There are immigrants and immigrants

It’s curious being an immigrant again.

Queuing to get into Valencia

I mean, it’s not the first time. That’s not counting my childhood in Rome, where I wasn’t an immigrant but an expat. If you don’t think that’s an important distinction, think again. Expats are people who never really belong. They’re usually in the country for a relatively short time, maybe on a limited contract, often with an embassy or a research institution or some kind of international organisation.

They tend to congregate with others of their kind, talking their own language, and have the sense that they’ll be gone within a while anyway, once their tour of duty is up. They tend to talk about the local people with a definite article, as in “the Italians do such-and-such”, where such-and-such is usually something that the person talking about it doesn’t like much.

The first time I was a real immigrant was when I moved to France in the late nineties. I was on a French contract with a company incorporated in French law. In fact, when it all fell through, it was great to have French law to fall back on with its generous approach to unemployment benefit. A lot more generous than, say, Britain’s. You can actually live on French unemployment pay.

Still. France was a bit special. As the husband of a Frenchwoman, I had a right to French nationality. Once I’d started work again, I set about securing it as quickly as I could. When it came through, I wasn’t an immigrant any more, but in my home country. My second home country, indeed, but a home country nonetheless.

But then we moved just across the border – a short car drive from the superb eastern French city of Strasbourg – into Germany. There we were truly immigrants once more, and it was fun. Discovering how things were done. Struggling, in my case (Danielle is a fluent German speaker), with a different language. Learning to enjoy different foods and pastimes. A great experience.

And now we’ve started all over again. Immigrants to Spain. Without Spanish citizenship or any right to claim it. Truly foreigners making a new home for ourselves in a different country.

It’s proving just as enjoyable as Germany. It helps, I suspect, that though our Spanish is execrable, we let ourselves go and speak it anyway. Far from reacting with horror at the way we’re massacring their language, they seem pleased, relieved even at not having to struggle with English to communicate with us.

So they just talk Spanish at us and, if we only understand two words in three, it doesn’t matter because they’re more than happy to explain what they meant. Making friends has proved surprisingly easy and, even among those who haven’t become friends, we’ve found people gratifyingly friendly.

There have naturally been a few problems. Civil servants tend to be a pain. Some of them take a perverse delight in telling you that you haven’t got the right document and need to come back in six weeks’ time when you’ve got it. However, in some cases we’ve found that even those can become quite pleasant if we persevere, trying to talk Spanish, until smiles eventually replace the frowns and rudeness.

We’ve also discovered that there’s no point thinking you can do anything in a single meeting. It will always take two or even three. The first may be where they tell you’ve gone to the wrong place. But even if that isn’t the case, it’s where they tell you that you don’t have the right documents. Generally, though, when you get there for the final meeting, having booked the appointment correctly, with the right papers, it all goes smoothly and even cordially

Nor is it only in the public sector that it all takes so long. Any big institution seems hopelessly sclerotic with bureaucracy. The banks, for instance, as well as ministries or local councils. Most organisations here have websites these days, and online procedures for doing administrative jobs. But again and again, you get to the final stage, when you’ve filled in page after page of information and uploaded half a dozen scanned documents, and you press the ‘Submit’ button, only to get an error message that tells you helpfully that ‘there is an error with your application’.

The only solution seems to be to go to the place in person, because they certainly don’t answer emails or return calls in response to voicemail. That’s what I generally do these days, without even attempting the online route. It may take a little longer but, in the end, you get smiles and your case dealt with – even the people in the bank are charming if you go and see them yourself – and that was the aim of the exercise, wasn’t it?

So we’re enjoying our status as immigrants.

Still, I know we’re immigrants who get an easy ride. We’re not Muslim or dark in skin colour. We’re not the ones who get told to go back home. I can’t begin to compare my achievements with those of Ilhan Omar, who has risen from refugee roots to become a US Congresswoman. That only makes it all the more shocking that she has been the target of racist attacks from her president.

And think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps one of the most impressive performers in the US House of Representatives, agree with her or not, also called on to go back home – though she isn’t an immigrant at all, but US born and bred.

