“To The World That Shames Me: I’m A Proud Immigrant Daughter – And This Is What You’re Getting Wrong”
It’s hard to write about my experiences as the daughter of immigrants without relying on the same tired clichés. Of parents struggling to assimilate, of belonging neither here nor there, of language barriers – perhaps, you know the rest. It feels, at times, like we’ve heard it all before. But as global events unfold and the rhetoric around migrants, refugees and asylum seekers seems to grow more dangerous than ever before, I ask myself: is there ever a limit to how necessary our immigrant stories are?
My family left Iraq in various waves. First, my father came to the UK to study in Leeds at 19 years old. He made friends there – who we still visit till this day – that he went camping with in the Yorkshire Dales; he drove around the countryside with friends on the weekends and frequented the heaving northern pubs of the late 1970s, listening to Pink Floyd and Supertramp.
My mum’s story was different. She had to endure Saddam Hussein’s totalitarianism of the 1980s in Baghdad alongside my grandparents Betool and Khalid, my aunt Zara and my uncle Zaid, as well as their extended family. Facing mandatory army conscriptions, executions, the fear of deportations and the anxiety of being watched or having your house bugged, life wasn’t easy in Iraq.
After Saddam Hussein began his eight-year-long war with Iran, life became – understandably – unbearable for many. The borders were closed during the war, so most could not flee the country. The estimated death toll ranges between 500,000 to one million. It’s hard to stomach the thought of such a loss. Among the dead – on both sides – were brothers, friends, uncles and cousins – as well as widows and many grieving mothers. This kind of violence wasn’t new, and in many ways, Iraq’s long history with colonial entanglement – including Britain’s early 20th-century mandate – had already set the stage for instability. The legacy of empire is not separate from migration; it’s part of the story.
“This is a call to broaden what is possible when we talk about migration. To understand that people do not leave their homes lightly, but do so with so much trust in the idea of a larger, safer life that each of us has a right to”
After the war ended in 1989 and the borders opened, my mother, the eldest daughter, left immediately, boarding a plane to London in desperate search for a dignified life, without the bone-trembling anxiety of war looming overhead. Her family remained in Baghdad as Iraq entered into yet another war just one year later, when Saddam invaded Kuwait. And this all happens before we reach the infamous 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq.
After my parents married in the early 1990s, after being set up by mutual friends at a party, they had to watch on television as their homeland suffered millions of deaths and was bombed “back to the stone age”, as Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef lamented, while raising a young family in the British suburbs. Before the 2003 war, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait resulted in the first full-scale American invasion in Iraq in 1991 – my aunt Zara and her cousin Zena were in Baghdad when the phone lines went down. My mother remembers calling them for weeks and not getting through – not knowing if her younger sister was safe or not. The family was, in fact, taking refuge on a farm a short distance away from Baghdad, shortly after the first bombs hit. Finally, Zara and Zena boarded one of the last buses from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, and together they applied for asylum status to the UK and joined the rest of the family in Surrey. Finally, safe from harm.
Watching the protests against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids in Los Angeles the past couple of weeks has been yet another sobering reminder of why genuine and authentic immigrant stories like my family’s have always mattered. Peaceful protests began taking place against ICE, which was ramping up deportations on a huge scale under the orders of the current administration. Reuters has reported that the immigration agency has been “intensifying efforts in recent weeks to deliver on [the administration’s] promise of record-level deportations”. Los Angeles, like any US city, is built on immigration – more than a third of the people in LA county are immigrants, and they have shaped the very fabric of the city. So it’s no wonder the people of LA demanded that their friends, colleagues and neighbours were treated with dignity, the antonym of which we find in these recent ICE deportations.
But of course, this isn’t just an American crisis. The language of dehumanisation travels – and it echoes loudly. The term ‘immigrant’ is a flat, failing one in most instances, too. For what humanity does the term deliver us? These are people; families and friends and communities. Closer to home, in Northern Ireland, as with Southport in July 2024, misinformed fringe groups have been attacking communities and vulnerable families with migrant backgrounds, in response to an awful crime against a young woman. When I watch people in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, stick signs reading “FILIPINO LIVES HERE” on doors, smashing the windows of homes and petrol bombing cars and shelters for refugees, all I can picture is my aunt in the late 1990s, newly arrived from a war zone in Baghdad, holding her breath behind a door beingh beaten in, praying it doesn’t give way to the unfettered aggression on the other side.
These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a wider story; one that reduces people to headlines and strips away their humanity. How do we begin to move past such headlines? Where do we find the real stories of everyday immigrant families – the quiet, extraordinary, beautiful ones?
