How many people have to die before we start talking responsibly about immigration?

Wrecked boats in Lampedusa. Image: Marco Molino

It’s easy to forget, when
a dehumanised mass of “immigrants” is invoked in political debate, that these
are people no different from you and me, our families and our friends. The Guardian cites “one survivor of a [migrant boat] sinking
off Malta [who] recounted spending several days clinging to a buoyancy aid
along with a teenage Egyptian whose hope was to pay for heart medicine for his
father. The youth drowned before they could be saved”.

In the space of last week
alone, an estimated 1,200 such people died in two separate disasters in the
Mediterranean. And we need to be crystal clear about this: there is a direct
line between those deaths and the increasing virulence of Britain’s
anti-immigrant politics. These were not
passive tragedies but the result of conscious policy choices made in an
atmosphere of noxious xenophobia. 

Over recent years, millions
of people have been forced to escape wars, state collapse, political repression
and economic desperation across the Middle East and North Africa. The overwhelming
majority have been displaced within the region, but thousands have also sought
safety and refuge in Europe. Due to legal routes being systematically closed
off, many have resorted to crossing the Mediterranean in dangerously flimsy or
overloaded craft provided by people smugglers. Following high numbers of
deaths, the Italian government put a search and rescue operation in place at
the end of 2013. “Operation Mare Nostrum” is thought to have saved around 150,000 lives over the course of last year.

When Italy asked EU states
for financial support for Mare Nostrum, UK Home Secretary Theresa May reportedly “played a leading role” in the
decision to respond with pressure on Rome to scrap the scheme instead. “When
there were signs that the Italians were reluctant to wind down Mare Nostrum,
May [again demanded], along with others, that it be ended immediately”. The monstrous
logic articulated by British government ministers was that saving people from
drowning represented a “pull factor” that encouraged more to attempt the
crossing, ignoring the horrific conditions that left migrants regarding the lethal
dangers of the sea as the least bad option available to them. The search and rescue effort was thus brought
to an end, despite warnings from Amnesty International that this “would put the
lives of thousands of migrants and refugees at risk”.

According to the UN refugee agency, 3,500 people died last year trying to cross the
Mediterranean, whereas this year, in the absence of Mare Nostrum, around 1,600
have died already. The numbers attempting the journey have not decreased
because people are being pushed, not pulled, with desperation forcing them to
accept the risks involved. All that has changed is that hundreds more are now
dying, as Amnesty and others predicted. 

Hours before the second
of last week’s disasters, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees representative
in Italy, Laurens Jolles, warned that an “incredible” level of “extreme and very irresponsible” anti-immigrant rhetoric in Europe
was creating the conditions in which rescue was being denied to the victims of
these mass drownings. Twelve months ago, I drafted a letter that was subsequently published in
the Guardian, signed by over 150 academics, writers, activists and concerned
individuals, highlighting the dangers of the rise in anti-immigrant politics in
Britain. The letter concluded with a warning that “if the resurgence of racism
and xenophobia is not confronted now, the consequences will become uglier
still”. 

This was not based on
clairvoyance. Last week’s deaths were no more unpredictable than the fact that a
celebrity columnist now feels able in the current climate to describe migrants
as "cockroaches", "feral" and a
"virus" in one of Britain's leading newspapers. Or the fact that similar
language was used by guards at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre, who
referred to the appallingly treated female inmates as "animals",
"beasties" and "b**ches". The dynamics of prejudice,
dehumanisation and maltreatment are hardly without historical precedent. 

In a way, we have been
heading towards this point ever since Tony Blair’s first administration
responded to a tabloid scare campaign against asylum seekers, not by defending
those vulnerable people who had come to us seeking sanctuary, but by forcing them
to use a degrading and paltry system of vouchers, rather than an adequate cash
allowance, to support themselves through the eternity it took to process their
applications. Labour’s consistent approach from that day on has been to validate
and pander to prejudice on asylum and immigration, with the xenophobic right
subsequently thriving in the absence of any prominent challenge. The dynamic,
and the direction of travel, has been clear enough for at least fifteen years,
at least to those willing to recognise it. 

