On Becoming an Immigrant (again)

• On becoming an immigrant, I promise not to call everyone with a different skin colour to me ‘racist’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I promise not to denounce the country that has welcomed me within its borders as ‘institutionally racist’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not demand that I be described as the same nationality as the people who welcomed me into their country and denounce those who don’t as ‘racist’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not assume that the wealth and resources and housing and services of the country its native population have spent generations building belongs to me as much as they do to them.
• On becoming an immigrant, I promise not to be offended when someone from the country that has welcomed me within its borders describes me as an ‘immigrant’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not regard or describe the indigenous population staring at my racial differences to them as ‘micro-aggressions’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not denounce the fears of the native working-class population about how my presence might deduct from their already limited state support as a ‘far-Right’ myth.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not dismiss their suspicions about my motives for coming to their country as ‘xenophobic’.
• On becoming an immigrant, if I am lucky enough to live in a home built by the parents, grandparents and great-grand-parents of a working-class population that cannot afford to live in an equivalent home, I will not reduce their complaints at this expropriation of their labour to ‘racism’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will be aware of the hostility consequent upon the British Empire’s long history of colonialism, and not be surprised if the population of a former colony assumes I’m just another white person looking to make a killing from their land and labour.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not regard the occasional suspicious looks I get from those old enough to remember first-hand what the humiliation of living under British colonialism was like as anything other than what is to be expected and accepted without complaint.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will endeavour to learn the language, culture and ways of the people whose government has allowed me into their country.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not live in ghettos of Englishness and socialise only with people from my own country.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not bring up my children to regard the country that has welcomed them within its borders as responsible for all their failures as they grow into adults.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not demand funding from the country that has welcomed me within its borders to celebrate religious and cultural festivals from my own country.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not demand or attend divisive festivals with names like ‘White on the Square’ or ‘Lent Lights’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not demand that the religious and cultural festivals of the country that has welcomed me within its borders be renamed with bland euphemisms like ‘winter festival’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not complain that the celebration of these festivals by the indigenous population for hundreds or even thousands of years offends me and should therefore be banned.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not describe the rural areas of the country that has welcomed me within its borders as ‘racist’ because I’m too lazy to get off my arse and visit them.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not bray loudly to whoever will listen about all the wonderful things people of my race and ethnicity have brought to the country that has welcomed me within its borders.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will not walk around in the outfit of a Pearly King and call it my ‘national dress’.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will remember that, although the country that has welcomed me within its borders may one day grant me citizenship, neither I nor my children nor my children’s children will automatically become a national of that country.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will recognise and hopefully enjoy the fact that cultures are above all national in their history, formation, practices and borders, and that the theoretical concepts of US academics and their woke acolytes will — thankfully — never erase that.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will remember that everything said about the country that has welcomed me within its borders by the UK government, media and entertainment industry is 95 per cent lies intended to create hatred and division between the working classes of the two countries, justify the arrogance of the middle classes of both, and feed the wars of the international ruling class.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will remember that the attempt to erase national and local culture, identity and unity is a strategy of globalism, which is to say, a product of Western imperialism.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will remind myself that multiculturalism is a term for this process of erasure, in place of which globalism is substituting the monoculture of US consumerism and the colonialism of global financial markets.
• On becoming an immigrant, I will remember to be grateful that a country to which I have contributed nothing has opened its borders to me, and not be an ungrateful, arrogant, supercilious little shit.
• And because becoming an immigrant is difficult, confusing, frustrating and alienating, and therefore I will, possibly, do some of these things at some time, I promise not to make these occasions the norm or the basis of my identity as an immigrant.
• Born in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, this is the second, third, fourth or even fifth time I’ve become an immigrant, having previously lived in the Soviet Union, France, Australia and the United States of America.
• This time I’m living in Hong Kong, which is a special administrative region in the People’s Republic of China, to which it returned in 1997 after 155 years of a militarily-enforced occupation by the British Empire, the last such colony to throw off its yoke.

The question of whether Hong was ever a colony of the British Empire is a contested one. According to the UK, the ‘Treaty of Nanjing’, signed by the Qing dynasty in 1842 in response to the First Opium War, ceded Hong Kong Island in perpetuity, to which the ‘Beijing Convention’, signed in response to the Second Opium War annexed Kowloon in 1860, with the New Territories ‘leased’ for 99 years from 1898 under the ‘Convention between Great Britain and China respecting an extension of Hong Kong Territory’. It was this latter convention that determined the return of all three territories to China in 1997, after the UK, which saw no viable way to divide them, signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984.

For the People’s Republic of China, however, since the three treaties were imposed on China by military aggression, they should not be recognised as lawful. This was corroborated by the United Nations in 1972 when it adopted a resolution recommending that both Hong Kong and Macau be removed from the list of colonial territories to which the ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’ was applicable. For China, therefore, although the Territories were occupied by the British Empire and later the Commonwealth, neither held sovereignty over Hong Kong, only authority, which was returned to China. The Hong Kong handover ceremony of 1997, therefore, did not represent a transfer of sovereignty but only a transfer of government.

Such distinctions have assumed great importance to China in its determination to reunify its land. This includes, most immediately, the island of Taiwan, which, like Hong Kong, was ceded to Japan in 1895 after the defeat of the Qing Dynasty in the First Sino-Japanese War, but never returned to China after the defeat of Japan in 1945, as had been agreed to by the UK and USA in the Cairo Declaration of 1943. This is the context in which China has declared its intention to recover authority over Taiwan, and in which the USA is using it, as Mao Zedong observed in 1965, as it uses the State of Israel in the Middle East, and, since 2014, the Ukraine in Europe: as ‘bases of Imperialism’.

Simon Elmer