© Guardian/Sara LeeKamila Shamsie
Five years previously, when I had entered the UK on a Writers, Artists and Composers visa I thought the road to settlement, and then citizenship, was flat and paved. As long as I could maintain myself financially, continued to work as a writer, and didn't break any laws, I'd be eligible for ILR in five years, and citizenship a year later. And then there would be a citizenship ceremony to end it all, which seemed a pleasant enough idea. I'm all for rituals to mark moments of significance. But I wasn't prepared for the mutable nature of immigration laws, and their ability to make migrants feel perpetually insecure, particularly as the rhetoric around migration mounted. "I didn't think that would affect someone like you," a large number of Brits said to me over the years, with the implacable British belief that if you're middle class you exist under a separate set of laws. They weren't entirely wrong - the more privileged you are in terms of income and education the more likely it is you'll be able to clear all hurdles. It's only the rich around whose convenience immigration laws are tailored.
I live at sufficient remove from that category to have endured many bouts of panic over the years. I would then have to sit down at my laptop and navigate my way to the (bookmarked) UKBA homepage to check that no new rules had been announced without my noticing, which would require me to pack my bags and leave. This sense of insecurity had set in about a year and a half after I first moved to London. Soon after my arrival, I had heard of an overhaul of migration laws which would bring in a new "points based" immigration system; but the migration lawyer I spoke to said there was no way that the Writers, Artists and Composers visa could be brought within that system, since there was no way to actually measure "cultural value". Speaking in a manner that suggested deep insider knowledge, the lawyer said that the migration route I had entered on would remain unchanged. I had enough faith in his polished assurance that I paid little attention when the new points based system was announced.
Several months later, near the time when I had to renew my writer's visa, I went to the UKBA website and discovered my visa category had simply been abolished. I would either have to find some other category for which I was eligible, or leave the country. That was the day I discovered how deeply the idea of a new home can settle into you in the space of under two years. I remember walking across the Hungerford bridge that night, looking at St Paul's Cathedral and the Gherkin skyscraper, and the liquid darkness of the Thames, imagining London lost to me. It wouldn't be a total severing; we would still be able to meet on my visits as we used to before - but now that I had learned what it is to wake up with London, and fall asleep with it, and have it be the place I returned to when all my wanderings were done. The thought of having nothing more than visitation rights felt like heartbreak.
Early next morning, after a sleepless night, I returned to the UKBA website, and discovered a way out (or, more accurately, a way in). There was another visa category; one for which it didn't matter if you'd written books or composed music. What did matter was the level of education you'd attained and how much money you'd earned in the preceding 12 months. It was purely a matter of good fortune that I was at the right point in the grossly unreliable earning cycle of a novelist's life - I had just sold a novel, and so it was the year of Incoming Money. (Writers are often asked to choose a favourite among their novels - I don't have one in terms of content, but I will always love Burnt Shadows for allowing me to buy my way into a new visa category.) Even in all my huge relief, I registered a sense of disappointment at having been transferred from Writers, Artists and Composers to the category Tier 1 (General). The age of wanting people to enter the country because they might have talents that seemed worthwhile had passed, and something colder and thin-lipped had taken its place.
I never really felt safe after that. Every announcement of proposed changes to migration laws made my heart stutter, every politician's announcement about slashing migration numbers felt like a threat. Another couple of years later, as the time for applying for ILR approached, there was another scare following further revisions to the law but this one, blessedly for me, only pertained to first-time Tier 1 (General) applicants, who would have to show a far higher level of income than previously necessary to qualify under that category. And so, five years down the line, I was able to apply for ILR - though first I had to take the Life in the UK test, which continues to be mistakenly referred to as a Citizenship Test.
At this juncture I received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy from my British friends. "It's ridiculous," they said. "Why should you have to learn about the kings and queens of England in order to stay?" In fact, the test teaches you little about kings and queens and is full of information about employment rights, schooling, the history of gender equality laws and other rather useful things (though the Tories want to add the kings-and-queens stuff, which will render it absurd.) What struck me about the genuine concern from my friends was their assumption that cramming facts for a few days and sitting for a multiple choice test was the most taxing part of the settlement process. The notion that once you enter the country it is a straightforward route to settlement and citizenship is one that continues to be widespread even as political parties are falling over themselves to prove themselves as "tough on immigrants". The citizenship laws are, consequently, rapidly moving to the point where the only criteria for becoming British will be the size of your bank balance.
