Immigrant

I just had a nice chat with an immigrant. You know, a scrounger, coming here to take our jobs, getting more money from the government in benefits that he ever could through working and getting free accommodation when ‘our own’ are living off scraps. His children weren’t even speaking OUR LANGUAGE. He wasn’t one of those ‘wretched people’ who cross the channel on inflatable boats. But if Rishi Sunak had his way, he, his wife and their three – THREE!!! – children would be on their way to Rwanda. Let’s take back control. Well, that’s one angle. Here’s another.

I was waiting outside my local pharmacy for a prescription which of course wasn’t ready – three days is never enough – so I chatted to this chap with his three young children waiting for his. The children, all very young, were adorable. One boy aged seven kicking a football around, a slightly younger sister doing gymnastics on the bicycle racks and the toddler in her pushchair.  I noted they were speaking in foreign, as foreign people tend to do, so I asked him what language they were speaking in. It was pashto, one of the main languages of Afghanistan. He had come to Bristol last summer when the west abandoned Afghanis to their fate. They had acquired a small rented house in Stoke Gifford and he was working in a pizza shop to help make ends meet. But he was not normally a pizza shop worker: he was a qualified accountant. When he left Afghanistan, he left everything behind.

This was exactly what I was expecting. A family forced to leave oppression or even death in search of first refuge then a better life. In addition to working in a pizza shop, he was taking English lessons, as were all his family, and he is studying accountancy in order to work in his field of expertise. My experience with immigrants – and I have plenty of personal experience given my paternal grandfather came from Norway and my mother from the Netherlands – is that the overwhelming majority do not come here to claim benefits and get free housing. A few probably have, but that is not the true story.  My temporary friend had left the place he called home and now was picking up the pieces of his life in another and working hard to make a go of it.

We chatted about a few things, including his son’s support for Manchester United which I questioned very gently, and here I saw a kindred spirit, albeit one with far more useful talent and skills than me. He was already contributing to the economy through his work and soon he would hopefully be contributing even more. He had brown skin but then so have I, albeit just for the time-being following my recent holiday. I have never been able to work out why some people find skin colour so different to deal with.

Anyway, my prescription not being ready, I bade him farewell, wished him luck and hoped I would see him around the village some time. And that was me, talking to an immigrant, outside a pharmacy in Stoke Gifford. He was very happy and grateful to be living in a relatively free country like this one, away from tyranny and away from fear. For once, I felt very proud to be British. Just for one day.