On Being a Young Male Immigrant

Reflections on the naivety of immigration policy in the West

I was young when I left home / And I’ve been a-ramblin’ round

And I never wrote a letter to my home

-Bob Dylan

It is a hallmark of the governing adults-in-the-room regimes in most Western democracies to profess wisdom and insight that ordinary people lack. This is, after all, the basis for any claim they have to possess authority. Yet the grim truth of the matter is that these people are, in the main, profoundly callow and naive. Having only ever for the most part mixed with people who are nice, they think niceness is universal, and innate.

Nowhere is this foolish belief more obvious than in respect of policies towards immigration, which are designed and effected in a manner that at times seems almost wilfully purblind to the possibility of nastiness. To refer back to our old friend Milan Kundera, the worldview of those who govern us is above all predicated on the ‘denial of shit’. And when it comes to immigration they deny it by the bucketload.

One issue that throws this denialism into stark relief is the rarely discussed matter (rarely discussed, no doubt, because to do so brings one close to so many of polite society’s third rails) of who it is desirable to have come to the country. I am something of a ‘squish’ with regard to immigration as such; I have lived as an immigrant myself, I am married to an immigrant, and I am furthermore of immigrant stock - both sides of my family originally came to mainland Great Britain from Ireland. It would therefore be hypocritical of me to complain about mass immigration per se. But it is painfully evident to me that discrimination with respect to who comes in and out of a country, particularly across the dimension of sex, has to be at the heart of any sane policy in this regard. And it is more painful yet to reflect on the negative consequences of what I will call (forgive me) the ‘shit-denialism’ of our governing class on this point in particular.

When I was 21, you see - young, dumb, and full of, er, ‘vim’ - I went to live in Japan. I had never intended to stay where I grew up, on Merseyside, nor where I went to university down south; I had seen some of the world - summers spent in France, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan - and I wanted to see more. My heroes were Hunter S Thompson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Barry Lopez, Jack Kerouac; I wanted to have adventures and then write about them, and I had no idea that my dreams in this respect were remotely trite. I had a Greek girlfriend and originally planned to live in Skiathos, and when that fell through I interviewed for a job teaching English in Yokohama and off I went.

By most standards, at least of the time (I arrived off the banana boat, so to speak, at Narita Airport in March 2003) I became what we would nowadays call an ‘integration success story’. I learned the language, I eventually had a career at a Japanese firm mostly using Japanese, and I managed to escape the expat ghetto. But for around two or three years I was immersed in the unintegrated Anglophone scene in Shōnan, the area of resort towns lying to the south-west of Tokyo along the Pacific coast. And this was enough to disabuse me for life of the notion that it is a good idea to allow single young men to come en masse into one’s country, especially without very strict rules that will allow one to deport them the instant they step a millimetre out of line.

Young men are the engine of a society: orient them correctly and they can do extraordinary things. But it follows that if you orient them incorrectly they can do extraordinarily bad things. And it is very easy for them to undergo a process of disorientation in the transition from one cultural context to another, i.e. by emigrating. Something happens even in the heart of the most well-brought up and well-intentioned young man when he is whisked to a far-off land, away from all of the implicit normative constraints that informed his upbringing, from all of the head-shakes and finger-wags of his friends and relatives (and especially his mother), and from the society in which he was raised. Something aggressive, competitive and irresponsible - something chimp-like and primal - swells in his chest, and he starts to transform into a small-time, petty iteration of Genghis Khan, bent on conquest.

This is something that it seems very difficult for women to relate to (and here I will lay my cards on the table and reveal myself to be one of those desperate lunatics who thinks that there are some important differences between the sexes), because it is so archetypically male. There is an urge that arises in the heart of the young male immigrant, which I think it is important to label psychosexual, to demonstrate oneself, in a very ugly and tribalistic sort of a way, to be physically and morally braver and more aggressive than the men in the society which one has come to. I call it psychosexual not because it is always sexually competitive - though it certainly is - but because it is not merely so; it is competitive in the round and seems to act out or express male sexuality in its most apelike and debased form, and in a deeper and more symbolic resonance than just the reproductive: not so much ‘I will have sex with as many women as I can’, as ‘I will lord over all of creation with my almighty penis.’

