Tower and Town, September 2016

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Migration: a Bird's Eye View

Birds, cells, atoms all migrate and so do people. Wikipedia says: Human migration is the movement by people from one place to another with the intentions of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location.

Human Migrants are everywhere; Scots and Irish who live in England, people from London who moved to the countryside, the retired who come to live in Marlborough and the young of Marlborough who cannot afford the house prices and have to move away. And then there are the Others; also referred to variously as asylum seekers, immigrants, economic migrants and at worst... scroungers.

People migrate for all sorts of reasons, and lucky are those who relocate for nicer weather, better housing or a relaxing lifestyle. Others escape wars, oppression, dictatorship or they simply want to better their lives and that of their families. I have migrated twice in a big way; once from a communist system to a democratic one within a divided Germany, and a second time for love and marriage from Germany to Britain. Each migration had its difficulties. Being an East German ‘Flüchtling’ in well-to-do Bavaria I was often an embarrassment to those who had mentally cut off all thoughts of their unfortunate cousins in the GDR (this stood for East Germany’s ‘German Democratic Republic’) and later on, as a German, moving to England provided for a few unpleasant encounters as well.

Time is of course a great healer, people have the habit of getting on with each other and I settled in the new locations. For migrants with different religions, languages or customs from those who are already there, settling in will take time, and in the process changes the society into which they settle. This unsettles the often reluctant hosts. Looking at the history of this island I wonder at what time the Celts, the Romans who stayed on, the Angles and Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Huguenots (who came in two waves 1572 and again 1685), the Hanoverians and more recently the people of the Commonwealth stopped being migrants? They are now from ‘Here’.

So I ask : I came to Britain in 1970, worked and paid tax since my arrival, have lived in George Lane since 1973 and in the same house since 1975 – when, if ever, do I stop being a Migrant?

Ilse Nikolsky