I am the immigration problem

It is 1989 or thereabouts. We have been in the country a few weeks. My mother is sitting opposite a man in a small room with a large desk - the headmaster of the local Grundschule - and she is trying to enrol me in his school, in a language she does not yet have, on behalf of a child who has even less of it. The man is being patient. He has met cases like ours before. He suggests, kindly, that perhaps the boy would do better at the Schule für ausländische Kinder, the school for foreign children, where there are teachers who speak Romanian and where the lessons are slower and the expectations softer.

My mother says no.

She says it in the broken, careful German of someone who is making the case of her life with a vocabulary the size of a postcard. The line she will repeat to me, years later, when I ask her why, is the line I have remembered ever since.

“If he goes to the foreigner school, he is always a foreigner. If he goes to the normal school, he becomes German.”

The headmaster looked sceptical. I looked terrified. My mother had survived a country, smuggled the remains of her life across two borders, and rebuilt the shape of a family from the ground up. She was not asking for permission. I went to the normal school the following Monday.

That is the moment - sitting in a chair next to her in that small office, understanding nothing of what was being said about me - that I would later identify as the actual start of my life. Everything before it belongs to a child in a different country. Everything after it belongs to the person I became, who is the person writing this.

I am, in the language of every newspaper I have read for the last ten years, an immigration problem.

I am the kind of immigration that Nigel Farage’s audience would rather did not exist, because I have the bad manners to be a counterexample. I arrived not speaking the language. I had no skills the country needed. My mother started from zero - whatever work would have her, a language built to humiliate adult learners, the slow manufacture of a second life out of almost nothing. The slogans imagine a certain kind of arrival: a boat, a lorry, a sudden mass of strangers coming over a horizon. Mine took the better part of two years, a marriage licence the state sat on, and a signature I had to beg for down a bad telephone line. It went like this:

It began on a beach. My mother took me to the Black Sea one summer, the two of us alone, to one of the coastal resorts where the regime corralled its Western tourists and their hard currency, and there she met Klaus - a West German spending his holiday cheaply in a poor country - and they got on. He kept coming back. In a free country two adults who got on would have sorted themselves out; in ours they applied to the government for permission to marry, and the government took more than a year to decide whether a Romanian woman might be allowed to marry a West German man. The permission came. My sister was born in Romania. Two or three days after the birth my mother and Klaus and the newborn folded themselves into the orange Opel Rekord and drove west out of the country, and I was left behind to come by a slower and more delicate route.

The route ran through my biological father. He had walked out when I was four and I had not seen him since: no visits, no letters, not one payment of the maintenance he owed. But the state, thorough to the last, required his consent before his son could so much as leave the country on a temporary visa, which was the only paper my grandparents could obtain to take me out. So one night I telephoned him, a small boy on a bad line, asking a stranger who happened to be my father to please let me go. He said yes. He had a price, which he put to my mother rather than to me: in return for his signature, she was to surrender for good any claim to the maintenance he had never paid in the first place. She surrendered it. On that particular night I was worth exactly the cancellation of a debt the man had no intention of settling.

My grandparents brought me out on the temporary visa, and then we did the thing the visa forbade, which is that I stayed. At the railway station Klaus said it plainly, you stay here, and my grandparents boarded the train without me and carried it home to a country I would never live in again. When they got back they were taken aside and questioned for some hours, by men who wanted to understand how a boy had left on a return ticket and not returned. The questioning frightened them and went nowhere. The men were, more or less, my father’s colleagues: he was Securitate, posted to the border-control section, a working part of the very machine built to keep people like us from leaving. The man who made me, and who had not spoken to me in five years, was the hand that signed me out.

Within six months I was fluent in German. Within a year I was indistinguishable from my classmates in everything except perhaps a slight accent, I dreamed in German, and made jokes in German that Klaus sometimes even laughed at . I was not, in those years, embarrassed about Romania. Romania in 1990 was the country that had shot its dictator on live television on Christmas Day; it was eastern and strange and faintly exotic, and my classmates were more curious than contemptuous. Being the Romanian boy was, if anything, a small distinction. The embarrassment came later, and from a direction the nine-year-old in that headmaster’s office could never have predicted.

This is the success story. This is what the system is supposed to deliver, when it works. I am exhibit A for the proposition that integration is possible. I am also exhibit A for what it actually costs to produce.

I will not romanticise the sink-or-swim. It was brutal. There is a particular loneliness that belongs to the first months in a language you do not have, and I do not wish it on anyone. You cannot tell a joke. You cannot be sarcastic. You cannot signal, with the small gestures of vocabulary, that you are clever or kind or scared. The personality you have built in your first language sits trapped behind the wall of the new one. The kids around you, mostly, are not cruel - children are remarkably adaptable when adults do not teach them to be otherwise - but you are a mystery to them, and they are a mystery to you, and the playground is a place where mysteries do not get patient explanations.

I remember Birol.

