Immigration | But I Smile Anyway...

Did you know the streets of the UK are paved with gold?

Everyone in Canada has a HUGE house?

In the USA, they all have at least 3 cars per household?

In Australia, you can live the life of Riley?

Did you know that? Did you? You didn’t? Well, that’s because it’s not exactly all true, but in the eyes of some people, these are statements set in concrete. Those people that want to get out of their own countries and live in these wonderful places!

I can’t speak for other countries and cultures, but I can reflect on what I know about some people and their thoughts in my own culture.

In India, where life in the villages is not as fast, and modern as the cities, parents dream of getting their children married into a well-settled family, where their child will have support and live well. Don’t we all?

Marrying your daughter to a person who was settled abroad was always a favourable thing, as even though you were sending your child far away, they would live a better life than what they had back home. And for those settled in other countries, having a wife from back home, meant you had the comfort of ‘home’, while settled in this paradise.

As children were born overseas, it was not only the sons who needed wives, but the daughters born abroad also needed spouses. Communities got bigger in other countries and marriages happened between those immigrant families, and everyone was getting along just fine. You still got the odd marriage happening back home, and a daughter or son-in-law, fresh from the homeland arrived, visa stamped, and ready to start a new life.

I don’t know when this happened but it became a HUGE money making racket. It was never something I knew much about as my family weren’t in India, but after I got married, I heard much more about it, with my own In-laws close family still in India. Now if you have a child in the UK, Canada, US or Australia, or numerous other countries, and they were of marriageable age, you could stand to make a packet!

Fly back home, put an ad in the local papers that you have a son/daughter with a foreign passport, ready to marry, and a queue would form outside your house door within hours. And not only would you have lots of candidates, but you would have lots of people willing to pay sizeable amounts to get your child married to theirs. See people almost offering a dowry for their sons, as well as daughters! Not only would their child get the same foreign passport, but after a certain time passes, they can then start calling over the rest of the family to live with them!

And when they got there, they would get all this stuff! A house, money, a car, material possessions that they could only dream of back home!

But no, get there, and realise you have to WORK! Get a job, yes! Then you might get that car, house, money you wanted!

You see, this is the problem with many folks back home. They have this ideal stuck in their heads, that everyone living abroad is rich, wealthy beyond comparison. And compared to them, I guess we are.

It’s our faults really. We go back home to visit family, with our fancy phones, cameras, clothes, and money to go shopping, and out and about all the time. But, what they don’t see is when we are back home, how hard most of us work, to save up to get these things, and how long we might save to go back home and be able to do this shopping etc.

They don’t see the cost of living here, compared to theirs. Yes, it’s cheap as chips for us, to go out for the evening there, to shop for amazing clothes, to hire a car and be driven everywhere, for the duration of our stay, but to do the same on a daily basis, back in reality, we would all need to be millionaires! We can afford to fund a two-week trip and pretend to be more well off than in reality, but even we couldn’t continue that lifestyle there for much longer!

I have seen so many people, men and women, who have fallen into the trap, their families have spent loads of money, got them married off to someone, sent them abroad with all these expectations, and they get there, and realise that

a) they have to get a job, to contribute to the family’s income, and then possibly afford some of the luxuries they had been dreaming about

b) they are nothing more than a glorified servant in their new marital home

c) the worst one, they were a cash cow.

Meaning this whole marriage was a means to make money for the family who had come from abroad, knowing the value of their own child. In fact many times you would find that this same boy or girl was already in a relationship back at their home, and the whole marrying in India, to give someone a visa, was a great way to make money! As soon as the stamp is on that newbie’s passport, hello divorce papers, bye bye India spouse, and time to settle down with their actual partner of choice!

Or, especially in the case of many girls brought to these countries, deal with the fact that your ‘husband’ isn’t actually interested in you, just your trimmings, so to say, and cope with the reality that he will be out, with other women, you are just the wife back home. Keeping the house clean, the food cooked and his bed warm.

I know there are some genuinely happy marriages that have been conducted along the way, not for money or visas, but there are just so many that give the whole sanctity of marriage a bad name.

If I’m truthful with you, and this is something I say to our younger family members back home, they are actually better off where they are. Most of the children in our families are from relatively well-off families. There, in India, they don’t have to work, they get everything they need, if they do work, it is a choice they have made. They probably have a maid or someone coming in to cook and /or clean. Luxuries we don’t see any of here. Ideal jobs don’t just land on our doorsteps, we have to study hard, and apply for job after job until we find something. There if you know the right person, you’ll get a job no problem! No qualification necessary, and if you need a qualification, just pay the right person for it!

