Good Immigrant, Bad Immigrant: On Assimilation, Civility, and Control

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The demand for assimilation is not an invitation to belong, but rather an increasingly weaponised mechanism of hierarchy. 

Historically, the process of ‘assimilation’ has been framed as a pathway to legitimacy. In contemporary British immigration discourse, there are the “good” English-speaking, skilled, economically productive, and grateful immigrants, and the “bad” dependent, incompatible, welfare-sucking immigrants who arrive on small boats. The use of these political constructions, rather than empirical binary realities, creates a third unscrutinised group that retains the authority to classify them. 

In everyday social encounters, these distinctions are, in fact, invisible. Visa category, sponsorship status, and tax contribution are legible only to the state, and not in public space. What is legible are embodied markers, such as race, accent, and dress. These classifications, therefore, become fantasies projected onto racialised bodies, and those fantasies determine treatment and, essentially, access to dignity.

There has been a clear intensification of anti-immigrant rhetoric in British politics, with the rise of populist parties identifying immigrants as the scapegoats for national frustration. And why wouldn’t they? Net migration has reached historically high levels, and in moments of economic strain, visible demographic change provides a convenient focal point for public anxiety. 

When immigration is framed as the structural cause of national decline, assimilation takes on a defensive character. It stops being about participation in a common civic project and becomes an attempt to demonstrate harmlessness, fragmenting minority communities. Those who are skilled professionals, with perhaps long-settled families, who watch Strictly Dancing on Saturday evenings, are incentivised to distance themselves from the most vulnerable (asylum seekers, recent arrivals, or simply those who seem more culturally distinct). The “good immigrant” must separate themselves from the “bad”, even maybe subconsciously, in order to preserve status. If your legitimacy depends on deflecting suspicion, then suspicion has already been accepted as reasonable. 

It is not on us to neutralise the political anxieties we did not create. We are entitled to participate in shared public life without that participation functioning as evidence submitted for ‘approval’. 

This categorisation proves the argument that assimilation results in the internalisation of colonial ideas and racial hierarchies that many Western societies were built on. This happens when immigrants begin to see themselves through the classifications created by the dominant culture. When “skilled”, accentless, English‑speaking immigrants are positioned as superior, they are elevated through a framework rooted in whiteness, productivity, and linguistic conformity. These values mirror the colonial hierarchy that rewarded proximity to the coloniser, and punished cultural difference. Immigrants who internalise this begin to reproduce the same ranking system within their own communities. Those who are here on skilled worker visas with less noticeable accents may see themselves as “superior”, and those who don’t are viewed as lesser. 

British society places value on visible, performative civility. Please and sorrys, queueing, and orderly behaviour. These performances can lead to a sort of evidence of moral character. This performance of civility can easily become a cloak that allows hierarchical and exclusionary behaviour to persist unchallenged. Politeness in words alone can mask prejudiced actions. Performative orderly queueing can mask forms of entitlement exercised elsewhere.

Against this backdrop, immigrant groups like South Asians  are framed as lacking “civic sense”  for being too loud, not courteous, or not quite fitting.  The language of civility has historically been used to construct a moral hierarchy and to position some as inherently more fit to govern, and others as in need of correction or control. British rule in India was justified on the grounds of civilisational superiority and of bringing order and discipline to a society cast as disorderly. Yet these claims about civility coexisted with acts of famine, repression, and extraction.

Today, when similar ideas of “civic sense” are used to frame certain immigrant groups as incompatible, the logic is recognisable and makes us question the authority from which they are imposed. Civility has been used as a moral foundation for exercising hierarchy in the past, and it may now be used to decide our place once again. The standards and language of belonging have all been used before, and we ought to be more critical of the prevailing discourse, to trace its historical roots, and to resist internalising a framework that was never built in our interest.