Immigrant song

How quickly we forget that most of us were immigrants once, if you go back.

My mum’s side arrived first, generations ago. They made their way with an enviable canny and hard work, as farmers and then truckers, but on Ngāi Tahu land. A gravel road with the family name still slices its way across the Southland plains, quietly prideful and choosing not to know.

My dad’s side arrived with himself and a bag in the early 1970s. Aotearoa was thriving, had more manual work on offer than pairs of hands to do it. That changed a few years later, with a downturn; but like my dad reflected once, the downturn didn’t affect us. We are white. It was the Pacific workers who arrived the same time he did - equally valuable, but urged to start their mahi before their paperwork was properly completed - whose families were torn from their beds in dawn raids.

It’s funny. However your forebears made it, money was probably at the root. They were let in either for their deep pockets, so they could fuel the economy, or with empty pockets, so they would serve it. It’s still like that. And I’m not sure, back then or now, that one group of pocket-owners should get to look down on the other.

All any of our immigrant predecessors wanted, however they imagined it, was a better life someplace else for them and their kids. It was a drive we admired so much that the global order was built on its pretext - as well as on the bones of its displaced. Righteousness sits awkwardly here.

America trains its guns not on those who break its rules, but the ones who stock its shelves and work its fields and bathe and dress its elderly. You’d have thought that meant something.

How quickly we forget we were immigrants, and how deliberately.

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