Afghans in UK: Citizens, Settlers or Social Parasites?

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans live in Britain, most of them came here as refugees and has been awarded live to remain or British nationality. Most of them benefit from social welfare systems and public funding, with the integration of eastern European into EU, a larger poll of refugees are coming to Britain, better educated and less relying on social welfare. We are now conceptualizing Afghan immigrants at the points where our analysis privileges categories generated by European Union.

Figures of threat thus haunt the way we explain diasporic formations. this haunting, selectively, by investigating two figures of threat for immigrant theory: the parasite and the settler. The use of such figures ultimately insinuates several presumptions into analysis. One of these presumptions is most significant: that a diasporic community is ‘Other’ and, as such, is separate, separable, and isolable from a national people. The nation in Europe is now the continent, a European nation is more relevant today than a national. Instead of afghan labour its preferred to have polish labour. The forms of knowledge production that intersect domains of immigrant studies and the modern nation-state, thus, constitute immigrant as a particular kind of problem that needs to be dealt with. The new immigration schemes in Britain reflects this, its practically impossible for refugees to get to Britain overland today while most of afghans travelled to Britain via land ten years ago. Even for skilled worker its made several times difficult under the new scheme introduced in march 08.

This focus on immigrant-as-problem deflects our attention from more precise analysis of the nation-state’s relations to alterity. In contrast to normative models that focus on the settler and the parasite, the nation state sees the difference of immigrant as a threat and simultaneously desires to interpolate diasporic difference into a multicultural vision of the nation’s people. In other words, the underside of what is often seen as a diasporic threat is a vision of promise in possibility of liberal unity. This goes back to Britain paranoia of world war 2, Britain was scared of Fascism and promoting a mix society was state policy until recently. However, this figure of promise, which also works at the margins of immigrant theory, is highly problematic; it uncritically recuperates, on the one hand, a capitalist fantasy of productive labour and commodity circulation and, on the other, a nationalist fantasy wherein diasporic difference may be abstracted into national equivalence. In the face of new Europe and plenty of poor immigrants form eastern Europe this is proving more difficult. East Europeans are productive labour and its easier to abstract their cultural differences under pan European ambition.

Sexuality plays a critical role in these diverse processes of abstraction. Particularly significant is the presumption found within discourses of the nation-state that both the minority and majority communities proliferate through distinctive sexual norms, interdictions, and transgressions—in other words, what is operative here is a generalized hetero-normativity which is posited to move between and conjoin a national /European and a supposedly separate immigrant community. This is a stupid argument, This analytic is designed not only to reveal the hidden presumptions of ‘promise’ within figures of threat, but also to draw out another, perhaps more powerful, figure of alterity—not of the immigrant conceived of as the nation-state’s ‘other’(Tololyan, 1991), but of an otherness of the national/European people itself.

We can’t answer the question I posed as a title, I argue, in theory. Britian is entering into a new chapter of economic and social relation with Europe and it affects its long standing view of multiculturalism. Afghans in Britian needs to be studies to understand their social contribution.