Some of the loudest voices against immigration belong not to people born and raised in the country, but to migrants who themselves only recently came ashore. They were in the queue yesterday; today they are in a hurry to close the gate. This seemingly contradictory posture has played out from nineteenth-century San Francisco to present-day London, and the script is remarkably consistent. Rather than rushing to judge it morally, it is worth first understanding where these people are standing.
Picture someone who has struggled across the moat, over the drawbridge and into the city. For him, the bridge has already delivered its value the moment he crossed. If it stays open to those who follow, it is no longer a favour but a source of competition. So he begins to do the sums: given the toll I paid, the scrutiny I endured, the years I waited, why should later arrivals have it any easier? Raising the drawbridge protects the position he has secured and makes his own earlier sacrifice look weightier. Paired with this instinct is a ready-made script: I came through the proper channels, I learned the language, I found work, I followed the rules. Personal effort is quietly promoted into a threshold, then used to measure everyone behind, and those who cannot clear it are said to deserve being shut out.
Subtler still is the calculation within the group itself. A migrant who has assimilated into the mainstream and speaks the local language fluently can look back at compatriots still finding their feet with an eye harsher than any native’s, because his own sense of identity now rests on having made it. Opposing immigration can even serve as a ticket of admission. The newcomer is anxious to shed the label of outsider and to be accepted as a local, and in many societies a wariness of migrants is part of the native register to begin with. Shouting it louder than the locals therefore becomes a shortcut to belonging: by disparaging new migrants, one demonstrates that one is no longer a new migrant.
What really drives all of this, though, is the arithmetic of resources. New and established migrants rarely compete for the top jobs; they compete for the same low-skilled work, the same social housing, the same hospital waiting list. The closer the distance, the more direct the rivalry. A lawyer does not fear that a newcomer will take his livelihood, but a migrant still scraping by at the bottom does. The fiercest opposition therefore tends to come not from those standing at the summit, but from the layer that has only just found its footing and most fears being washed back by the next wave. The moment a local economy comes to depend on migrant labour, that hostility quietly softens, which shows that positions have always tracked interests.
Time, meanwhile, pushes people towards conservatism. The longer they live somewhere, the more their politics drift towards the local consensus, and yesterday’s newcomers gradually learn to talk about today’s newcomers in the natives’ own voice. Put all of this together and a pattern emerges: the antagonism between migrants is not really about where one comes from, but about where one stands in the line; what determines attitude is not blood or culture, but position and scarcity. This is also why institutional design matters so much. When a policy clearly stipulates that newcomers must wait several years before they can draw on public benefits, the hostility of established migrants tends to subside, because the perceived threat has been pushed away by the rules. For Hong Kongers who have only just settled in Britain, this is a mirror worth looking into: the hand reaching to raise the bridge today was, only yesterday, clinging to the very same bridge to climb ashore.
