“What is better, England or Dubai?” asks a bright young Indian man who has come to repair a broken window in my Dubai apartment. “I want to live in England but I was asked to leave the country and can't get back in again because my visa expired.”
I ponder the dilemma and tell him that a good way back into the country might be with a student visa.
He nods enthusiastically.
“England is a very rich country,” he says. “Veeery rich.”
I laugh and shake my head.
“There's a lot of poverty in England,” I tell him. “A lot of homeless people living in cardboard boxes. It's not a rich country for everyone.”
He discounts my words and repeats that England is a very rich place.
I am reminded that for many people, Europe represents a promised land, a protected bubble with healthcare and benefits for the poor – a wonderland that everyone wants to be a part of.
Immigration was a hot topic of conversation during the UK's last general election with millions of Britons basing their vote on the conviction of the respective party leaders' political stances on the matter.
“I don't go clubbing any more because the clubs are filled with little foreign men,” a former colleague of mine once told me.
I laughed before realising that she was deadly serious.
The England I grew up in is a very different place to the one I return to today. But while many Brits lament the loss of old-world England, I can't help but be anything than grateful for the benefits that immigration has brought to the place.
The small town I grew up in - once a very lacklustre, and very 'white English' place - is now filled with interesting people from around the world. Previously barren streets are lined with cafes and restaurants and the place seems more alive than I ever remember it being as a child.
I got a tiny taste of anti foreign sentiment as a half English, half German girl growing up in small town England.
At primary school, kids would run up to me and ask if it was really true that I was half German. If I answered yes, they would visibly recoil in horror. I can only presume that their mothers had heard my mum's accent at the school gate and given their kids a good talking to about the Germans after school that evening.
A religious friend of mine once told my rather surprised mother, “I really love the Germans because Jesus said to love your enemies.”
“Oh... that's nice sweety,” my mum replied.
By middle school I'd learned my lesson and flat out denied it if anyone asked me about my secret half nationality.
My mother's 'otherness' and the rather provincial nature of the small town I grew up in meant that anyone of 'difference' often became good friends. Close family friends growing up included French, Spanish, Egyptian, Nigerian, Saudi and of course German people.
Today my parents provide rooms for young language students from the local language school. Usually these students stay a while – often for a couple of years or more. The last few such students have come from Saudi Arabia – young men and women full of life who are eager to learn the language and customs of England.
One such youngster, who has lived with my parents for a couple of years and now counts himself as a family friend, rang my mother from a pilgrimage to Mecca.
“I am giving thanks to important people in my life and I want to thank you for everything you have done for me,” he told her over the phone.
It was a gesture beyond the realms of anything my mother has ever experienced from a European student and she recently came to the conclusion that she prefers students from the Middle East because she finds them so much more respectful and willing to integrate.
On a recent inspection of the house by the language school to check that everything was up to spec, the woman from the school let her in on a secret.
“You know, most people in this town say that they don't want to house people from the Middle East,” she told my shocked mother.
Facebook is a great way to have a nosey at the lives of people you went to school with. I look at the profiles of some of the kids who were so staunchly British at school – many of whom are now mothers with children who never left the town we grew up in.
By fate of accident I met the husband of one such girl – a taxi driver who drove me back from the airport on a return trip from Dubai. I told him that I had lived in Dubai and was about to move to Berlin, and then we got talking about where we were from and it turned out he was married to this rather anti-German school friend of mine.
On our journey back from the airport he lamented the fact that he'd never lived overseas.
“I've always wanted to do something like that,” he told me.
“Well it's never too late,” I said.
“Nah,” he replied rather sadly. “You can't do something like that when you have a family.”
I look at the differences between our home town then and now and wonder if their kids will have more of a chance to appreciate different cultures than they did.
Certainly living in a place with people from all over the world right on your doorstep has to go some way towards expanding the mindsets of tomorrow's kids. Surely that can only be good.
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