Immigration – History’s Forgotten Story

Immigration is rarely out of the headlines now it has become it has become a political hot potato. You would be forgiven for imagining this is something unique to the modern world. Often, those who are on principle opposed to immigration are woefully unaware of the real facts.

Take for example my own country – The UK. You can eavesdrop a conversation in a post office or shop of how immigrants are changing the character of the country. There are strange foods in the shops. There are people for whom English is a foreign language. Even the sound of the music seems unusual. Because this all seems inescapable and perhaps alien to a lot of people, it can lead to tension and a general feeling of ‘foreignness’ among native populations.

But this is to misunderstand what makes a culture. A lot of what makes the ‘British’ lifestyle are actually the outcome of historical waves of immigrants.

Even our mother tongue, for example, is comprised of traditions that those who have settled here have brought with them.

We have been an outpost of the Roman Empire, conquered by the Germanic peoples, the subject of onslaught by the Danes, pilloried by the French. Each of these conquests created a hodge-podge of languages as the new overlords gradually knitted into the existing fabric of society. In any given sentence, we throw away mix Romance and Germanic languages with barely a thought. Our mother tongue is the outcome of a confusing tumble of sources.

And it doesn’t stop with language. With every coin you throw into a wishing well, you are replicating the bronze sacrifices that the Saxons used to make to their gods in streams and pools. If you have ever tooled along the A1 you are following tracks laid down by the Romans.

Our system and principle of law, venerable old titles and customs and towns are the inevitable outcome of often uneasy mixes of tradition that have become as one only with the passing of time.

In more recent times, our swaggering era of global dominion saw huge movements of people as our influence straddled continents – creating displaced communities all over the country. From freed slaves from Africa, to those fleeing wars on the borders of Empire Britain became ever more diverse.
Today all we are seeing is something that has been going on for thousands of years.

While some people will always cavil at a glimpse of a burqa or jilbab or the sound of a foreign tongue in the local market, this has been happening long before we arrived on the scene. Eventually, immigrants become part of the cultural warp and weft of the country in such a way that their presence won’t even be remarked upon. At which point, they too will be writing to the paper to express their outrage at the flood of immigrants from Jupiter.