Birol was Turkish, my class, possibly the only kid in that room whose social position was lower than mine - which made him, by the inscrutable logic of the playground, my natural enemy. One break-time he called me a Polack. I knew the word perfectly well, and I knew what it was for, and the part that stung was the error. I was not Polish; I had no wish to be taken for Polish; and being filed under the wrong foreignness landed harder than being insulted for my own would have. So I called him a garlic eater, which I delivered badly, in my still-broken German, but which I meant with my whole heart. Consider the scene. A Turkish boy and a Romanian boy, the two lowest-ranked foreigners in a German playground, reaching for the sharpest stone each could find, and the sharpest stone was the other one’s nationality - a nationality neither of us could have placed on a map with any confidence, attached to a contempt neither of us had thought about for a single second before deploying it. Xenophobia does not check its facts. That is the comedy buried inside it, and it took me thirty years to laugh: the thing hates foreigners and is itself the most foreign thing in any room it enters, native to no country, fluent in every playground on earth.

We did not become friends that day. We became friends slowly, over the following year, mostly because we were both small and both OK at football and both, in our separate ways, foreigners.

I did not learn anything about integration from a government leaflet. I learned it from Birol, on the day we worked out that the playground had a hierarchy and we were both at the bottom of it, and the way out was sideways - through each other.

This is the part that immigration debates, on both sides, get wrong.

The anti-immigration side wants me not to exist, because I am proof that it can be done. They prefer the failed cases, because the failed cases are the argument. The pro-immigration side wants me to exist but not to talk too much, because if you ask me how it actually worked, I will start describing things they are uncomfortable demanding: linguistic adaptation, cultural accommodation, the acceptance of the local norms of the place that took you in. I will say, plainly, that I think my mother was right and the headmaster was wrong, and that the foreigner school would have been the kinder choice and also the wrong one.

I will say, plainer still, that the British system has now arranged itself to produce the failed cases on purpose.

If you set out to design a system whose output was failed integration, you could not do much better than what we have. You take people who arrive with nothing, you forbid them from working for years whilst their cases sit in a queue, you put them in hotels that are not their home in towns whose council had no warning, you block them from the language classes that are the one thing that would help them most, and then, after several years of enforced passivity, you express astonishment that they have not integrated. Read as policy failure, the system makes no sense. Read as policy success, designed to feed the argument that integration is impossible, it makes a great deal. The second reading is, I am afraid, the correct one.

I do not propose to write a treatise on this, because the treatises exist and are mostly ignored. The countries that do this well - Canada with private sponsorship, Denmark with a six-month processing window, the Netherlands with mandatory but supported integration from day one - are not state secrets. The evidence is boring, and the boring evidence is the problem, because nobody is selling adverts against it. You will not see a viral thread about Danish caseload management. You should, but you will not.

The slogans are doing the work the policies are not. Stop the boats is brilliant in the same way just do it is brilliant: it is a sentence whose meaning is entirely emotional. As a policy it is approximately as useful as stop the weather. As a slogan it does what slogans are designed to do, which is to bypass the part of the brain that would otherwise ask what, mechanically, anybody intends to do about anything.

I have stopped arguing with the slogans. They are not arguments. They are flags. You do not argue with a flag.

What I will say, because I am one of the few people in this conversation who has actually been the kind of person being argued about, is this. The system worked for my family because two things were true at once: the country we arrived in expected us to adapt, and we were prepared to do the adapting. Both halves were necessary. Take either half away and the success comes apart. Right now Britain has half a system. It has an expectation that immigrants will adapt, and it has constructed an environment that makes adaptation almost impossible. The result is the visible failure that fuels the next round of expectations that adaptation is impossible. Round and round.

Here is the direction the embarrassment came from, since I promised you it earlier. Somewhere in the last twenty years the word Romanian stopped meaning a person from Romania and started meaning, in the English tabloid ear, a category of petty crime. The smear was built by organised gangs who happen to carry Romanian passports - Roma, mostly, whose connection to the country on their documents is about as deep as a forger’s connection to the monarch whose signature he copies. Nineteen million Romanians inherited the reputation without committing the crimes, and the Roma themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom steal nothing from anybody, inherited it twice. Two separate peoples, libelled by one lazy noun. Try explaining that distinction to Nigel Farage. Try explaining it in the space a slogan allows, which is none. The distinction is true, and it matters, and it is exactly the kind of true, mattering distinction the machine is built to flatten, because the flattening is the product and the nuance does not fit on a poster.

Years from now, when this argument has been forgotten and a different one is being shouted about, I will still be the immigration problem. I am not going home. I do not have a home to go to. My German is my second mother tongue, my English is the language I work and dream and parent in, my Romanian is the language I phone my mother in, and the place I plan to be buried is a churchyard in Suffolk. I am, in every meaningful sense, fixed. I am exhibit A, and exhibit A is bored of being argued about.

I would like the slogans to lose interest in me, so I can get back to the route I actually take in the morning, which is downstairs, to the kitchen, to the kids, who have never once in their lives wondered whether their father is German enough or British enough or Romanian enough. They have wondered, on the other hand, whether there are Weetabix.

There are six in the cupboard. That is the only national headcount I am running today.