I’m a white, cisgendered, heterosexual male. I was born in an affluent Western country and lucky enough to get an elite education. I have all the attendant privileges and instinctive reassurance that comes from those accidents of birth and genetics, but in one quite profound respect I’m minoritised: I have spent 19 years – more than two-thirds of my adult life – as an immigrant.

I was born and raised in the UK, but since 2006 I have lived in the USA, in Austria, and in Germany. I was born an EU citizen, but I am no longer an EU citizen. I grew up speaking English, but I now live among people who do not speak it as a first language, if at all.

This time on the road has, undoubtedly, been the greatest experience of my life. To live in different cultures, to learn about different peoples, to see how their language affects how they express themselves, how they think, and how they might accidentally come across if they speak English has enriched me beyond measure.

I have seen that it’s possible for a country to have a functioning and affordable public transport network, that you can have cities where you always feel safe, and discovered that you’re less likely to be hungover after drinking beer brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot. I have loved feeling part of this decentralised community of internationals whose careers have taken them to locales far from the lands of their birth. I have loved feeling part of the countries that have welcomed me inside their borders, and to whom I’ve been happy to contribute my time, my work, and my taxes in return.

I have all those things, and as a white male I can walk around quite invisibly, but I’m still aware that whenever I speak German I instantly announce myself as an Ausländer. I learned first-hand how being an immigrant made me vulnerable in German academia. I once experienced direct hostility in Vienna, a hostility that instantly melted when the official realised that I was English and not some other white European (I assume he initially thought I was Slavic). In America it was my Englishness itself that was occasionally a target, and I was verbally abused more than once by Nth-generation Irish-Americans who had never visited Ireland or experienced anything of the Troubles but thought they bled green.

I’ve been a bigot too. I used to claim that all immigrants should be able to speak the language of the country they’re in, until I moved to Vienna and saw how many native English-speakers there never learned German. I grew up hearing one British politician after another blame the EU for whatever was going wrong in Britain, and I believed it until I crossed the Channel. Making the EU a scapegoat for the UK’s problems was one thing that ultimately led to Brexit, because when you’ve been told for so long that everything that’s going wrong can be traced back to Brussels it’s hardly surprising when people take what appears to be a quick fix.

Now, it seems, right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic have decided that the fundamental problem isn’t the EU (although it’s striking how they all loathe it), but immigrants. Now it’s people like me that are the problem.

Or is it really people like me? Just like the Viennese official whose hostility was apparently reserved for only specific kinds of foreigners, people like me usually don’t even get described as immigrants. You never hear about American immigrants, British immigrants, Australian immigrants – no, we’re expatriates. It’s another sign of privilege. The word “immigrant” itself now has a pejorative whiff, implying people who have come from somewhere you wouldn’t want to go to. 

Somewhere along the line “immigrant” stopped meaning “someone who leaves their home country in search of a better or different life, and is prepared to work for it” and was distorted into “someone who leaves their home country to do the jobs I disdain, or comes to commit crime, or exploit welfare systems”. Nowadays when people start discussing immigration or mocking immigrants in front of you there’s often an implicit or explicit qualifier, “Oh, we don’t mean you”, but in my head there’s a little voice that says “No, you don’t understand – you do mean me”, because you can’t talk about things using such a broad term and not expect to include everyone that falls under that definition. Just because my race or nationality or gender isn’t a problem now, that doesn’t mean it can’t be made to be in the future.

Another thing that made the EU a great scapegoat in the pre-Brexit British political scene was that the targets of that rhetoric generally couldn’t vote in British elections. Immigrants similarly make great scapegoats because they usually can’t vote either. I spent a number of years being completely disenfranchised, unable to vote in Germany because I didn’t have citizenship and no longer able to vote in the UK because I’d been abroad for too long. That lack of a voice at the ballot box makes immigrants among the weakest and easiest target for unscrupulous politicians because they can be vilified with impunity.

People are right to be worried about their livelihoods, their quality of life, and the kind of society they’re part of, but the source of their problems isn’t the immigrant population. What’s made right-wing populism so successful in recent years is that it’s correctly and unsqueamishly identified and diagnosed a malaise in Western electorates, but it’s also invariably offered the wrong explanations for that feeling. Another thing that makes right-wing populism so attractive and so destructive is that it always, always, offers simple solutions to complex problems. If the EU is the problem then leaving the EU will make everything better (spoiler: it doesn’t). If immigrants are the problem then deporting them will make everything better (spoiler: it won’t).

The USA was the shining example of a country that not only tolerated immigrants, but welcomed them. The USA was a country built by immigrants, by waves of immigrants, its wealth and prosperity and opportunity a beacon to ambitious and hardworking people the world over. It was perceived as not only a country but THE country where immigrants could not only arrive and prosper but even be encouraged and welcomed to stay. Its scientific success was a standout feature of that philosophy, exerting a magnetic pull so strong that “brain drain” was instantly understood as the emigration of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and academics of all specialisations across the Atlantic.

But nowadays those scientists, like their fellow immigrants, like me, are being made scapegoats.