The immigrant outsider

The introduction of stringent requirements for citizenship means that applicants have to invest a considerable amount of extra time, energy and finances in the process. It also serves to further promote their ‘foreignness’, justifying the imposition of requirements above and beyond what is expected of British-born citizens. There was frustration from some participants at these added demands, particularly in relation to the Life in the UK test, which they felt would not be passed by many natives. However, the emphasis the Life in the UK places on

learning about a new country from which you are considered an outsider became a way of rationalising these expectations, as Corina and Moses alluded to:

But me, I am not from here so it is a requirement to know about the laws before you become a British citizenship.

(Corina, economic migrant, Philippines)

It’s actually important for people who have lived here. Because even those people who got a lot of people who got born in Britain, some of the things they don’t even know in that anyway so I suppose it’s important for everybody in a way. But extremely widely important for people who have not been in the UK for a while or not been living here since birth.

(Moses, student/economic migrant, Ghana)

Here, citizenship was associated with having lived in the country for a certain amount of time, ideally from birth. The requirement for prospective citizens to possess particular knowledge became normalised in the fact that ‘we’ are not ‘from here’, so must therefore conform to ‘their’ requirements. This suggests an

expectation of one-way immigrant incorporation (Freeman, 2004). However, the degree to which this knowledge is useful for integration is questionable, given that

it is not widely possessed by the host population. Although Moses recognised that everyone should know about the country in which they live, he posited that this was still more important for immigrants, suggesting that the onus should be on them to prove their successful adaptation. Naturalisation measures therefore become a self-perpetuating tool, convincing prospective citizens of their necessity by entrenching the division between immigrant and British-born.

Negative populist rhetoric surrounding immigration also erects a clear boundary between immigrants and citizens, affecting new citizens’ views on acquiring

citizenship. Being branded an immigrant had impacted the everyday experiences of many, either through direct discrimination or negative self-categorisation. Gaining the status of a British citizen was often seen as a way of escaping the stigmatisation associated with being classed as an immigrant, as Bintu and Leandre explained:

Whatever I want to do now, they can ask me, I can give my passport, the British passport. And they will say oh she is a British citizen. So it make my life grow up more. But before if they used to ask me for my passport, whenever I would give them this passport they would say oh oh no, you are asylum seeker, they think I am asylum seeker. Unless I start telling you see, I say I’m not asylum seeker, I’m married to British, I am citizen, I have citizenship, but I already applied for my British

passport. Still they don’t believe me, you see. So if I have a British passport it will build my life up more.

(Bintu, family migrant, Sierra Leone)

I used to get really annoyed when you get these clearly politically motivated news things about immigrants [laughs]! Now I can just it doesn’t apply to me anymore. I guess it does and it doesn’t in a sense, because if you say you’re British and they say well the British people have done this then that includes you as well.

Despite their very different social positions, Bintu an uneducated migrant from Sierra Leone and Leandre a highly skilled South African migrant, they felt similarly victimised by the negative connotations of being classified as an immigrant. The implications of being mistaken for an asylum seeker were particularly challenging for Bintu, who was refused access to a GP on this basis. The racialised vision of immigrants as asylum seekers (Fekete, 2001) meant that she was denied the rights that her legal status should have afforded her, increasing the perceived need for the only document which could fully prove her right to be present in the country, a British passport. As a white, highly educated migrant, it is unlikely that Leandre would have been subjected to the same treatment, but she nonetheless felt the psychological effects of being homogenised as part of a group which is consistently demonised in the media. This stigmatisation may be internalised by migrants, creating negative self-representation related to their status, leading to a loss of self-esteem and an inability to challenge their harmful status (Goffman, 1963, Campbell and Deacon, 2006). Both participants considered the only way to counteract this was to acquire British citizenship, affording public recognition of a legitimate status, and official inclusion as a British person.

A countertopographical analysis illuminates how the positionality of migrants is produced relationally through everyday processes (Heley and Jones, 2012). These processes can furthermore be used to connect the individual experiences of different migrants. The increasingly negative view of immigration as an

uncontrollable global force in Western societies is perpetuated by national and local actors and played out in the lives of those they demonise. This is linked to wider debates over the potential damage that ethnic diversity causes to social cohesion, directed towards those already living in the country. Media, public and state representations combine to exclude immigrants from national rights and recognition, impacting individual identities and opportunities. This connected very different subjects in their motivations to gain formal membership.