“Foreigners” are not foreign

At the most obvious but least interesting level, it is of course true that most “foreigners”— that is, people of another nationality, typically speaking a different language and manifesting a number of different customs and food preferences—are different from “us.” Visible differences in such ethnic markers as skin colour, eye shape and hair type add emphasis.

Unfamiliarity with the members of another tribe, and the ignorance that accompanies it, has always been a major source of xenophobia, with the competition and conflict that often arises.

It is easy to stoke such feelings among those who lack either the opportunity or desire to know better. Nationalists and those who live at the extreme end of nationalism’s logic, namely racists, do not have to be especially adept as demagogues to arouse anxieties and exclusionist sentiments.

The mere suggestion that “they” are coming to take our jobs—Ukip is trying to play this card—is not far from the fear that “they” are coming to take all the rest of our birthright too. Sometimes the claim is that “they” already have taken “our” birthright: the Scottish nationalists are busy playing on this.

One might think it would be insulting a xenophobe’s intelligence to remark that all human beings are, first and foremost, exactly that: human beings. Alas, this point is consistently overlooked by the ilk. Yet that is the overwhelming and prior fact that underlies all thinking about human rights and civil liberties, premised as it is on the idea that all humankind constitutes one great family, and that before any other identity—national, political, religious, ethnic, gender—anyone you encounter is before anything else a human individual and fully possessed of the rights and entitlements of being one.

Having this notion principally in mind on meeting others makes a difference to how one treats them. Emerson said we should give others what we give a painting, namely, the advantage of a good light. The best light always starts with another person’s humanity. Temptations to see a new acquaintance under differentiating descriptions— of nationality, sex, race and the rest— is to start in the wrong place and, by the usual steps, too frequently to arrive at an even worse place.

It can take time to master another language, but it does not take much time to learn about—to gain some familiarity with— aspects of the culture and history of people one visits while travelling, or who visit one’s own country. Human commonalities are many, and it is a mistake to inflate the size of differences in the way that they are expressed in different parts of the world. For example: people marry; the customs attendant on marrying in different places require different amounts of noise, colour, festivity and the like; but it is marriage nonetheless; the community is marking the fact in its own way; the arrangement is very similar across most societies. One could multiply examples.

I use the phrase “in different parts of the world.” Cultural differences are the result of geography and time. Nations are artificial things, their borders chiefly drawn in the blood of wars and the ink of treaties, and their populations (and the cultural inheritance of those populations) far too influenced by immigration, trade and exchange for any nationalistic purism to withstand much scrutiny.

Someone might object that prejudice against foreigners is not at all the same thing as patriotic invocation of the right to selfdetermination and the preservation of one’s own culture. But alas: these things lie along the same line, even if closer to opposing ends than to one another. We do well to acknowledge the fact before yielding to the siren voices of the demagogues who, in insisting on the differences between “us” and “them,” seek to make the divisions greater.