Playlist: Immigrants

It's an emotive subject at the best of times, but migration has been a fact of life throughout human existence. Everyone, if you go back far enough, is descended from a migrant of some sort - political borders are more of a recent thing (in the big scheme of things).

Anyway, this is not a political post in any way - just a reminder of one key thing - everyone migrating, for whatever reason (work, education, climate change, war, poverty etc.), temporarily or permanently, locally or over long distance, is a human being and not a faceless number. Each one has feelings, a family, and more often than not, a story to tell.

It is is a subject that should not be ignored, especially through music, and so here are ten tunes that look at immigration through a number of lenses - but all with a humane (and human) element.

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1. Rihanna: American Oxygen

We start with something of a biographical story - a representation in song, of Rihanna's own journey from Barbados to the United States. The song was written by Alex da Kid, Candice Pillay, Sam Harris and Rihanna herself. There is some (acknowledged) inspiration taken from Springsteen's Born In The USA, as an anthem of taking pride in your country and its potential, but in this case as someone who has come from the outside, to chase the American Dream - and "to sweat for a nickel and a dime, turn it into an empire." There is a spirit of hope for the future and that "this is the new America." The video depicts many aspects of the black experience in America, and so in some way provides something of a contradictory counterpoint to the more hopeful tone of the lyrics.

Rihanna: American Oxygen (Official music video)

2. K'naan: Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)

This track by Somali-Canadian rapper K'naan is taken from the Lin-Manuel Miranda curated Hamilton Mixtape, tying in with the Hamilton musical. The song also features the rappers, Snow Tha Product (Mexican), Riz MC (British) and Residente (Puerto Rican). Miranda said of this track, "This election cycle [2016] has brought xenophobia and vilification of immigrants back to the forefront of US politics. This is a musical counterweight..... Each MC culturally represents from a different place on the map. These are my favorite MCs from all over the world. They can speak to this theme from their brilliant perspectives." Entertainment Weekly says that the collaboration was borne out of a conversation between Miranda and Atlantic’s VP of A&R Riggs Morales. They quote Miranda, “Riggs and I are both Latino, and we were like, it would be amazing to find a way to get Residente - maybe the most famous Spanish language rapper - on this mixtape.” (He also happens to be Miranda’s third cousin). I said, ‘What if we do something around [that dialogue]?’ It’s such a highlight of our show. It gets a response every time from the audience.' The pro-immigrant message is increasingly relevant postelection. It has become more potent,” K'naan adds, “It’s more of a fight song.” Mexican-American hip-hop artist Snow Tha Product, also on the track, says: “Now more than ever, we need to speak on these issues. As it says in the introduction - 't's really astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, "immigrant" has somehow become a bad word."

K'naan: Immigrants (We Get The Job Done) (Official music video)

3. Gaby Moreno: Ave Que Emigre

Photo: Lunchbox LP

Another song with autobiographical undertones. Gaby Moreno is a Grammy Award winning Guatemalan singer songwriter, now living in Los Angeles, who sings in both Spanish and English, with music that touches on Latin, blues, folk and Americana. This song contains many nods to her own journey from Central to North America - [translated] "I come from far away, Looking for blue sky, Following predicaments, I come from far away. Memories from my childhood, Sometimes leave the soul, My Guatemala is never forgotten, It is always carried with me."

Gaby Moreno: Ave Que Emigre (Video oficial)

4. Bruce Springsteen: Across The Border

Bruce Springsteen has dipped into this thematic well on many occasions over the years. This particular track probably draws inspiration from Freddy Fender's Across the Borderline. Springsteen's take on it though, is slightly more optimistic in its tale of a Mexican immigrant preparing for the dangerous trip north and across the U.S. border. It was intentionally optimistic because 1995's The Ghost Of Tom Joad LP already contained "a lot of mayhem". Across The Border represented "the kind of dream you would have before you fall asleep, where you live in a world where beauty is still possible." So it becomes a song about retaining (or clinging onto) hope when it seems the odds are almost impossibly stacked against us. There is wistfulness and pain and a reminder that faith and bravery may not always be enough to carry us where we want to go - but still, it is important to remember "for what are we without hope in our hearts?"

Bruce Springsteen: Across The Border (Live in the studio)

5. Steve Earle: City Of Immigrants

Photo: Cory B. Clay

Having lived for three decades in Nashville, Steve Earle had moved back to New York City in the 2000's, telling Jools Holland (on his BBC show, Later) that he wrote the song because every great city in the world was built on immigration. "All of us are immigrants, Every daughter, every son, Everyone is everyone, All of us are immigrants, Everyone." The album it is on, Washington Square Serenade, marks a clear move he was making from the 'guitar town' of his Nashville sound, to a new outlook for New York. The song also includes assistance from the US-based Brazilian group Forro In The Dark.

