Unpacking

You learn a lot by moving to a new country, about the country you’re immigrating to, but also about the country you’re emigrating from. And more importantly, you learn a lot about migration policies and the attitudes surrounding this.

I’m not new to the theoretical side of migration. I’ve done research about deaf women’s migration experiences, and I try to keep up with (Belgian) migration policies and politics. Still, I was surprised when a fellow PhD student warned me that I might encounter negative attitudes within UK deaf communities, because I’m not a UK citizen. Remarks about “foreign people coming to the UK to steal our jobs” are not uncommon, she informed me.

I was shocked by these attitudes, but I started to wonder why I was so startled by this. In Belgium too, these attitudes can be found in almost any pub you walk into, on every social media platform and in every newspaper. So why was I so surprised about this? I needed a few days to think about it, but then it dawned on me: I did not expect to encounter these remarks as a white, European person.

If I was a Black person or a Person of Color, I would have known that this would happen. Even if a Black person or Person of Color is born in Belgium, many people still see them as a foreigner who’s here “to steal ‘our’ jobs” – but, somehow, at the same time also here to “profit from the system and enjoy unemployment benefits". My whiteness has protected me from these discriminations and exclusions. And it still is protecting me.

Why did it take moving to a different country and becoming a migrant (in the most privileged sense) to finally realise this?