Instead, we still see families ploughing their savings into the marriage of a child, so they get that magic visa…

Please, think twice before doing it, your child might actually be happier where they are…the grass isn’t always greener you know…

Melting pot or salad bowl?

A repost of an older post of mine…. Seeing as I brought up the EU Referendum earlier!

I’m not a great one at remembering who said what, quote wise, though, if in an argument with Hubby Dearest, I can remember the second something was said, and by whom!

Ok, only just started and already going off tangent!

So, where was I? Oh yes, I was thinking about something someone once said, about immigration, and whether we want a melting pot or a metaphorical salad bowl…

I liked that whole thought. We’re all different, and if integrated properly, all the different cultures around us, living together, make a veritable smorgasbord of flavours for us to enjoy.

I know the original quote was regarding America, but it goes for everywhere, doesn’t it? Every country where there is a large number of different cultures living together, every school where there are many different children, and even within families, because, even within cultures, there are very different types of people, and if we were all the same, how boring would it be?

When you move to another country, I believe you definitely should NOT forget where you came from, or what your background was/is.
But that you need to remember that you are moving somewhere that has different ideals and sensibilities. And this should be respected.

Where I live now, in Kent, we are part of a large Sikh population that moved here mainly in the 50’s and 60’s. At that time, I’d imagine the thoughts of the general Gravesendian population would have been thinking where have these brown faces with cloth wrapped around their heads come from?

But over the years, and with hard work, most of these people built businesses, set up home and brought their families over. We see the Sikh Gurdwara standing, side by side with churches, and over the average year, as much as Christian festivals, and days of importance in the British calendar are observed, the same importance is given to the Sikh festivals, with Vaisakhi, a festival Sikhs give a lot of importance to as it signifies the birth of the Khalsa, being celebrated in such a way, the majority of the town is shut to allow a grand procession to go through, and everyone, from all walks of life are welcome to join in, and they do!

The same at Diwali, or Bandi Chorr Diwas, where we celebrate the festival of light. It’s spectacular, the fireworks, the lighting up of the temple, then days before, or after, we all celebrate Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night with the GB population!

Yes, there are areas in town where it is a bit Indian-ified, punjabi shops catering for food and clothing needs, but who doesn’t like the restaurants, with authentic food, that have also popped up over the years?!

In the beginning, many of the men found it hard with their turbans, so many cut their hair, to fit in, much to the chagrin of their families back home, and gave themselves English names so the English tongue didn’t find it hard to say their names. Jagdeep became Jack, Satinder became Steve, and so on. And children where registered with simple names, and hair cut from the beginning so the child didn’t suffer any bullying at school. There were, however, those individuals who refused to change their exteriors to fit in, and this didn’t hinder them in the long run. Yes, it might have been a slightly harder integration, but they wanted to be accepted, and their religion respected, as well as being able to show they could do all the jobs just as well as your average hair cut individual!

But times have changed, a Sikh person is now proud to wear a turban, if they are baptised, or even if not, and many of our children go to Punjabi school alongside their normal education to keep a grasp of their roots. The majority of children have their UK born parents to impart the knowledge which will help them day to day, and grandparents who will help them with their cultural roots.

When I first moved here, I found it a bit wierd, having grown up in quite an anglicised area in Birmingham, in a predominantly white school, with lots of brown interaction through my large family. I walked into the town centre here, not long after getting married, and so many faces were brown, like mine! But there were no worries, everyone got on just fine! There were very few obvious looking Muslims and I didn’t see many Afro Caribbean people initially. But that changed too over the years.

Now we have a huge addition of Eastern Europeans in the mix. And I feel like the way everyone talks about them now is probably what the locals were saying about Indians all those years ago. There are a few differences though, not so many of these new additions finding employment, instead, being housed, and having rather a lot of children.

But going back to what I originally started thinking about, with this post in mind… It’s so nice to be able to live side by side, stand beside one another, celebrate your differences, add a different dimension to the community. But don’t try and create your own land within another… What was the point of moving, if that was all you wanted? Heck it’s not like the weather is any better here! Live by the rules of the country you move to, don’t forget your background, your culture, they make you who you are… as much as the place you move to, and the people who are from there, their beliefs and culture, make them the people they are too.

I like salad!