IS it just me who finds the word ‘immigrant’ faintly troubling these days? Somehow it has been given a negative spin over the last few years.

Yet a brief stroll round York reveals that you are – quite literally – walking on the bones of wave after wave of migrants.

First, a layer of Celts then Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans – and a plethora of other nationalities and ethnic groups too numerous to list.

We see the traces of their presence everywhere: walls, columns, archaeological remains in the Castle and Yorkshire Museums.

And, more recently, restaurants and services and clothes shops created by immigrants that bring the world’s wonderful diversity to our doorstep.

All these men and women have helped make York what it is today.

Scroll forward to July 2017. Every day we hear fresh information about the Brexit negotiations and, in particular, the issue of what rights migrants from the EU should be granted in a post-Leave UK.

No crystal ball is needed to predict discord ahead.

The current negotiating stance of Theresa May’s Brexit team is certain to provoke anxiety among York people with friends or family who happen to be EU nationals. And such people are numerous.

Basically, the government wishes to introduce mandatory biometric residence identity cards for EU nationals only, thus creating what could be seen as 3.2 million ‘second-class’ citizens in Britain.

Also on the table is a UK proposal to introduce a minimum income threshold – currently £18,600 – for EU nationals who want to bring close family members to the UK after Brexit.

Naturally, such uncertainties are already leading to a new phenomenon: Brexodus. EU nationals are looking into a future where they feel less welcome and voting with their feet.

Among them are highly-skilled professionals, including the doctors and nurses our cash-strapped NHS relies on to keep functioning.

It has long been known that immigrants are net contributors to our economy. Their loss would impact on everyone’s prosperity in the UK. No one voted for Brexit to be worse off.

Of course, in the popular press some immigrants aren’t immigrants at all. I refer to British citizens who have chosen to work and make their lives abroad.

Such people are dubbed ex-pats, not immigrants, as though somehow that’s different from a ‘foreigner’ coming here. British ex-pats, we’re meant to assume, are a sheer blessing to those nations lucky enough to have welcomed them.

Naturally, such double-thinking is fraught with tensions in the post-Brexit world.

Our housing stock and over-stretched public services, already weakened by years of austerity, would struggle to cope with waves of Brits drifting back to the UK.

Only reciprocal rights for citizens from all EU countries who live abroad can realistically avoid that.

However, for many people, there is more than just an economic dimension to the question of EU nationals in the UK. You might call it a philosophical standpoint.

If you take the broadest view, each and every one of us is an immigrant to this Earth. We are given no choice where we are born.

Nationality is a lottery. In fact, the whole question of individual identity and culture is largely a matter of upbringing and education decided by others.

Only upon reaching adulthood do we get a serious chance, as individuals, to choose the country to which we wish to belong. Before that, the decision is made for us by parents and elders.

While no one rational is advocating completely open borders and unmanaged migration, we have to acknowledge that the potential for people to move from nation to nation enriches the whole human race.

That doesn’t preclude patriotism or a love of country.

Tens of millions of us love Britain deeply – but our love is for a tolerant, multicultural UK that finds diversity exciting, dynamic and profitable in all kinds of unanticipated ways.

So I say, let us tread very carefully when it comes to deciding the rights of EU nationals post-Brexit.

And especially the rights of children born here who happen to have parents who were born elsewhere.

York is a far, far richer place for its millennia of migration.