Immigrants are Coming to Get What We Stole

They’re not coming for your jobs they are coming to retrieve what colonialism looted.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I am an immigrant.

I am also a white immigrant with a colonialistic heritage. I was born into an upper-middle-class white family during the apartheid era in South Africa.

My father was born in England and came to South Africa with his parents when he was seventeen to flee the economic fallout of Britain after the Second World War. My mother, her parents, and her grandparents were all born in South Africa but their heritage is British and Irish.

I was born into extreme privilege.

Not into extreme wealth, my parents came from nothing and my father’s work ethic elevated us to upper-middle-class, but the prevalence of white privilege in the southern African country gave him endless opportunities to do so.

I wanted for nothing as a child. I moved into my childhood home at three months of age and left when I was twenty-one. Christmases and birthdays brought mountains of gifts, my school uniforms and supplies were all new, and when I turned eighteen I inherited my grandfather’s old 1978 Ford Escort. It was peanut brown, automatic, and only had three gears but it went and gave me a whole new level of independence.

I was also raised racist.

White South Africans were around twenty percent of the population and yet controlled the entire country and all industries within.

Black South Africans numbered more than triple that but had no rights whatsoever. Under the apartheid regime, they weren’t allowed to vote, had no access to positions of power in any company or institution, were controlled by curfews, and had to carry a ‘dompas’, identification papers that restricted movement in certain areas.

Dompas is Afrikaans for “stupid pass” and was akin to an interior passport. Even as I type this I am ashamed of my heritage and history.

Basically, Black South Africans were paid slave labour — and I’m using the term “paid” liberally.

I knew nothing of this for multiple reasons. Firstly, it was not considered wrong and therefore there was no need to educate white folks of the atrocities and brutality of the system. Secondly, even if someone had informed me, I wouldn’t have been interested in the conversation.

I repeat: I was raised racist.

I moved to New Zealand in 2003 and my mindset was much the same, waning slightly as I headed to Australia in 2007.

In 2013, however, I got a part-time job with an Aboriginal agency focussed on connecting Aboriginal children in foster care with their family members and histories.

It was here that I began to learn.

It was here that I engaged with the “stolen generation” of Australia’s British-governed racist system. It was here that I looked into the eyes of people still hurting from the past as well as the present. It was here that I began to grasp the abhorrent behaviour of my people, of those white privileged colonialists that went before me.

It was here that I woke up one morning with a deep understanding of the ridiculousness of racism. There’s no other way I can describe it — I woke up knowing with every fibre of my being that it was wrong.

I went from grasping the concept to not getting it in twenty-four hours.

This didn’t make me better than anyone else but it sure as hell made me better than I was before.

I still, however, did not realize how deep my privilege went.

My white privilege made it easier for me to get residency in New Zealand and made it easier to move to Australia. My white privilege helped me get jobs, a car loan with no credit history, and a rental with only a temporary job to prove my income.

Did I know that then? Hell no!

Do I know that now? Hell yes!

I tried to move to the US in late 2017 and I have been trying to get residency in Canada since 2019. I have not, however, managed to get permanent residence in either country. Whilst my white privilege has enabled me to travel in and out of Canada without much fuss, it has not helped me thus far to get a work visa.

Am I bitter? Hell no.

I am well aware of the history of my people and I am also very well aware that I have benefitted quite nicely from my white privilege to this point.

Currently, in Canada, most of the visas being processed are for refugees. I support this.

As a white English speaker, I often get overlooked by people around me as they lament about “all the immigrants they are letting into this country.” From time to time, someone will remember that I, too, am an immigrant trying to get into this country but I am an exception to their rules.

I’m not black or brown and I don’t wear a hijab on my head, therefore, I’m one of the good ones.

Whilst this piece is not about my particular struggle, I thought a little context would be helpful.

Now for a brief history of colonialism according to the gospel of Vanessa.

Britain decided many centuries ago to wander around the world decrying “mine, mine, mine, mine” (akin to the seagulls in Finding Nemo) as they swept through India to take control of the spice trade, Hong Kong to join the opium wars, Australia to put their prisoners somewhere — God forbid those dirty bastards sullied the same land as the royal family, and Africa to take control of the gold, ivory, diamond, cotton, rubber, and coal industries.

If all of that wasn’t enough, they decided that moving into the seemingly wealthy lands of North America and slaughtering the natives was also a stellar idea. Not satisfied with their current state of wealth, the Brits then headed towards the Caribbean in an attempt to monopolize the sugar market, effectively trying to cover all their global bases on how much trade they could control.

Spain and Portugal also got in on the African action and took control of Central and South America as they competed in the Western European need for greed. France did their bit as did the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Italy in their collective desire to take what was not theirs.

Whilst the Scandinavian countries were not as “successful” in taking what was not theirs, they gave colonization a good effort as they invaded Iceland, Greenland, parts of Africa and the Caribbean.

All of these countries have accumulated great wealth based on their brutal invasions of territory that was never theirs to begin with.

Colonialism is still active, though not as overtly.

A Canadian-based oil and gas company is currently trying to destroy one of the most pristine areas left in this world, the Okavanga Basin, and because of their vast fortunes amassed in the wake of colonization, they have the resources to do so. There is currently an outcry against the effort and so all operations have been put on hold.

Whilst I love the Great White North, they do not have the right to destroy another.

The Commonwealth, “an international association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire from which it developed” [Wikipedia], enables rich countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to get even richer as they benefit from the discounts the association brings and allows these countries to be first in line to exploit the poorer countries in the Commonwealth.

Sounds like colonialism to me. Doesn’t it sound like that to you?

In summary, Western Europe and the developed countries taken over by the white wealthy descendants of colonization are rich because they ran around the world playing “mine, mine, mine,” and now their citizens are pissy because the people they stole from are coming for what’s owed them.

These immigrants that are trying so desperately to move into Western countries are not coming for your jobs, your money, your freedom, they are coming to collect what we stole from them.

There is no doubt in my mind that the “shithole countries” that many like to disparage would be wealthier than Western countries had they been allowed to just “keep calm and carry on”.

Most of the world’s reserves of almost anything valuable are located in countries outside of Western Europe and yet the descendants of this part of the world have benefitted the most from excavating them.

It is for these reasons that I have no right to be bitter that I haven’t managed to claim residence in the places where I feel most at home. It is for these reasons that I hope Canada continues to have one of the most active immigration systems in the world.

I just wish that residents of white Western developed nations would realize that immigrants are only trying to benefit from what colonialism stole.

Please feel free to buy me a coffee if you like what you read.