myself. Just a hope that by educating each other, and talking about the harm that barriers, borders and exclusion cause people – we can do better.
If, in a democracy, we decide, then perhaps there is a piece of work for us to do: rethinking our nationality rules so they truly reflect that kind of belonging that we feel people in our communities deserve.
Need some inspiration? 🤔
Jackie Kay was the Makar (national poet) of Scotland from 2016 to 2021.
Read Threshold 🚪a wonderful poem about belonging and Scottishness, which reminds us:
Our strength is our difference. Dinny fear it. Dinny caw canny.
You can also listen to her read it here.
First published on LinkedIn on 9 August 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/migration-belonging-finding-home-jen-ang-ho18e/
