How shutting borders is punishing migrants in the UK

Marie Le Conte | 2nd March 2021 | Uncategorised

Life is increasingly hard to navigate for immigrants in the UK

I have no plans to leave, but I have to confess that the past few years haven’t been easy on us immigrants, argues Marie Le Conte

Being an immigrant is a funny thing; at first your circumstances are all you can think about, then you get so used to them you even forget you’re from elsewhere, yet sometimes your status still hits you like a ton of bricks. I moved to London in 2009 and largely stopped thinking about it in about 2011. In 2016, my Frenchness hit me like a ton of bricks. Suddenly Brexit was happening, and it wasn’t clear what role we, Europeans in Britain, had to play anymore. Would we leave? Stay? Were we still welcome? Did it matter? Things calmed down after a while, because they always do and because Brexit just became something happening in the background. We’d had the wars, and while the 2019 election didn’t quite feel like the peace, at least it removed some of the uncertainty. It didn’t last long, of course; a few months later, the world got stuck indoors, and suddenly borders were being shut everywhere you looked. I cannot speak for all immigrants, but it certainly took me a long time to truly c...

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