On jobs, belonging, and the stories we tell ourselves
Someone once told me, in that flat, accusatory tone people use when they think they’ve uncovered a grand truth, that I was the reason a native-born worker couldn’t find a job.
The sentence hung in the air like a misplaced piece of luggage, heavy and handled too many times. It wasn’t anger I heard beneath it, not really, more like a story someone had carried for years without ever checking whether it still fit the world.
When people say things like this, they usually aren’t talking about jobs at all. They’re talking about belonging, and about a sense that something slipped from their hands when they weren’t looking.
The claim becomes a shortcut, a way to name the discomfort of watching someone unfamiliar succeed in a place you thought was reserved for you. It’s easier to blame a person than a system, and easier to blame a system than history.
The strange part is how old some of these ideas are.
Immigration categories written half a century ago are still invoked like sacred texts, as if a nurse shortage in 1973 can explain every visa approved today. People imagine that anyone who comes from somewhere else must be uniquely talented, irreplaceably skilled, somehow superhuman. And if they believe that, then losing out to someone foreign feels inevitable and unfair at the same time.
It’s a story that flatters both sides while clarifying nothing. Underneath all this sits a tension no one enjoys naming.
If you admit that a local worker could have done the same job, then you have to look at why they didn’t get the chance. If you insist that only an outsider could do it, you start believing myths about your own indispensability.
Neither version is flattering. Neither version is entirely true.
Both keep people from seeing the simple reality that economies move like weather, shaped by pressures far bigger than individual merit.
What remains is quieter.
People work where they can, when they can, carrying their own reasons that never make it into these arguments. Blame is a blunt instrument that breaks more than it fixes.
The truth lives somewhere smaller, in the recognition that opportunity isn’t a birthright or a theft. It’s a shifting doorway, and most of us are just trying to step through without pretending we’re the only ones who deserve to.