Return to Sender

Return to Sender: When the Empire Forgets It Sent for Us

By Sekou Gar Sankara

So now the United Kingdom, keeper of stolen jewels and selective memory, has declared it’s time for “foreign workers” to go. Yes, the same workers who sanitized their hospitals, fueled their buses, stocked their shelves, and nursed their elderly while the elite and the ordinary relaxed in their respective silos. As the aristocrats clinked wine glasses behind lockdown gates and clapped performatively from colonial porches, they are now exhausted and overwhelmed with doing nothing.

But this isn’t an immigration reform. It’s imperial panic in polite packaging. Across the West, the UK, the US, Canada, and the EU, we’re witnessing synchronized hysteria disguised as policy. Birth rates are plunging, pension systems are collapsing, and labor forces are shrinking. These aging empires don’t just want your labor; they want your silence. They want your desperation. They want you grateful enough to take the abuse, but too scattered to build anything better. They don’t fear migration. They fear irrelevance. They fear losing control over bodies they’ve long considered assets. And when that fear spikes, they do what empires always do: destabilize the Global South, demonize the migrants they displaced, and disguise dependency as nationalism.

Libya wasn’t broken by accident. It was broken on schedule. Failed states make perfect holding pens. Slave markets are cheaper than legal immigration. Chaos is more cost-effective than compassion. They’ll manufacture a crisis in your homeland, then market your exile as an opportunity. Canada will smile politely while quietly deporting the very workers who keep its farms and care homes running. The EU will outsource brutality to border patrols in Tunisia, then send press releases about human rights. The UK will strip your citizenship over paperwork while selling Commonwealth nostalgia like cheap perfume. And the US? The US will steal your talent, call it meritocracy, and treat your communities like crime scenes.

A Dispatch to the Afrikan Diaspora

To those in Europe: You are useful until you are inconvenient. You are citizen-adjacent. And even when born on their soil, they treat your belonging as rented.

To those in America: Don't let Hollywood fool you. They celebrate Blackness only when it’s profitable or dead. They will dress up in your culture, monetize your slang, and legislate your body. To Canada: Diversity without equity is decoration. You cannot multiculturalize your way out of colonialism. To the Caribbean: Stop mistaking temporary visas or visa-free access for respect. If they could import your labor without your dignity, they already would. To the Afrikan continent: Stop exporting brilliance to feed systems that exploit it. Do not mourn every visa denial, some doors are exits from dignity.