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Having lived in the United Kingdom for over 40 years, I saw wave after wave of immigration from Asia, mainly India and Pakistan in the early days, followed by Europeans coming as the barriers for movement within Europe were relaxed and new member countries entered into the European Union, often facilitated by new innovations in cheap travel and vastly improved communications, and information resources available through internet developments.
In the UK I had several Asian friends, partly through the oddity that we used the same swimming pool and sauna at the same times and days, and I had other friends from ethnic minority groups, mainly through the fact that I made the effort to speak to people I saw often or passed on a regular basis.
The British government at some stage realised that it was necessary to do something to help these people integrate into society, of course much too late, but at least it was something.
So by the late 90’s, I could pass by immigrants who had access to resources in education, the health service, and the welfare and benefits systems, but by enlarge they still kept all their life activities within their own families and ethnic groupings. Probably the exception was in the workplace where through racial discrimination legislation different groups were forced to mingle and liaise, whether through working together or through a business to customer interface.
Fine, but the integration plans just never succeeded, and with certain ethnic groups the barriers to friendship grew instead of shrinking, partly through traits and trends in crime attribution and sociability issues, and also partly through the fact that many UK taxpayers perceived the immigrants as actually having better resources and benefits than they themselves had and were paying for, as well as new legislation to protect them from any unpleasant life experiences which in itself was perceived as racism.
Whether these are valid issues that hamper social integration is not really the issue here. The issue is that given equality in every respect, is it really possible to coerce people to come together as one race?
By the early part of the new millennium, politicians were becoming openly more concerned about the issues or integration, or rather ‘non integration’, and what is obvious to me now but was just a suspicion at the time, is that they really don’t understand the complexity of the issues and the difficulty involved, probably through having never been in the same situation themselves and certainly through not asking the people being asked to integrate about the difficulties. Moreover, politicians want integration to happen for different reasons than if the people want it to happen, namely in that it reduces social problems, government expenditure at local and national levels, unemployment and crime, and that’s just for starters.
OK, so now it’s happened to me, and the shoe is on the other foot.
In 2003 I went to live on Madeira Island, part of Portugal, a few hundred miles of the west coast of Morocco, isolated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I have not lived there all the time, and so I have still had plenty of time with my own people.
Now the difference between me and the situation I have already described is quite different, as I knew I would be pretty much alone, living in a small town (about 5,000 people) with very few of them able to speak any English … my one and only language skill. There would be a few English speaking expats, who might pressure a friendship on you under the umbrella of ‘us and them’ and the ‘we Brits stick together’ syndromes, when you probably wouldn’t normally have anything to do with them even if they lived next door back home.
You can easily identify them, as when talking about anything to do with the Madeira, they refer to ‘them’ rather than ‘we’, and generally they complain frequently about the Portuguese language, the Madeiran way of driving, and the fact they can’t get certain products they used to get in their previous lives, and for sure they are not going to try and learn to speak Portuguese. It is not my intention to be disrespectful to these people, as they have made their own choices, as they have every right to do.
So I made a conscious decision to integrate, followed by an enormous effort to do so, starting with learning to speak Portuguese. It’s probably the hardest thing I have ever tried to learn in my life, and long after those initial encouraging comments like ‘it takes 10 years to learn’ and ‘you will never speak like a Madeiran’, I still don’t speak the language very well and I am now realising that those comments were absolutely spot on. However, I will add that I am learning and progressing very slowly, and am able to have some mostly one way conversations with the locals, and I can feel some friendships blossoming, partly thanks to that great leveller called ‘football’, having ditched my English allegiances for clubs at both club and national levels. My website at madeira 4u will tell you some of the difficulties us Portuguese students face.
Unlike the British Government (albeit for selfish reasons) the Madeiran government does nothing to encourage the mere existence of foreigners on its soil, other than to spend money and pay tax. Aside from its EU obligations that it cannot escape undetected, it provides nothing special for foreigners whatsoever. We don’t have our gas bills available in 22 languages; we have to struggle to do our tax returns with requests for help ignored (which is a good reason why many of the immigrants living on Madeira have never filed a tax return). We don’t get schooling laid on to help us learn the language, we don’t get offered jobs because the Madeiran employers only employ their own kind, and if there are any racial discrimination laws nobody here is aware of them.
The people of Madeira are mostly kind and friendly, and I can walk around any time of day or night knowing I am safe, and should I suffer a heart attack on the street someone will arrive very quickly to help me. The Madeirans by enlarge are deeply catholic with many regular church goers; however, like all religions, the rules are there to guide other people and rarely apply to oneself. The trouble with being a foreigner is that it does imply a certain financial affluence whether it’s true or not, and it is rather sad that some shops, bars, taxis, hotels and other businesses will see you as a tourist, ready to be short measured, overcharged, and underchanged.
Even the mosquitoes prefer my white soft skin to that of the locals, whilst normally quiet dogs who let locals past without bother, bark at me from one end of the street to another, and even the stray cats I feed run a mile if I get too close.
I now accept that I can never fully integrate into the society that I choose to live amongst, but I can keep trying to make inroads if I make the effort, and that takes me back to the beginning of this account, reinforcing my now firm belief that if you cannot integrate people who want to integrate, what chance do you stand with those who show no interest in blending into the alien society in which they live. Add to that the point that in most societies it would be near impossible to get two different cultures to a point where they could say they had equality in all respects, as religion, political bias, and personal and family beliefs, to name just a few, are huge stumbling blocks.
And maybe even more relevant is the fact that you can’t teach or force a feeling of trust and respect on someone, when they have difficulty trusting and respecting those around them, and that’s exactly what a culture barrier does.
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