Expat, Immigrant, Migrant, Refugee, Alien

Perception and reality collide when people cross borders

This week I receive my renewed residence permit. Every two years I have to pay a large fee and reapply to live here in the Czech Republic. That is in addition to the taxes I dutifully pay.

I have to go through this song and dance every two years because I was not born here. Only in the country of my birth do I have a near absolute right to live and work. This is true for every one of us. We are citizens only of the country in which we were born, except on rare occasions when a parent can confer citizenship to a child.

The Terms We Use

The Czech government refers to me as a “foreigner” or a “third-party national.” That’s much nicer than in the country of my birth, the US, which refers to immigrants as “resident aliens.” Those word choices say a lot because those terms have normative meanings.

Expat, immigrant, migrant, refugee, alien.

Those words delineate a spectrum of value judgments on people. In largely unspoken but nevertheless real terms, those words define the perceived value of people.

I’m not an expat, though some people might call me one. The term “expat” has connotations for most people that I do not claim for myself. Consider the perceptual differences between the terms “expat” and “refugee.” It is about class. The expat is assumed to be legitimate, be reasonably well-off, and have a legitimate reason for being in a foreign country. The refugee is assumed to be poor and not have a right to be in a foreign country. Worse, the refugee is often assumed to be a burden or a threat. More charitable people will see refugees as poor but in need of compassion and safe harbor from whatever dangers they are fleeing.

Let’s not pretend that there’s no prejudice involved. It is a presumption of who is desirable and who can make a desirable contribution to society. Who has a right to have rights? Expats may seem a bit odd, but they are generally thought to be acceptable — the refugee maybe not in the eyes of closed-minded people.

The Legalities

As mentioned, you have a legal right to live and work only in the country in which you are a citizen. The European Union (EU) is an exception in that it affords EU citizenship to all citizens of member states of the EU. So, if you are a citizen of one EU country you have citizenship rights in all 27 EU countries. Still, there is a legal distinction between EU citizens and non-EU citizens in the Czech Republic and all 26 other EU states.

I have no right to live in the Czech Republic. I am an immigrant. I need the permission of the government to be here legally. My being here is a privilege granted to me that I cannot demand but only request. Fortunately, the Czech government grants that permission. They see me as a desirable foreigner, not a refugee or alien, so they let me stay.

Much of my desirability comes from my willingness and ability to go through the proper legal channels. Yes, I am a legal immigrant — legal because I jumped through all the hoops, filed all the proper forms, paid all of the fees, and waited through all of the delays. They gave me a card to show my legal status.

But when people talk about immigrants, they often, if not usually, mean illegal immigrants. Right-wing politicians stoke fears of these immigrants, or as they prefer to call them — “migrants.” Not “people,” surely not “expats,” no, they are labeled “migrants,” as though they are animals that have strayed to where they don’t belong.

I am legal because I have had the luxury of being able to be legal. First off, I was not fleeing a war, persecution, or natural disaster. Secondly, I had the financial wherewithal to file the forms, pay the fees, and wait the months for the paperwork to be processed. Legal immigration is the privilege of the already privileged.

When we hear talk of illegal immigrants, we should not rush to judgment as the politicians urge us to do. These are, first and foremost, people. They are human beings with rights. This simple reality is too often forgotten. They may be illegal because they are refugees without the time and means to go through proper legal channels. It’s worth mentioning that those legal channels are deliberately made difficult to access and navigate.

We cannot assume that illegal immigrants are the evil criminals that they are often slanderously labeled as. However, the reality remains that they are illegal in their status. Laws do matter, and if the rule of law is to be meaningful, the laws must be upheld. It is disrespectful to those who go through the legal channels to ignore enforcing the laws on those who flout them. Nevertheless, the presence of large numbers of illegal immigrants signifies a larger problem that isn’t solved by enforcing immigration laws and borders. People cross borders for reasons.

