Awate - Immigrants Are Not The Problem, You Political Parasites lyrics

Written on 27 March, 2013 at my website. The year is 2013, we're in the middle of a triple dip recession, the country is fighting two big wars and lots of little neo-colonial ones and surprise, surprise, the issue of immigration is huge. Without petulantly perpetuating Godwin's Law, this is the same vicious argument of blaming the outsiders and marginalised people of society for the ills of the “indigenous” populous that the West's old friend Adolph Hitler used. The same one that comes up whenever there is a period of economic strife that is caused by the rich and payed for by the hard working poor, many of which are so hard working that they haven't a job due to the rapacious methods of the decadent few at the top. I am a refugee. I came to this country in 1993 when I was 2 years old. I am a black man, a m**m, a refugee and poor – other than being gay, I have nearly all of the ingredients that the Daily Mail reading population don't like the taste of in the complex lasagna that is a person. On my first day of reception at my multi-cultural primary school in Camden, I was told by one of my cla**mates that she couldn't sit next to me for the astonishing reason that her dad had told her that she wasn't allowed to mingle with the evil m**ms (we are very evil, trust me). This had a profound effect on my five year old mind. It was the first time that I had been alerted to the fact that I was different and didn't belong in this country. For the next sixteen years of my life, I had a basic understanding of why I was a victim to both the pa**ive and covert racism, either by an individual or the institutionalised variety or the overt kind where I was bullied at school for being different, attacked by older brothers of cla**mates for being friends with them and having dark skin or being attacked in the street by drunk racists. And even though I knew it was because I was physically different (which, over time, lead to me being mentally different) I never had an answer for the cla**ic line: “If you don't like it here so much, why don't you go back to where you came from?” I would stare blankly at the inquisitor, trying frantically to use by wits to articulate a careful and biting response. It's only recently that I have been able to come up with that response. One that will stop a racist dead (figuratively – for now) in his tracks. When asked about why I have so much contempt for this country's way of treating those who have come to it's shores for a better life or why I have to talk so negatively about Britain's rich history of empire, exploitation, genocide, slavery, divide and rule, colonialism, the mental conquest of entire continents, the systematic robbery of the riches under the feet of the countries that it swallows up and no apology, my answer is this: British history. They say that people coming over here need to know a thing or two about British history and culture before they dare step foot on this noble land and put impossible quizzes about Britishness in front of their noses before granting citizenship (tests that nearly all “indigenous” British people would have failed (including the Prime Minister) until they recently amended them) but I bet you that if you were to ask someone from India, Pakistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Malaysia or Grenada about British history, their knowledge would be vast. For what Britain has done to nearly every country in the world and the condition they are in now, these people deserve a life in this country of a welfare state, free education, free health care and constant hatred by the public because they obviously deserve it. This isn't the only reason why it's wrong to stigmatise immigrants with a bad label. They do good work. My mother is a nurse. She does one of the most honourable jobs known to humanity. She is a tax payer. And if she loses her job next week when the NHS will be destroyed and forever condemned to a life of privatisation, her 20 years of payment into her pension and National Insurance would mean nothing to some people. “She's not from here and on the dole”, they will say. But she has done more for this country than the working cla** Tories and lovers of Thatcher that have stolen from this country by purchasing a council house. That is theft of public property and privitisation on a large individual scale. A way to indoctrinate the poor into appreciating the “I live happily, you can all go do one” attitude of neo-liberalism and the Tory party. And when there is no public housing and rent in London is £500 for a room the size of a sleeping bag, they blame the immigrants who work their foreign socks off, not the fact that there is no subsidised, low cost council housing for their 22 year old children to move into because they themselves bought one of them. The racist, misogynistic thief – Mayor of London, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has this week described potential immigrants to this country as, “benefit tourists”, a term that the head of his party and expert on British history (his family made several millions from the trans-Atlantic slave trade), David Cameron has also used. This kind of language is vile and incendiary and the mendacity of this government to fuel this hatred of the other, whether it be immigrants, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, m**ms, the overweight, the bald, the vegetarian, the bearded, the black youth or the left handed needs to be smashed. It is a tactic to stop us coming together and smashing them as we should. Welcome immigrants. Accept them into your ranks of many against the few that exploit us and have us fight against each other and strike on all fronts of intellectual and direct action before it's too late because at the moment, all I envisage is the EDL going on an Anders Breivik shooting spree, the Tories joining in holy matrimony with their fellow xenophobes – UKIP and the NHS and welfare state a distant memory.