The 'squad' of awkward women of colour in Congress, attacked by Trump
Ilhan Omar is speaking. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is next to her in black

No. There are immigrants and immigrants. Some are treated gently. Others are the butts of aggression from people who draw encouragement from such as Trump. They face attack even if they are merely descended from immigrants (and how many of us aren’t?) and only distinguished by the colour of their skin or their faith.

We’ve seen that there can be joy in being an immigrant. Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where that was true for all of us.

A birthday that reminded me of a strange event

Google – or was it Wikipedia? there are so many of these things these days and it matters so little which is doing the talking – reminded me this week that William Seward’s birthday fell on the 16th of May.

It was his 218th birthday so I don’t imagine he was doing much celebrating. But I raised a glass to his memory. Because he’s one of those figures that I think deserves to be remembered with affection and a twinkle of humour.

Not perhaps the most attractive of men
but a most attractive character

He was born into wealth and into a family which owned a few slaves in the last few years of that shameful institution in the state of New York. Whether or not his family’s experience of slave ownership played any role in the formation of his ideas, he grew up with an abiding and outspoken hatred of that abuse. Inevitably, he was one of the main figures in the launching of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

That party, as well as having a powerful conservative wing, was also the home of many US radicals, including most of those in favour of abolishing slavery. It was, above all and increasingly, the party of liberal Northern, business and financial interests, against a much more strongly agrarian and conservative current in the Democratic Party, in which Southern concerns played a forceful and growing role.

Funny how things have changed, isn’t it? The Liberal wing of Republicanism seems to have sunk without trace. It’s the Democrats today who represent the liberal currents of the wealthy North East, the West and of some central states.

By 1860, Seward had served two terms as Governor of New York and was approaching the end of his second term as a Senator for that State. He was one of the best-known and powerful voices in the Republican Party and his track record of public service was outstanding. No wonder that when his name was submitted to the Republican convention in Chicago that year, for selection as the party’s presidential candidate, he seemed not just the front runner but a shoo in for the nomination.

Back home in New York – candidates in those days didn’t attend the conventions, though it was there that nominations were decided, in a time before primaries – back home, his friends and family had put together a huge celebration to mark his selection including a battery of cannon to mark the great moment.

Unfortunately, however, he’d put off many of the more moderate members of his party. Or maybe it would be more accurate to describe them as prudent or even nervous. Many felt that to oppose slavery too openly would spell doom for the country, splitting it irretrievably and possibly even precipitating Civil War. Many felt it was wiser to adopt a less radical stance, perhaps of allowing slavery to continue where it was already practised but prevent its spread anywhere else.

Sadly for Seward, while he was able to command the biggest single bloc of convention delegates on the first ballot, it didn’t constitute a majority. And through the next three ballots, his vote remained static.

Instead, the less abolitionist majority, originally split among several candidates including Ohio Governor Salmon Chase and former Missouri Representative Edward Bates, began to coalesce around just one.

And who was he?

Well, his name is known around the world today, far beyond the borders of the United States. But you need to imagine yourself back into the atmosphere of the times to realise how extraordinary his nomination was.

He was a local politician of limited education, raised in agonising poverty, who earned his living practising law in a thinly populated state, and had only made any significant amounts of money when he began to take briefs for such enterprises as the railroads. His total experience as a politician at national level was a single two-year terms as a congressman eleven years earlier, when he had signally failed to make anything like a name for himself.

No Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recognisable anywhere today after only a few months in office and so well-known, indeed, that she can simply be referred to as AOC.

A major national party nominated for President of a United States on the brink of Civil War, and at a crisis point over slavery that was as moral as it was political, a man barely known outside his State and with limited previous political experience.

He was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1860 Presidential Election, though without winning a majority of the popular vote. Despite all the prudence of the moderates, the result of that vote precipitated the secession of the Southern states, and the Civil War they had hoped to avoid by selecting Lincoln in the first place.

One of his first acts was to appoint his rivals from Chicago to his Cabinet. Salmon Chase became Secretary of the Treasury. Edward Bates became Attorney General. And Seward, cheated of his coronation, became Secretary of State, the most senior member of the Cabinet, second only to the President himself.

