Susan and I had a country pub for a while, sort of a last adventure before retirement, but that whole story is for another day. Some of our regulars were not really exemplars of the liberal thinking end of English society. They read and believed (!) the tabloid papers. And for the tabloids, when there was no royal wedding or divorce going on or any celebrity nonsense to write about, a perennial fall-back story was how immigrants were the source of all crime and mayhem in the country and besides they were only here to get the unemployment benefits and anyway they take all the jobs away from the otherwise hard working Brits.
Thus immigration was a regular topic of conversation and debate (well not really much debate) in the bar of our pub. One evening, the complaints were targeted on the Polish immigrants who, under EU treaties, had a perfect right to live and work in the UK just as British people had a right to live and work in Poland. I confess that after months of working behind the bar and listening to this racist diatribe, I was well and truly fed up. So this particular evening, I interrupted the flow and said, “Hey, wait just a minute, I’m an immigrant!”
The regulars almost chorused, “No you’re not!”
“Sure I am!”
“No you’re not.”
The point that I was missing was that someone who spoke English, had a pale complexion and was the landlord of an English village pub couldn’t possibly be an Immigrant.
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