It is as though, in other words, when a young man is liberated, so to speak, from social convention and given a certain amount of implied permission to act anti-socially on the grounds of being a ‘foreigner’, there is a temptation for him to want to sew his wild oats in a very crass and stereotypical way, and also for him to engage in boisterous, aggressive, mildly sociopathic behaviour insofar as it satisfies his competitive impulses. The civilising influences that have shaped him in his domestic context melt away, and this puts him in more direct contact with his id.

In a recent-ish article, the ever-readable Matthew Crawford casts light on this phenomenon by describing the problem of the ‘sadistic personality’ and its contribution to what Renaud Camus calls ‘nocence’. This, Camus’ coining, is used to describe the opposite of ‘innocence’ - a gradual coarsening of the public sphere through inconsiderate, jarring, unpleasant behaviour. According to psychological research, Crawford tells us, the men (and, let’s face it, it is generally men) who deliberately install loud exhausts in their cars are marked by sadistic personality traits. And this makes it appropriate to use the word ‘cruelty’ to describe the attitude and behaviour of the disruptive, anti-social male in this type of context. ‘The fabric of the world,’ Crawford says, in terms that anyone will recognise, ‘is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.’

The connection with immigration is obvious, but awkward and extremely uncomfortable to tread around - not least because Camus himself has become associated with the ‘far-right’ (he was indeed banned from entering the UK to speak earlier this year because of something something fascism). But Crawford navigates this successfully and sensitively by very carefully identifying the underlying psychology not just of the disruptor but the disrupted:

Let us consider how, in the cosmopolitan cities of the West, the field of petty harms is allowed to expand due to a code of propriety that requires suppressing our awareness of patterns (if they involve people designated as oppressed), as well as a good-natured readiness to surrender one’s own claim to public space. Such readiness is a point of moral virtue for the liberal, but it creates a vacuum into which more aggressive energies rush. Such energies are sometimes carried by newcomers who have not been catechized in liberal virtue.

The readiness of the nice, well to do, polite people in a society to surrender their own claims to public space, to repeat, creates a vacuum into which more aggressive energies rush. And it is, sadly, natural, that the young male immigrant, already predisposed to be more aggressive than the settled population by default whatever the different racial backgrounds involved, will therefore be the driver of a considerable amount of (deliberately or accidentally cruel) nocence. Something about the condition of being an outsider, in other words, cultivates low-level sadism.

I saw this a lot amongst the expat community in Japan, and also, naturally (to my shame now) in myself to a certain extent when I was embedded within it. Partly this manifested itself in a certain glee in behaving antisocially - causing too much noise on the train (it is a matter of important etiquette in Japan that one should be quiet on public transport), loitering in public places drinking and emitting hostile vibes, getting into fights, fare dodging on public transport, and so on.

And partly it manifested itself in a casual, caddish, objectifying attitude to women that never strayed beyond the realms of consent but which resulted in a lot of hurtful, thoughtless, stupid behaviour that no middle-aged man could look back on and be proud of. It was as though being from another culture simply gave one a license to behave badly, and in expat circles in Japan at that time it was indeed common (perhaps it still is) to speak of a ‘gaijin license’, or foreigner license, which allowed one to get away with things that one simply could not have done back home.

I did not at that time think of this in terms of ‘a good-natured readiness to surrender one’s own claim to public space’ on the part of the settled population, but that is undoubtedly what it was - and what it was that allowed all the ‘aggressive energy’ of a 21 or 22 year old male far from home to ‘rush’ in. The temptation to take advantage of this was too strong for most of us to resist - though some resisted much less forcefully than others. And it resulted in, at times, cringeworthy antics going far beyond the level of mere nuisance or ‘nocence’, and indeed beyond what I would be comfortable subjecting my readership to in detail: public sex, drunken foolishness, violence, hijinks and bad juju.

Having seen the degeneracy of the expat scene in and around Tokyo I gradually found myself gaining more and more respect for the toughness with which the Japanese authorities deal with matters of immigration - i.e., if you step out of line, you’re out. I knew two people during my first couple of years in the country who were deported - one for a drug-related offence that in the UK would not even have registered the interest of an average police officer, and one for overstaying his visa. And I knew of nobody in our extended circle who considered these outcomes to be anything other than just - we had all been there on some of the many occasions the former of these men, for instance, had shoplifted expensive bottles of cognac from supermarkets; we all knew that the latter, a former US marine, had more or less made it his mission in life to seduce as many housewives as he could. Their deportations were clearly of net benefit to Japanese society (actually, one could even say they were of gross benefit), and we all knew it. Our response was, uniformly, ‘Fair enough’. One lived by the sword and one died by it.