Better, as Lyndon B. Johnson would later colourfully claim, to have them in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

I’m only going to tell three anecdotes about Seward, three of my favourites. But, this post being more than long enough already, I’ll come back to them in my next.

Nancy and Bobby: what leadership looks like

On 11 December 2018, Donald Trump tried to ambush the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, by turning a photo opp at the White House into a political debate in front of the cameras.

Pelosi was having none of it. In a few well chosen sentences she demolished the President, even mentioning the need to avoid a ‘a Trump shutdown’ of government. That riled the president who rose to the bait. If he didn’t get the funding for his precious border wall, he knew just what he was going to do.

I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.

She had entirely wrong-footed him.

Trump meeting his match

He has, as usual, changed his tune since. Far from taking ‘the mantle’, he now denies all responsibility for the shutdown, blaming the Democrats instead. But today Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and she can keep the pressure on him. The first step has been to pass a finance bill with no money for Trump’s wall, putting the onus back on the Republicans to keep the shutdown going.

It’s wonderful to see such gutsy and principled leadership in a world that is sadly short of it. Let’s hope Pelosi stays as firm as she promises to. It’s time that Trump had a lesson in the kind of treatment he can expect from a real leader.

I felt for Pelosi and Schumer in that White House meeting. At my own far less exalted level, I’ve also had the experience of talking to a hostile audience. Funnily enough, I find those sessions the most exciting and the most memorable. Generally, I present to customers, and if one of them attacks me, there’s no question of responding in kind. I have to be strictly polite, even deferential. It’s a fascinating challenge to stay that way while giving absolutely no ground.

The best outcome from such a confrontation is to see the critic, or critics, change their position and end up supportive or at least neutral towards us. That isn’t always possible, in which case the aim has to be to win the support of the rest of the audience that is watching the debate. If they leave concerned – even apologetic – for their colleague’s behaviour, and open to my arguments, then I’ve done as much as I could in the circumstances.

Now, Pelosi wasn’t going to win Trump around. Or even the Trump cult followers watching on TV. But she could hope that her performance would consolidate the backing of her base and win the support of some neutrals. That is the way to beat Trump and at the moment she seems to be handling the campaign superbly.

Sometimes, though, as I’ve suggested, one can actually change minds in an audience. And thinking about that reminded of one of the most remarkable instances of leadership I’ve seen in my lifetime, which indeed changed the minds of many of those listening.

On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. That evening, Robert Kennedy, brother of the murdered President, who had not long previously announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination himself, was due to speak to a rally in Indianapolis. It was being held in a strongly African-American neighbourhood. Kennedy’s advisers and relatives, even the police, told him he should not go, such was the anger in particular amongst the black population. The police had even had reports of young black men with weapons seen near the venue for the speech.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, Kennedy went anyway. He spoke from rough notes he made in his car. And he made what is arguably the best speech of his career. He started, unhesitatingly, by going straight to the news he was breaking.

I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Bobby Kennedy breaking the bad news

It’s worth listening to the speech, if only to hear for the visceral moan from the crowd when he spoke those words.

Kennedy had made a point of not speaking about his brother’s death in public before. But that night he made an exception.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

Abie Washington, a young man in the crowd, then only 26, told the Washington Post fifty years later:

I was upset, to put it mildly. I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.

But as he listened his feelings changed.

My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?

That night, there were race riots in 100 cities across the United States. In Washington DC alone, a dozen people were killed. But in Indianapolis, there was nothing. The crowd went home after Kennedy’s speech.

That’s the leadership we need today. I hope Pelosi can provide it. And others too, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to Congress, or indeed Beto O’Rourke who ran a barnstorming campaign for the Senate in Texas, coming closer than anybody might have expected to unseating Ted Cruz.

In Britain, we need it in the Labour Party, but that’s going to need a major change at the top.

Still, at least we can admire Pelosi. Or that extraordinary speech in Indianapolis. And hold up as a model the leadership offered by Bobby Kennedy.

Who was dead, himself the victim of an assassin, only 63 days later.