Immigration traps newcomers who can neither belong nor return home

Evidence

These days it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started … but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers—who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil’s pact … it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 763 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Among them, we still find that oldest group of stateless people, the Heimatlosen produced by the Peace Treaties of 1919, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, and the establishment of the Baltic states. … Sometimes their real origin could not be determined, especially if at the end of the war they happened not to reside in the city of their birth, sometimes their place of origin changed hands so many times in the turmoil of postwar disputes that the nationality of its inhabitants changed from year to year (as in Vilna which a French official once termed la capitale des apatrides) ; more often than one would imagine, people took refuge in statelessness after the first World War in order to remain where they were and avoid being deported to a “homeland” where they would be strangers (as in the case of many Polish and Rumanian Jews in France and Germany, mercifully helped by the antisemitic attitude of their respective consulates). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 684 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Borders generate new hierarchies of belonging shaped by immigration control — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 31; Immigrants reject whichever identity fails their inclusion or differentiation needs — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 748; Immigration becomes a devil’s pact leaving migrants belonging nowhere — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 763 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Immigration becomes a devil’s pact leaving migrants belonging nowhere #corroborates (0.95) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 763
• People sometimes chose statelessness to avoid deportation to unfamiliar homelands #complicates (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 684