Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker
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Hello Wonderseekers!
There is a building in London called Lunar House. Well, it’s actually in Croydon, a 45-minute tube ride on the outskirts of South London, which feels like it gets to be called London only on a technicality. Croydon is a place that light forgot, and Lunar House represents its greyest epicentre. It houses the UK Home Office’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate.
You know you’ve reached Lunar House well before you arrive, as you’ll see the line of people queuing out front and down the street. People of every colour and ethnicity and language, each carrying a sense of heavy anticipation, curling and morphing along the pavement like a whisp of dense smoke.
These people share two things in common. They are all waiting. And they are all immigrants. And for more than a decade, I shared that shuffling, liminal space with them, also waiting, also an immigrant.
I am an immigrant and come from a family of immigrants. I’d like to share part of a letter I wrote to my local MP, Keir Starmer, who happens to also be the Prime Minister, about a recent comment he made regarding the risk that immigration will make Britain ‘an island of strangers.’
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Mr Starmer,
Let me tell you about this ‘stranger’.
When I was 35, I left an abusive marriage. Over the course of eight years, my ex had hollowed me out until I had nothing left except the bruises. But I guess I still had enough in the tank to move back to my home town with the few precious items I was able to take with me. I licked my wounds while planning the next chapter of my life.
I was not a typical student for Queens University Belfast, being both American and what they would call a ‘very mature student.’ But when they accepted me, I gave notice at my job and sold everything I had. I took my old engagement ring and had jewellers cut out the diamond. The money they gave me for it was almost the exact amount I needed for my flight from Atlanta to Belfast. It felt like a sign. Like my life was turning around, and the UK became a beacon of hope and renewal to me.
It took incredible effort and bravery to leave. No matter the impetus, it is never easy to leave one’s home. But I made it to Belfast and graduated top of my class at Queens for my Masters degree. I went on to marry an amazing man from Nottingham, bought a home in your constituency and made a family with him and his son.
We started a business that employed many Brits and also served as a conduit for incredibly intelligent young people from other countries to immigrate to the UK and work with us. They have all stayed and continue to contribute. Our clients included some of the biggest British businesses like Unilever, BP, GSK and others. I’ve been an expert in my field for the BBC and BBC Radio as well as The Economist and The Sunday Times, among others.
I went on to write a Wall Street Journal bestselling book that was featured in the Metro, the Guardian and many other British publications, and I’m now pursuing my PhD at QUB.
I also became a citizen. Took your stupid Life in the UK test. (Tell me why I need to know the tallest rollercoaster in the country?) Paid tens of thousands of pounds over the course of a decade to an immigration attorney because your immigration system is intentionally difficult to navigate.
Every time I had to go spend the day in a waiting room in Croydon, I looked around at the people for whom English was not a first language. Those who clearly had much less money than I did. Who didn’t have legal representation. And I thought how much braver they were than I was. How hard they were fighting for a chance to be British.
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So when I see people in the US being lured to court with the sole intention of dismissing their cases so they can be scooped up by ICE in the hallways of justice, I don’t see foreigners who broke the rules (75% of recent deportees have no criminal conviction) I see immigrants like me, like my family, who have been fighting to make America their home but had the rules changed on them for the sole purpose of cruelty and dehumanisation.
If you aren’t an immigrant, you can’t know the pervasive, foreboding, tearful, fearful existence it is. A life lived under the Damoclean shadow of a government that holds the power to blow up your life, even when you’ve done everything right.
I hope you never do.
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
Crossing Borders, Carrying Trauma: The psychological toll of the immigrant experience.
What fear does to your brain and how to stop it: According to neuroscience, fear is killing us.
What immigrants know about happiness: The act of migration involves taking risks in pursuit of a meaningful reward and having faith in the future.
I hope to give you an update from Psychedelic Science 2025 next week. Until then, let’s try to be good to each other.
With wonder,
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