Growing up as a child of immigrants means navigating two cultures. Columnist Shukri Bashir explores identity, expectations and belonging, revealing the tension and complexity of growing up in two very different worlds.
There is a particular silence you learn to read when you grow up with immigrant parents – the pause before they answer a question in English and the slight embarrassment when they don’t understand a question.
As a child, you don’t always understand this silence, but you feel its weight long before you can articulate why it’s there.
It’s a strange experience teaching your parents things my peers’ parents already know.
I grew up knowing my story stretched far beyond the borders of the country I was raised in.
In Britain, I was just another kid in the playground, another person in a sea of stories.
At home, Somali was the first language I heard, the language my parents spoke to each other, the words that wrapped around my earliest memories.
I lost it somewhere along the way, caught between two worlds, and the ache of relearning it reminded me how much of myself had been shaped by absence and distance.
My parents’ story is where it all began. They fled Somalia during the 1989 civil war with two small children in their arms. They chose movement over death. They became refugees in the Netherlands, before moving to the UK in 2001.
They arrived with three children and all their belongings – yet they had trauma that they didn’t have the luxury to unpack.
I still find it hard to fathom how they were able to rebuild their lives and create a home on such unfamiliar soil – all so me and my siblings could have a life that they never had.
My sister and I were born a few years after my family arrived in the UK and, my God, growing up in a predominantly white area made my difference impossible to ignore.
I was Somali, Muslim, visibly “other”, and that visibility felt sharp on days when my identity was used against me.
I remember sitting in class during the rise in terrorist attacks in 2017 and I could feel the thickness of the air, and the eyes flickering in my direction, as if my identity made me responsible for horrors I feared just as much as anyone else.
I learned to shrink, to tread softly, to exist in a way no child should ever have to.
And yet, the strangest part of my identity is that even Somalia doesn’t always feel like mine.
I’ve only been back a few times – yet each visit pulls at something deep inside of me.
I see my cousins – my age, my reflection – living simplistic lives that so easily could have been mine.
For years, that guilt weighed heavy. But over time it softened into gratitude: gratitude for the life I was given, for the sacrifice my parents made.
And pride – pride in being Somali, in being Muslim, and having parents who refused to be held back by boundaries so that they could give their children everything they couldn’t have.
Everything I am, everything I dream of, exists because of their courage and the older I get, the heavier and prouder that truth feels.
The feeling is sharper now in Britain where far-right, anti-immigration discourse grows louder, framing immigrants as threats or burdens.
For a city I know like the back of my hand, Leicester has never made me feel more out of place – more lost – than I do today.
The flags that once used to symbolise hope and opportunity for many people – proof of safety in a new country – now are a marker of exclusion, a big ‘no entry’ sign shouting that we are unwanted.
People who have never had to flee anything speak as if entire communities don’t have the right to exist, forgotten in their rants is that I – a child of an immigrant – grew up side by side with them.
Because the truth is simple: Me and you? – we were born in the same hospital. We played with the same toys. We shared the same stage in school plays. We complained about the same homework and sat the same exams.
So what makes us so different? Our lives have always been intertwined, long before politics tried to pull us apart. Growing up between cultures isn’t empty. It teaches reliance, empathy, and gratitude, layering your identity with history, struggle, and hope.
It’s the ache of knowing your parents left everything – family, homes, entire histories – so translating that phone call, or helping them fill out a form is a sacrifice that we can make.
We are not as different as the headlines suggest. We grew up side by side.
Our journeys just started in different places.