We all knew, in other words, and could readily own up to the fact that young male immigrants bring with them a host of social ills, and it is sensible therefore to have a means of ejecting them as soon as they reveal themselves to be more trouble than they are worth, and to control their numbers overall. And to this it should be added that it is more sensible yet to ensure that illegal entry is stopped absolutely, on the grounds that any illegal male entrant is vastly more likely at the margin to be of the type to bear nocence-driving ‘aggressive energy’ simply by dint of having a lack of respect for law.

Our great problem in this regard, of course, is that it is next to impossible to discuss this subject sensibly and rationally, because - as I mentioned earlier - it strikes at so many sensitive spots all at once. The first of these is male-female sex differences; we are deeply uncomfortable with the notion that men and women might behave differently to one another in different social contexts and that, for this very reason, young male immigrants may simply be much less desirable to have in a country than female ones (or indeed older males who are less beholden to the whims of testosterone and may be married with children). To this can be added the second sore spot, which is the sheer squeamishness that exists in respect of any possible implication that diversity might sometimes be a weakness, and that having a diverse young adult male population, of whatever ethnic composition, brings with it certain risks by dint of male characteristics that transcend race.

But the third is I think the more important, and brings us back to where we began: a denialism about the darker, less pleasant aspects of the human soul. Those who occupy positions of power and influence in our societies are thoroughly imbued by what it seems sensible to call Rousseauvian kitsch. Human beings are basically good, the idea goes - and it is society that tends to lead them astray. And this becomes a kitsch because it unites those who hold this idea in a common perception that perfection is possible. If only society could be fixed, and made perfect, then innate human goodness will be released from its shackles and given free rein.

Kitsch, Kundera tells us, is always predicated on the ‘denial of shit’, precisely because it holds to the possibility of perfection. Kitsch presents a vision of idealised niceness, and anything that is undesirable, discordant, or awkward must therefore be ruthlessly expunged. Just as the existence of literal shit itself suggests that human beings can never be perfect (because how can a perfect being be reduced to sitting on a toilet to defecate?), the existence of metaphorical shit - nastiness, unpleasantness, unpalatable conclusions, nuisance and cruelty - suggests that humanity is irredeemably and incorrigibly imperfect. The result of this is that it, so to speak, harshes the vibe; it ruins the beautiful and fantastical vision which kitsch makes possible. And its existence must therefore simply be ignored and denied - it cannot be allowed to enter perception at all.

That is the position that we have sadly come to with regard to mass immigration. As with every social phenomenon, immigration has benefits and drawbacks. Yet those who govern us have become intoxicated with the heady notion that our societies can be at the same time diverse, united and tolerant. And the vision of such a society that exists in their heads, as incoherent as it is, is in its own way one of perfection - a sort of universalised celebration of difference, all the time, everywhere. Unity is achieved through absolute recognition of all individual variation by public authority, in every circumstance.

To bring up the notion that there are some types of immigrant who may be less desirable to have in the country than others, much less to suggest that this ought to bear relevance for our immigration policy in the round, would be simply to introduce too much shit into the picture. It would be to imply that diversity, unity and tolerance are not coeval. But, perhaps even more importantly than that, it would be to imply that human nature is not in the end perfectable. And this would be a recognition that would strike at the heart of the gambit of modern government, because it would suggest that in the end the project of politics is pessimistic. It is not to realise social purposes, but rather to achieve the much less ambitious goal of long-term survival. To a governing class steeped in the notion that realising social purposes is the quintessence of governing, this would be anathema, because it would throw their entire project into disrepute. And it therefore must simply be suppressed and ignored.

To the untrained eye, though, the thrust of things in the end easy to grasp. All one need do is picture a scenario in which one is being forced at gunpoint to make a choice about who to share one’s own home with for a year. Presented with no information other than age and sex, and with a choice between a 55 year old woman and a 20 year old man, no sane person would choose the latter over the former to be their own, long-term housemate. We simply know, on average, what the characteristics of the two respective demographics will be, and which we would prefer to have in our home - we know who is more likely to be respectful, considerate, quiet. The same should obviously, patently be true in respect of who is allowed to enter the country and who is not. Yet we currently do not even allow it to figure in our calculus - to our immense and ongoing detriment and puzzlement.