I'm sorry I hadn't updated my blog since I started it. A bit lazy, I know. The thing is that I started another in Spanish and I have been trying to keep track of it so I abandoned this one in English a bit. After the row about Dr. Williams words about the Sharia law in the UK I would like to share with you all an article I wrote on immigration. Being an immigrant myself (twice!!) I know a bit what I am talking about. I hope you enjoy it and think about it.
Please leave a comment.
Be my guest (but do not become an intruder)
Every time I have guests I want them to feel at home. I try to fulfil their expectations and to make them comfortable. On the other hand I expect from them to adhere to my rules. I do not have a lot of rules but I have some, after all it is my house and, though welcome, my guests do not own my house. They did not spend money on the new carpet or on the new floorboard in the bedrooms or in the newly installed kitchen and bathroom. Therefore I expect them to behave and respect my home. I will see to their needs and if I have vegetarian visitors I will cater for that, I will even buy soya milk if they have lactose intolerance. I will prepare healthy meals if they are on a diet, I will basically make them feel at ease. I will not, however, abandon my habits and I will eat the food I like, I will have milk and I will do what I always do although I will try to accommodate my activities in order to spend time with them.
In this same way I expect immigrants to behave when they come to a foreign country to live and work. I should know how to do it, I am an immigrant myself and not once but twice. The first time I left Argentina to live in Spain. That was quite easy if we consider that my parents were Spanish so I was not unaware of Spanish customs and traditions. After eleven years in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula I thought of myself as a Spaniard, I had even changed part of my vocabulary to sound more Spanish than Argentine, mainly because being a teacher I needed to speak as my students did. It was not traumatic, I did not feel I was losing my identity, it was just a normal process of integration in the country I had chosen to live in. It would have been preposterous and pompous to expect those around me to change their habits to make me feel more at home. Spain received me with open arms and although in the end things did not turn up as I expected, the Spanish people never made me feel unwanted or a foreigner. They embraced me and I embraced their customs and traditions.
The second time I migrated was to the United Kingdom. A series of coincidences made me decide to try my luck in the south of England. I knew the language, and I knew about Britain?s traditions from my history books and by reading about the country but when I arrived in London a new world opened up. I started to experience all the theory I knew and that was, at the beginning a bit complicated. Idiosyncrasy is something you learn to understand little by little and although I cannot expect to develop the same idiosyncratic feelings as my new fellow countrymen I can understand it, and what is more important of all I can respect it. Without respect coexistence is impossible. I learned that through my parents, when they told me how they integrated into Argentinean society and later on when I did the same into Spanish society and now into British society. Something that I am very proud of is my capacity to embrace the values of the countries I lived in.
I strongly believe that because of my way of understanding immigration I felt very touched when the 7/7 London bombings happened. How could anyone born and bred in this country could have done something like it? How could anyone born and bred in Holland could have killed Theo Van Gogh? How could anyone born and bred in Amsterdam could have said ?get my Amsterdam rid of homosexuals? And it struck me, those people have lived in those places but they were never integrated. Multiculturalism sounds perfectly politically correct but it is not real. The key to coexistence is integration, multiculturalism creates ghettos and small closed communities that do not learn how to live together with other communities. How can you call a city yours when you cannot accept its values? I could only call Buenos Aires mine (although I was born there) when I agree to adhere to its values in the same way that my Spanish parents did. I could only call La Coruņa mine when I knew it and respected its traditions. You cannot call a city your own only for having been born there when you do not respect the values that city represents. I think that every single person in Europe think of Amsterdam as the libertarian model of the 20th and 21st centuries. A city rich in tradition, culture and tolerance. And the same could be said of London where tolerance is its trademark. Nobody in their sane minds could aspire to change that and if they do they do not belong there. Immigrants and their descendants need to understand that their values and traditions cannot be imposed to the people and the country where they chose to live. They are guests, their traditions are foreign to us and we cannot be expected to embrace them mainly when those traditions go against our most basic ideas of tolerance and justice. Western Europe try to guide its actions by basic human rights where women are equal to men, with the same rights and obligations, gays cannot be discriminated because of sexual orientation and their unions must be protected by civil law, discrimination against women and gays is illegal, it is a crime. When we consider that a tradition is unfair we get rid of it. Furthermore when we consider that any Christian church regulation or belief is unfair we are not afraid to legislate against it because the basis of society is not religion, it is coexistence. Secular countries are a right and it took a lot of bloodshed to gain it. Nobody has the right to impose their beliefs over others. Religion is a private matter not a public one. Bush made his beliefs a public affair when he refused to allow gay people to marry or to make their unions legal under civil law, he also made his beliefs public when he vetoed stem cell research to cure life threatening illnesses. Mr Bush completely forgot he promised to rule for every American, he is only ruling for those who believe the same things he does, his consideration of other Americans is non-existent, as it is his consideration for most of the world. When a government legislates with their mind in God, the society becomes unfair and old-fashioned. Religions cannot affect the way everyone lives because not nobody has the duty to believe. In fact we have the right not to believe.
The respect for foreign traditions cannot be blind. We cannot allow unfair lifestyles to take root in our countries. Forced marriage in our society is not legal, traditional or acceptable and those who practise it need to understand our point of view, a point of view that was developed throughout generations. We are not going to change it or accept it because of a misunderstood multiculturalism. It is foreign to us, it is something we cannot condone. Therefore those living in western countries need to adapt to the country they are living in, they need to integrate. I am not asking to abandon their beliefs and traditions but they have to understand that some of them are considered illegal or a crime in our countries and that cannot be changed to make them feel at home. Nobody would be surprised if after committing an ?honour killing? they are taken to Court, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. We cannot condone ?honour killings?, we found them atrocious, a horrible and cruel breach of human rights.
We find ourselves in the obligation to accept and celebrate different cultures in our countries but what about those different cultures accepting and celebrating our own, after all this has been our home for longer and we have the duty to protect our social values and the progress we achieved in social issues.
I think that the United Kingdom has tried too hard to make immigrants feel at home but forgot that its citizens were here first and now our own traditions and cultural values are being threatened by others. Think about some Muslims in Holland: they want to establish a Sharia court in order to hear their cases. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested recently that some aspects of sharia should be applied in Britain. However, that is not integration, that is occupation. Sharia law has nothing to do with our values, allowing the establishment of that kind of courts would be a terrible danger for our tolerance and traditions. Allowing Sharia courts in non-Muslim countries would be something like validating crime. How would we justify death by stoning, or flogging, or hanging or cutting hands and feet? There is no way for Sharia law to coexist with our law. It would be degrading our due process and make it a mockery.
