When I moved from South America to the UK, I didn't speak English – and I learned a lot about integration

I look around me today and I see my Colombian cleaner FaceTiming her family during her shift, and Peruvian shop workers glued to foreign telenovelas in London supermarkets. Learning English is no longer compulsory

Ministers have called for English classes for immigrants to become compulsory (PA)

As we leave the office at the end of the day, our cleaner gets ready to start work by clipping on her headset and phoning her family back in Colombia on her mobile. As she goes about her chores, her lively Spanish fills the room. She chats to her mother and to her children, whom she has not seen for several months, but they can see her via FaceTime or Skype.

On my way home I sometimes shop at a Latin American supermarket, whose Peruvian owner watches her favourite telenovelas on her laptop, perched next to the till. She is perpetually glued to her screen, yet blissfully unaware of programmes like Countdown or The Chase.

Both the cleaner and shop manager speak limited English and have little interest in learning. Yet in many ways they are model citizens, working long hours, paying tax, bringing up families, and getting on with their lives quietly and efficiently. They provide a service that we need, in return for a modest income. Technology has made separation from their loved ones bearable.

A generation ago, I too arrived from South America to settle in the UK. But life was very different. This was before the internet and mobile phones. My only contact with family and friends was by post, which took several weeks. The telephone was prohibitively expensive and unreliable. There was no online news to keep up-to-date with events at home, so I soon lost touch. Without social media, it was fiendishly difficult to find other people from South America.

Faced with such isolation, I made a new life for myself. I connected with the community around me and immersed myself in British culture. I watched cricket on television, instead of South American football, and BBC news. I drank warm beer in pubs and learned to shoot darts. Like the Colombian cleaner and the Peruvian shop owner, I too worked long hours, paid tax, and raised a family.

MPs now demanding that all immigrants must learn English as a pathway to integration and social cohesion fail to grasp the profound change caused by technology. Language is a “prerequisite for meaningful engagement with most British people”, they insist. This is true, perhaps. But “meaningful engagement” is also elusive for many who are born here and who claim English as their mother tongue. It is not just foreigners who live in Britain in apparent isolation, at the edge of society. To reduce “meaningful engagement” to mere language is to make light of the complexities of integration.

English became my first language, and I became part of the community, but one did not drive the other. The motivation came from the complete separation from family and home, a sensation that has been consigned to history by 24-hour satellite television and Facebook. The immigrant of today, however difficult his circumstances may be, is rarely disconnected from his home, his culture or his language for long. This is as true for someone from, say, Sudan living in Manchester, as it is for a Briton living in Malaga.

Many immigrants already speak English when they come to Britain, or learn soon after they arrive. Irrespective of their language skills, many chose not to engage with British people simply because they don’t have to. The lives they build for themselves here are merely a continuation of the lives they lived at home, and expect to resume one day.

If we are truly serious about greater integration, we must offer a reality that is more appealing to immigrants than the distant world they can access via the internet. And we can start by learning not to view with suspicion those who depend on their children’s virtual hugs to get them through another day of life in a foreign land.