Steve Earle: City Of Immigrants (Live on Letterman, 2007)

6. Crowded House: Help Is Coming

This thing of beauty was one of the few tracks written in the final mid-90's sessions before Crowded House broke up. It ultimately appeared on 1999's excellent compilation album Afterglow. As Neil Finn's website says, this 'refugee song', "beautifully evoked the journey made over the years by hundreds and thousands of people fleeing unrest in order to find a safer home for their families." While it was originally written about Europeans arriving into New York's Ellis Island, it got a second, very apt life, coming back to prominence in 2015. Against a backdrop of thousands of Syrian families fleeing a three-way civil war - stuck in overcrowded camps on Kos, holding pens in Hungary and the shanty towns and detention centres of Calais, Finn was approached about using the song to do some good. He agreed for a vinyl and download version of the song to be made available, with all proceeds going to the Save The Children relief effort. As it says in the specially made video, "No one puts a child in a boat unless it is safer than the land."

Crowded House: Help Is Coming (Official video - not an easy watch, but important)

7. M.I.A.: Borders

Photo: Daniel Sannwald

Written by M.I.A. (real name Mathangi Arulpragasam), with Levi Lennox and Amish Patel - it an electronic fusion of hip hop and various world music rhythms. Borders, like much of her music, deals with migration - something she could draw on first-hand experience of, having been a refugee herself, fleeing war-torn Sri Lanka, aged 10, with her family, moving to London. The accompanying video garnered much positivity, but with the nature of the topic, it also caused some controversy, as it highlights the migrant crisis going on across Europe at the time (2015) - there was the obvious hate from far right groups, but also some claimed she was using people of colour as props. Everyone featured in the video were 'real' people and not actors, who she got largely from casting in the refugee camps of southern India, where many of the Sri Lankan Tamils had fled civil unrest. They then recreated the Melilla border fence that exists between Morocco and the Spanish North African enclave, to provide the European aspect.

M.I.A.: Borders (Official music video)

8. Rage Against The Machine: Without A Face

Never ones to shy away from controversial and hard hitting topics, Rage Against The Machine (RATM) tackle the issues of immigration, specifically over the Mexican-US border, in typically forthright fashion. The song talks of the hardships faced by Mexicans moving to the States and the wall that was built to keep them out. Lead singer Zack de la Rocha said in 1996, "Since 1986, as a result of a lot of the hate talk and hysteria that the government of the United States has been speaking, 1500 bodies have been found on the border. We wrote this song in response to it." The 'without a face' references the fact once in the U.S. these migrants are often 'unseen' and nameless, and with many people having been hurt, both American and Mexican, by economic policies and trade issues, leaving them, as de la Rocha said, "with no alternatives, without possibilities". As the song says, "Born without a face, One motive, no hope."

RATM: Without A Face (Audio only)

9. The Pogues: Thousands Are Sailing

This tune was written by the bands guitarist Phil Chevron. This is another song about immigration into the United States, but this time from the white European perspective. It is about the looming presence of Ellis Island in New York and the 12 million immigrants that were processed there between 1892 and 1954 - and the number of Irish souls that never quite made it, perishing on the journey (there was a 30% mortality rate on the crossings at times) and who "haunt the waves." But it moves to a more optimistic tone, seeing America as "a land of opportunity" - and that for Irish immigrants, "where'er we go we celebrate the land that makes us refugees."

The Pogues: Thousands Are Sailing (Live on St Patricks Day, 1988)

10. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Mainland

This single from Rolling Blackouts impressive debut LP Hope Downs (2018), reflects the time that the song's writer, Tom Russo, had spent with his girlfriend in the Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea (north of Sicily). "We were away from everything — civilisation. I was going in to town every day and reading the newspaper and having wine and good food, but at the same time looking at the paper and reading that the refugee crisis was happening literally 20 kilometres away. There was really horrible stuff happening. That song was me coming to terms with being in such a privileged position: being in love and on this island and having this amazing time, and then reflecting on the vagaries of fate meaning that other people, born in a different place and time, were having this life and death struggle. I guess it was me trying to make some sort of sense of it all."

Rolling Blackouts: Mainland (Live on KEXP)

11. Idles: Danny Nedelko

Photo: Stewart Baxter

Perhaps the finest anthem in recent years to celebrate diversity and multiculturalism and offer a strong rebuke of blinkered nationalism. The hero of the song, Danny Nedelko, is a Ukrainian migrant (and friend of the band), and this clearly continues to add resonance even now, given the turbulence ongoing in his homeland and the forced migration that has caused. But the song itself is a positive feast of all of the vibrant and varied cultures that have put the Great into Great Britain - namechecking every possible angle from Freddie Mercury, to Polish butchers to Nigerian mothers. The build up and chorus still give me goosebumps every time I hear it - it distils all facets of the immigration situation into just a few lines: "He's made of bones, he's made of blood, He's made of flesh, he's made of love, He's made of you, he's made of me - Unity. Fear leads to panic, panic leads to pain, pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate...."