By Oluwaseyi Oduyela
It’s easy for most immigrants to be mad at the alt-right protesters in the UK. The reason is simple: they’re after us and envious of our accomplishments.
Listening to some of them talk to journalists, reveals that many have criminal records, making it almost impossible for them to get a good job. It’s easy for us to dismiss them because it’s their fault. That sounds good to us, but how many of us or people that we know have been to jail in Nigeria and after their return could not find jobs? We don’t even have records of convicted felons in Nigeria.
The system in the U.S. and UK makes it hard for a convicted felon to be accepted back into civil society. On job or assistance forms, you have to answer if you have been arrested before, convicted before, or have a case pending. That’s a red flag to employers. In fact, some people won’t get apartments with a criminal record in the U.S., which means that the Department of Corrections, as they call it, isn’t correcting anything.
If immigrants can be broad-minded in their view of the protesters’ complaints, they will see that the cause of the problem is the government. The prisons should work as they are supposed to: corrections. These offenders should be able to get back into society without fear of discrimination.
The protesters should have directed their grievances at the government, not the immigrants. The government needs to fix the broken system.
Let’s look at it from the perspective of the protesters for once and not be biased by our own status and position.