I passed the test. I climbed Everest. A year later, I applied for citizenship - a far more painless process than applying for ILR, and less fraught with concerns that someone might find reasons to reject you. And within a few months I was on my way to Camden town hall for a ceremony, accompanied by my sister and parents, who were visiting London from Karachi at the time.
The council chamber of the Camden town hall is a lovely high-ceilinged room, a place ready to accommodate significance. My family was taken to the rows of seats for those viewing the proceedings , and I joined 60 or 70 other people in the queue to have my name checked against an official list, and enter the seating area of the chamber.
© Kamila ShamsieKamila Shamsie at her citizenship ceremony.
What dissipated the feeling of melancholy was a glance toward one end of the council chamber. There was a picture of the Queen in her tiara, set against a large union jack. I might have laughed out loud. It seemed so American: the smiling portrait, all those flags. And then someone pressed "play" on a CD player and classical music filled the room. I want to say it was The Ride of the Valkyries but this seems so over the top that it must be a novelist's imagination rather than memory. Mustn't it? All I know is I kept looking across the room at my sister and giggling.
The mayor of Camden entered, and made a rather nice speech which was largely about Camden, its diverse community, its great museums and libraries that were open to the public and other such things which had the benefit of actually pertaining to the lives of people in the room. Then she read out a list of the different nationalities of people present, which was the most emotional part of the ceremony for me. When she reached Iraq, a man standing across from me nodded to identify his country of origin, and his eyes filled with tears. I kept my eyes on him rather than the flag-affixed Queen as I read out in unison with my fellow almost-citizens the words of allegiance "to her Majesty the Queen, her Heirs and Successors".
I looked at him again as we all sang - or moved our lips meaninglessly in time to - the national anthem; he was near tears at various points, and although I knew nothing about him other than "Iraq" and the fact that he didn't appear affluent. I found myself trying to imagine what it must have felt like for him every time there was talk of changing the immigration rules and he waited to discover what that meant for his ability to stay in the UK. However high my levels of anxiety might have felt along the way, I always knew I had the luxury of another home to return to, as well as a livelihood which wasn't contingent on being in one place rather than another.
And then my name was called out. I stopped forward to collect my certificate of naturalisation, posed for a photograph in front of the Queen and flag, and sat back down. We had all been given envelopes for our certificates, and when I opened mine out popped Theresa May. Or at least a letter of welcome from her, with her photograph at the top of the page. Just a few weeks earlier, May had sent her "Go Home" vans across the UK, so this hardly inspired a feeling of belonging. Instead, it served as a reminder that the process of coming to British citizenship through six years of residence can't really be a process of feeling increasingly British when it is so marked with threat and insecurity. We want the paper that says we are citizens in order to protect us from the state's growing antipathy to migrants and its ever shifting laws. Indefinite Leave to Remain isn't enough to create that feeling of security as it once did. Then again, I was soon to discover that even citizenship itself isn't enough to create that feeling of security - a few weeks after I become a citizen, May called for powers to strip Britons of citizenship in particular circumstances, if they are born outside the UK. Anyone who thinks that, if this comes to pass, the category of "particular circumstances" won't ever be broadened to fit the prevailing mood or score political points simply hasn't been paying attention to the rhetoric that separates "the British" from "British passport-holders". (Money is now such an important factor in citizenship that it doesn't take an Orwell to imagine a future in which the born-outside-the-UK Brits might be stripped of citizenship if placing too great a burden on the resources of the state - is it even necessary to add that the irony here that the resources of the state, as embodied by institutions such as the NHS, would probably collapse without migrants?)
After the ceremony there was tea and sandwiches, and then I returned home, feeling the whole thing had been rather anti-climactic, and in some ways quite dispiriting, when I had expected the opposite.
The first thing I did on returning home was download and fill out a passport application form. Wanting to stay was my primary reason for acquiring citizenship, but the added benefit of a passport that allowed me to travel without the visa nightmares that come attached to a Pakistani passport was also a strong motivating factor. I filled out the form, took it to the post office, and handed it across the counter to a bearded man with the name tag Khaled.
"First passport?" he asked.
"Yes."
Khaled looked gravely at me.
"Welcome," he said, and everything uncomplicated and moving I had wanted to feel in that citizenship ceremony, I felt then.
There are plenty of British citizens who do not feel safe and secure in the UK. For far more serious reasons than that the gov decides artists, writers and composers are not all that important.
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You'll forgive me please if I can't quite drum up sufficient sympathy for someone who already has secure citizenship and middle-class, privileged status in the country of her birth (whose citizenship she is maintaining: how then does her oath of loyalty to the Queen and the UK sit...?)