Spaces and exchanges:how immigration shaped today's world aèd what have been the main challenges encountered during this process?

Spaces and exchanges:

First of all I would like to give a definition of exchanges. It is the act of giving or receiving something in substitution for something else. In today’s modern-day world these exchanges can take several forms:  economic – work exchanges, exchange of goods, cultural – exchange of ideas, education, movement of people like immigration. Our modern-day world is changing quickly and seems to be a smaller place due to improvements in technology and communication. I would like to illustrate this phenomenon through the theme of immigration, which I believe can characterize the different aspect of this notion. The question that I would like to raise is: how immigration shaped today’s world and what have been the main challenges encountered during this process? 

To begin with, I would like to define immigration. Immigration is an international movement of people into a country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle or reside there. When migration occurs, the migrants bring their culture with them, participating to the formation of a more multicultural society. One of the most multicultural places in the world is the UK.

This country has seen her historical story shaped by its migration history.

First of all, we saw a BBC documentary entitled “Multicultural Britain”. In this document we meet Avinda who is Kenyan and who arrived with his son Sunny in 1970. Avinda says what it was like at his arrival in the UK. It was very hard for him, he couldn’t find a job and it was the same problem for people like him he says. But now, it is really different. They are integrated, they are part of the community. In the past, differences between communities have led to violence. To solve this issue, community based projects have brought different generations and cultures together.

To understand the importance of the different ethnic groups in the UK, we watched in class a documentary called “Little India” in which many markets have, in order to meet the tastes of the new populations of consumers, adapted themselves. The food presented was mostly Indian and Bengali recipes. No food of British culture is truly British, and it is very difficult to present proper British food because everything was originally foreign food. This is a good example of what others cultures can bring to a country, and we can wonder if such countries are not just a best of all the other cultural aspect of their colonies. This analysis can bring us to wonder what it really means to be British? The notion of “Britishness” has been a deep concern for Black Britons. The Guardian published an article debating about that matter in 2011 after the triumph of Mo Farah, a British athlete of Somalian origin.

The fact that inequalities are increasing is a notable trend in our modern society. We worked on a cartoon, named “a tale of two Britain’s”. The author presents a vision of Britain pretty negative. On one hand you have a joyful girl with straight A, with a powerful, shiny background, and on the other hand, you have a guy, probably a migrant in an inner city, with a criminal record. The author criticizes the inequality toward education; it is way more difficult to each excellence when you’re underprivileged. Furthermore, I personally think that it is difficult to have stability if the world continues to move at two speeds, one for the haves and another for the have-nots.  

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