Scroll through social media right now and there’s no doubt you’ll come across discourse around immigrants and minorities. Of course, you’ll see hateful, xenophobic and racist remarks in the wake of terrifying far-right riots in the UK this week. But you’ll also see many people trying to defend minorities.
‘Our society wouldn’t be half as functional without immigrants doing the jobs that proud English people won’t do.’ ‘Just one day without ethnic minorities and you’d see how society fails to function.’ ‘Imagine the state of the NHS without immigrants working in it .
’ While these posts are well-intentioned, they feed into a dangerous narrative – defining someone’s worth by their contribution to society. Which, in my mind, is the problematic and harmful trap of the ‘model minority’ trope. The model minority is someone who is considered a ‘good immigrant’.
They will achieve a high economic status and be immune to the disenfranchisement felt by other immigrants. They won’t complain, they will work hard and study hard. It’s something my family knows all too well.
In the 1970s, my parents left India and came to the UK. They worked multiple jobs to make their way through parenting in a foreign land and they were given the impression that Britain was a land of opportunity. I was born in the UK and I used to wonder why my family would push for me to study hard and become a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
Or why it was always the joke in British As.