Life & Wisdom Quote by Alden Nowlan

“Being a foreigner is not a disease” lands like a small, clean slap: it refuses the oldest trick in the xenophobia playbook, the one that turns difference into contamination. Nowlan’s line is blunt on purpose. “Foreigner” is a social label, often assigned rather than chosen; “disease” is a diagnosis, freighted with fear, quarantine, and the implied right to police bodies. By pairing them, he exposes how quickly communities smuggle medical logic into moral judgment: if outsiders are a “sickness,” then exclusion becomes “treatment,” and cruelty gets rebranded as public health.

The intent isn’t sentimental tolerance. It’s a demand for linguistic hygiene. Nowlan strips away euphemism and insists we hear the metaphor we’re already using. That’s the subtext: the real pathology is the reflex to pathologize. The sentence also works because it’s defensively simple, the kind of phrase that could be spoken at a border crossing, a schoolyard, a hiring desk. It anticipates the everyday mechanisms of othering - the sideways glance, the bureaucratic suspicion - and answers them with a moral baseline that can’t be spun into policy jargon.

Context matters. Nowlan, a Canadian poet from a country built on immigration and still shaped by entrenched hierarchies, writes into an era when “foreignness” could mean language, class, ethnicity, or just not knowing the local codes. The line reads like a reminder that belonging is not an immune system. It’s a choice about who gets counted as fully human.