In my work as a journalist and editor, I have tried to tell stories of people in the margins who were just like me; who grew up between lands and between cultures. It didn’t – and still doesn’t – matter where their families came from. Being a child of immigrants unites us in a universal experience, no matter our background. After I launched The Road to Nowhere magazine in 2020, I began meeting creatives from diasporas across the UK and beyond. I met refugees and asylum seekers. I met children of immigrants. I met people who were third, fourth, or fifth generation. Their families had come from China or Malaysia, from Ghana or Jamaica. Their grandparents were Kurdish or Armenian. What we shared wasn’t just displacement – it was the deep, aching routine of movement. The constant negotiation between worlds. The questions of belonging and origin that lingers in every room we enter. We published three issues of the magazine addressing the lack of celebration and joy in conversations around migration.
In one issue, Angela Hui explored her life living above her family’s Chinese takeaway in rural Wales, about the awkwardness of bringing school friends home for playtime and the resourcefulness it taught her; the love of sharing food it instilled in her. In another, Polish photographer Maciek Pożoga shot the most humane, celebratory visions of everyday life in Aubervilliers, an immigrant-heavy community on the periphery of Paris: two children playing in the water from the street’s fire hydrants; a woman talking through A mobile phone perched in her hijab; men exchanging cigarettes. These stories were not marked by the ‘migrant’ label, they moved away from talk of dehumanising policies, the very real and exhausting bureaucracy that follows immigrant journeys. They did not feature immigrants being saved by their adopted society. These were self-sufficient people; these people were us.
Indeed, we talk about the struggles, yes, but we don’t talk enough about how sacred a gift it is to feel at home in many places at once. We don’t talk enough about how leaving one home makes space to build another. We don’t talk about how being an immigrant means gifting those around you with the beauty of your homeland – its language, its music, its memories.
My mother has recently befriended a Polish neighbor on the same street I grew up on. My mother visits her every week, and now our cupboards overflow with Polish cherry tea and jars of dark Polish honey. In return, my mother brings her kleicha (Iraqi date cookies) and postcards of Iraqi art. This is not a “feel-good” anecdote to soften the realities we face. I am not offering you a metaphor. They are simply two women, with complicated histories, who have made room for each other in the most ordinary way.
We know what it is to grow up being othered, to navigate the small, daily humiliations: the mispronunciations, the mocking of our mothers’ accents, the suspicion cast upon our foods and our faiths. We know the headlines that turn our lives into weapons of fear. We have seen our communities described as threats before they are seen as neighbours. But we also carry extraordinary things.
“We talk about the struggles, yes, but we don’t talk enough about how sacred a gift it is to feel at home in many places at once. We don’t talk about how being an immigrant means gifting those around you with the beauty of your homeland ”
Immigrants and their children are best at creating something from the intersections of our layered identities. I truly believe we are the most creative and adept shapeshifters in the world. The beauty of hybridity is not that it is neat, but that it is expansive. It refuses to be boxed in and rejects singularity. When I came to write my recent debut Babylon, Albion, a book-length essay exploring life as a daughter of Iraqi immigrants, I knew that I needed to look into our past in order to begin shaping a future that was defined by generous fluidity, rather than staying chained to a painful past. I wrote it not only to honour the journey my family took from Iraq, but also to pour love into a place – Britain – that didn’t always feel like it loved me back, but whose folklore and mythologies felt comforting, like home.
This is a call to broaden what is possible when we talk about migration. To understand that people do not leave their homes lightly, but do so with so much trust in the idea of a larger, safer life that each of us has a right to.
If you’re reading this and wondering what to do, start by listening. Read immigrant authors. Support refugee organisations in your city or local area. And when you hear misinformation, speak up – even when it’s awkward. That’s how change starts.
As for those of us who carry these stories – children of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and all who have lived between languages and lands – we must continue to tell them. Not because they make for heartwarming, feel-good content, but because they are essential to the fabric of our shared humanity – because words have a very real effect on our world.
I know what some people will want me to say; that being a child of immigrants is a painful, complicated and singular experience. But in truth, we all – at some point – have come from somewhere else, and truthfully, we are always passing through. We never stay still – the human condition is filled with the hum and rhythm and trembling of movement. This Refugee Week, I honour my parents for the gift of a migrant history, for it is through belonging to multiple lands at once we find empathy for each other. The immigrant daughter is not someone to be pitied. She is someone who stands at the intersection of histories and carves a future from it.
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