Borders

A poet once wrote that good fences make good neighbors. Good boundaries are healthy. But then what constitutes a good boundary? For a person? For a neighborhood?!? For a country? National borders are fences, whether or not there is a physical fence to go with the legal fence.

Sometimes borders are substantial — a body of water or a mountain range. Sometimes borders are imaginary — a line on a map with no corresponding geographical marker. Either way, borders between nations are demarcations that for good or ill separate people. Born on one side of a line and you are a citizen of one country; born even a few meters away on the other side of the line, you are a citizen of another country.

Because most borders aren’t insurmountable barriers, or even natural barriers at all, people who live on either side of a border aren’t in practice all that separated. National borders can cut through communities that share language and customs, creating artificial divisions and artificial conflicts. Despite this, the arbitrary borders enforce real distinctions of laws and practices.

Gloria Anzaldúa in her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, wrote eloquently about artificial borders.

The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. — Gloria Anzaldúa

Borders, Anzaldúa says, create the division between us and them, but they also are a cultural and psychic terrain that people inhabit. People living in the borderlands along the artificial line between nations are both in this space and between two worlds. That means living within borders of difference but transcending the binaries of difference.

In the case of the US-Mexican border, the people of the borderlands shift between the perspectives of two cultures and bridge the binary opposition created by the artificial national border. Anzaldúa uses this transcendence as a metaphor for borderlands of race, gender, and sexuality. Living in the borderlands is a consciousness that can enable people to live and thrive outside oppressive structures and outside of or between the binaries of difference.

People

Immigrants by any name are still people. Laws and borders should not be tools to strip others of their human rights. Beyond legalities, cultural attitudes toward legal immigrants erect artificial borders that divide people into categories of acceptable and unacceptable.

An underestimated conflict in the world is that between cultural homogeneity and cosmopolitanism. Throughout history, immigrants have brought their cultures to their new homes. Most people have welcomed and incorporated these cultural influences. For example, think about which foods are part of your diet and realize how much immigration and cosmopolitanism have enhanced your life.

The cosmopolitan influences of immigrants tend to win out in the long term, but throughout history there has been resistance to it. Fear of the Other, so common in people, naturally extends to fear of immigrants and their different cultural practices. Sometimes there are truly incompatible normative differences, but often, the differences are superficial and insignificant.

One can welcome people of different cultures as a way to learn from new experiences. One can also be intransigent and demand that there be no differences in cultural expressions by immigrant groups. The latter is seen in the demand that immigrants “integrate” into society. The problem is that the demand that “immigrants must adopt [insert country’s] culture and values” expresses the demand for assimilation not integration. Integration is mutual borrowing, the bridging of the binary opposition for which Anzaldúa called.

On the one hand, the demand for cultural homogeneity is the privilege of the dominant class. We can see this in the colonial behaviors of the English and French abroad in contrast to their demands of immigrants in England or France to assimilate —to abandon their culture. In other words, it is okay for the colonialists to immigrate to other lands and demand a right to live in segregation from others — islands of supposedly superior colonial culture amidst the native population. However, when those native populations come to the colonizer’s nation to work menial jobs, they are denied their cultures.

On the other hand, it sometimes happens that immigrants take over a neighborhood and turn the former inhabitants into outsiders. This is uncomfortable for all involved. Immigrants do have a responsibility to live compatibly with the culture of their adopted country. My right to live in the Czech Republic is and should be dependent on my following the laws and norms of this nation, respecting the people around me and their ways. I have no right to demand a segregated community of my ways. Always, above all, we should be treating people as people no matter the language they speak or the cultural ways they follow.

We must make distinctions between legal and illegal immigration and who is a refugee and under what terms, but we must not forget that we are dealing with people. Opposition to immigrants as a tool of political exploitation is probably as old as humanity and very common today. Dehumanizing immigrants as “migrants” or “aliens” is common but never acceptable. The legalities of borders and the realities of movement across them are complicated but can only be solved by discussions that never forget that these are people who have human rights.