Strangers Next Door

Immigration and the Work of Neighbourliness

Few subjects in our national life generate more heat and less understanding than immigration. The arguments are familiar by now. One side speaks of numbers, borders, pressure on housing and services, and the pace of change. The other speaks of rights, economic need, compassion, and the contribution migrants make. Each side accuses the other of not listening, and on that point at least, both are right.

What strikes me is how rarely either side talks about the place where immigration is actually lived: the street. Nationally, immigration is a set of statistics and a battleground of policy. Locally, it is the family who have moved in three doors down, the new shop on the corner, the unfamiliar language overheard at the bus stop, the school playground where the mix of children has changed in a decade. It is here, far more than in Westminster, that people decide whether change feels like enrichment or loss.

I spent ten years as a parish priest on the east side of Bradford, in a largely Muslim part of the city, helping to establish a new church and community centre. I learned there that most of the national conversation was conducted at a height that bore little relation to life on the ground. On the ground, the question was never really “immigration: for or against?” It was something much more ordinary and much more difficult: can people who did not choose one another learn to live well together?

That question deserves to be taken seriously from both directions. It is too easy to dismiss people’s unease about change as simple prejudice. Sometimes it is. But often it is something else: grief for a familiar world that seems to be slipping away, a sense of not being consulted, a fear of becoming a stranger in one’s own place. Those feelings are real and they are not shameful. Equally, it is too easy to talk about newcomers as a problem to be managed, a number to be reduced, or a labour shortage to be filled. They are people, with the same longing as everyone else to belong somewhere and be known by someone.

Part of what makes this so hard is the same transactional thinking I have written about before. When we see ourselves primarily as consumers of scarce goods, such as housing, school places, GP appointments, then every newcomer can look like a competitor. And when the economy sees migrants primarily as units of labour, it has little interest in whether they ever become neighbours. Both views reduce people to their function. Neither has anything to say about belonging, and without belonging, suspicion fills the gap.

What does neighbourliness offer instead? Not a policy. The questions of how many people should come, and on what terms, are genuine political questions, and reasonable people will continue to disagree about them. But whatever the answers, the people who are here have to find a way to share a common life. That cannot be legislated into existence. Integration is not an outcome a government can deliver; it is something that happens, or fails to happen, between people.

And it happens in quite unremarkable ways. There is a long line of research suggesting that prejudice diminishes when people from different groups meet regularly, on equal terms, around something they share. That matches everything I saw in Bradford. The breakthroughs were rarely dramatic. They came when people found themselves at the same table often enough to stop being categories and start being names: the mother whose child was in the same class, the neighbour who helped when the car wouldn’t start, the man at the community centre who turned out to support the same football team.

I have seen the same thing in very much harder circumstances. Some years ago I helped establish a project bringing Arabs and Jews together in the Holy Land. Nobody pretended that relationships could dissolve the political realities of that place. But over time, participants came to see things from the other’s position. They did not stop disagreeing. They stopped being unable to imagine one another. That is not a small thing. It may be the precondition for everything else.

If neighbourliness is the answer, then the loss of shared spaces is part of the problem. Many of the places where different people once met without trying, the pub, the library, the working men’s club, the church hall, the local shop, have closed or emptied. People now live side by side in parallel, their lives routed through cars, screens and separate institutions. Without somewhere to meet, even goodwill has nowhere to go. Rebuilding those places, and the everyday rhythms that bring people into them, is one of the most practical things any of us can do.

It also asks something of everyone. Hospitality has to run in both directions. Those already settled are asked to make room, to be curious rather than suspicious, to extend a welcome that costs something. Those arriving are asked to join in, to invest in a place that is now theirs too, to become part of its shared life rather than living alongside it. Neither can be forced. Both can be invited, and both become far more likely when there are people and places doing the inviting.

This, again, is where the common good becomes concrete. A common life is not something we inherit and then defend. It has to be made, and remade, by each generation and each wave of newcomers. Our national politics may continue to argue about immigration in the language of numbers and threats. But in thousands of neighbourhoods, the real question will be settled quietly, one relationship at a time. The stranger next door becomes a neighbour not because a policy said so, but because somebody knocked on the door.

**You can read Paul's blogs here.