The history of the world is the history of migration.
That is an indisputable fact.
Life has evolved to move from one place to another. Look at the evolution of hominids, animal migration patterns, .. even plants develop features so their seeds can hitch a ride and find a new place to sprout. Whether we move for new sources of food & water, to escape hostile territory, to trade, to marry, to learn, … whether we migrate by choice, by force, or by accident, movement is the essence of life. It’s how we get variations, differentiations, and adaptations.
My personal history is also a history of migration. I’ve migrated three times in my life so far (Singapore, USA, the Netherlands), born to first-generation and second-generation immigrant parents (from China to Indonesia), with ancestry whose ethnic group (Hakka) literally means “guest families” a.k.a. migrants.
Given my history, I never know what to say when someone asks, “Where are you from?“. That’s a good question. Where am I from?
What does ‘from’ mean? Which place do I feel I belong to? (None of them). Which place/culture influences me? (All of them) Which place best characterise me as a person? (A mix of some of them)
“I guess it’s not an easy answer,” someone said, when I started explaining my history.
No, definitely not. And definitely not easy administratively.
It hasn’t been easy or cheap, having to apply for visa after visa, going through one immigration process after another, having your worthiness poked and prodded each time, while also testing the database limits of various administrative systems. When a government official looks in my file, they often get confused and ask if I’m Indonesian, American or British, because my last port of departure (UK), passport (US), and birth country (Indonesia) present different countries. The system assumed that these ought to be the same: you’re born in one country, same passport, and travel to your destination from the same country.
Another complication: On my Dutch driver’s license, my birth place is listed as “Onbekend” – meaning “Unknown”. Because, I assume, the system doesn’t have my hometown in their database. When I told this to my friend, a proud Catalan, she wondered why I haven’t marched down to the city hall and demanded they fix it right away. To her, the idea of not being identified and connected to your homeland even on paper, is plain heresy. I told her, it’s not a big deal. I kinda like that it makes it harder for people to profile me.
I share this not to brag. There are many others with stories similar to mine. Also, while in many third world countries, migrating overseas is often seen as a pinnacle of success, everyone who has immigrated before will tell you it can be a struggle. Yes, the adventure and new experience are fun. Though novelty quickly wears off, giving way to the reality that you’re a stranger in a strange land. For the first few years, all you hear are incomprehensible babbles of foreign tongues, and many experiences will leave you feeling stupid. Having to re-learn how to do basic things again in your 30s: how to register for insurance, how to find a doctor, how to open a bank account, how to register for a car, how to get a mortgage, etc.
I don’t take pride either in being the corner case that stumped the immigration officer. All I get is longer processing timelines. Thankfully by now I’ve become quite persistent and very good at writing objection letters that sound like it’s being written by an immigration lawyer (Thanks, ChatGPT!). Given my background, the immigration process triggers a deep ancestral wound. Is my lot in life to have to continually prove to different authorities that I have the right to live and exist, else I be banished? Can one feel homesick, not for a specific place, but more for an idea of a homeland that doesn’t exist, because there’s not really a country/land that would fully lay claim to me as theirs?
Like it or not, administrative systems – i.e. the bureaucrats – would rather everyone stays put as it makes their jobs easier. The idea of people moving from place to place must be such a source of annoyance for those who see populations as collection of numbers to be counted and registered, to be tagged and shelved in neat categories for statistical purposes, to be stamped and marked so they know who’s alien and native, legal and illegal, who to tax and who to subsidise. I can hear them saying, “Doe niet zo moeilijk joh” (Don’t be so complicated!). “Don’t move around! Stay put!!!”
I don’t mean to blame the bureaucrats. I get why it’s important. Given the situation in the world right now, the topic of immigration is a pointed one wherever you are. And to think that it’s only going to become worse with all the ongoing and brewing wars over resources, with the climate crisis, etc…
I’m marveling at the irony. The more we develop (i.e., the more advanced the bureaucratic system), the more accesible land & air travel is, the more we globalise, intermingle, eat each other’s food, listen to each other’s music, couple up and join our families, and know more about each other than ever before, the more immigrations become complicated. A point of conflict. Not just at the administrative level, but also with personal, cultural, religious, language and national identity.
What was it like back then before the rigid lines of nation states with their professional bureaucrats and border controls? When boundaries are more porous? Or rewind further. What was it like when we were a bunch of roving bands of hunter gatherers, migrating together with the seasons and our herds? Did we encounter other migrating groups?
Or maybe it’s always been this way. Maybe we’ve always been territorial, and the story of humankind and its accompanying migration has always simultaneously been a story of tension. Settlement and invasion. Possession and dispossession. Two sides of the same coin. Each claim to home is also an act of exclusion, labeling those outside the fence as the others, the out-siders.
I don’t have an answer to the question of whether migration is our essence as humans, or its greatest source of friction. As I get older and appreciate the non-duality of life, I get that it can be both. We move, call a place our home, and accidentally (or deliberately) transgress those who were there before us. We continuously perform this delicate dance of survival and belonging, over and over, across many generations.
Perhaps as resources become scarcer and climates shift, we’re going to see even more migration everywhere – so much migration that all of us will become migrants again. That we finally reckon with the weight of histories that precede us, the invisible stacks of paperwork and visa stamps and immigration stories our ancestors have accumulated. That we stop asking “where are you from?” or tell someone to “go back to where you came from!” because these phrases would no longer make sense.
Perhaps then we’ll all be stripped of the false security of fixed belonging, and realize that we’ve always belong nowhere and everywhere. Without exceptions. Then we can move freely with Life itself, the way we were meant to live.