According to YouGov, 26 per cent of the public now want the
government to “encourage” immigrants to leave the country, including family members
like myself who were born here. Only 43 per cent of those polled disagree. Amongst
UKIP supporters, the proportion favouring “encouraged” repatriation rises to 51
per cent, with only 24 per cent opposed. Yet centre-left commentators and
politicians have been falling over themselves to assert that the rise of UKIP is
down to “legitimate concerns” about migration, rather than prejudice about which
of us counts as a proper member of society. 

It is long past time to
address this. It is legitimate (to put it mildly) to be concerned about insufficient
wages, lack of affordable housing, and the underfunding of public services. It
is not legitimate to scapegoat foreigners. Britain is the sixth richest country
in the world, and one of the most unequal countries in
the Western world,
where the richest 1,000 people have a combined wealth of a ludicrous half a trillion pounds. In such circumstances, you address
concerns about the provision of housing and public services by democratically
redistributing the national wealth to ensure those needs are met. You address concerns
about wages by legislating for a living wage, and reforming Britain’s
regressive union laws so employees of whatever background can work together to
bargain effectively with their employer. Human beings who happen to have been
born somewhere else should not become collateral damage because the right is
too selfish and the Labour Party too craven to deal seriously with social
injustice.

And while it is unpleasant to engage with the cold logic
of the right that reduces people to their value as economic units, one cannot
stand by and allow the national debate to continue on the assumption that
foreigners are a drain on society. We have
no choice but to point out that those coming to Britain from new EU member
states – the ones UKIP blames for all Britain’s problems, and Labour has the
nerve to apologise for – have been major net contributors to the British economy. The
assumption that they were otherwise is nothing but prejudice. Now personally,
I’m comfortable arguing that there should be a presumption in favour of human
beings living wherever they like on our planet on grounds of principle rather
than economics, and I welcome having that argument with those who claim they
“just want to talk about immigration” but are somehow prevented by the awesome
oppressive forces of political correctness. But let us at least ground that
discussion in accuracy and truth, however inconvenient. 

When the politics of
immigration are steeped in prejudiced views of a threatening “other”, and this discursive dynamic
escalates and feeds off itself year on year, it eventually becomes possible to
dismiss people as “cockroaches” and leave them to drown in the sea. The hate
and hysteria of the right-wing is one aspect of this, but the other crucial
component is the response of the left, because it is the two together that define
the parameters of conceivable policy and debate. When Ed Miliband makes a show
of being “tough” on immigration, when he makes an election issue out of the infinitesimally small number of people who don’t speak
English, he is creating a situation where, left or right, “everyone knows” that
immigration is a burden, a threat, and a problem to be dealt with in a tough
and decisive manner. 

When a minor row erupted a
few weeks ago over Labour selling a mug emblazoned with the slogan “Controls on
Immigration”, the New Statesman reported that “privately, Labour strategists
are relaxed about a few bruised feelings among lefty activists on Twitter”. One
wonders if they are equally relaxed about contributing to a political
atmosphere that results in the drowning of an Egyptian boy who only wanted to
help his sick father. One wonders if they have given a moment’s serious thought
to the dangerous dynamics they are feeding into, and the social cost of the
games they are playing. 

Politicians and
journalists like to pretend that public opinion is a static given which they
simply respond to. In reality, it is varied and contested space, continually shaped
and reshaped over time. The public are not passive, malleable subjects in this,
but they are certainly not the ones with the power. The power to speak, to set
the agenda, to frame the discussion, to entrench unspoken assumptions, or to
change them, lies overwhelmingly with those who have the wealth and privilege required
to create, or gain access to, a platform to speak from: be it a newspaper, or a
prominent position in party politics. It is this class of people who bear
primary responsibility for the mean, shrivelled, and nasty mood that now
prevails on the subject of immigration, and for the ever darker consequences
that are flowing from that.

Following last week’s
horrific events, a simple and direct question must now arise: how many people
have to die before we snap out of this? Exactly what number of drowned human
beings will it take to shock us out of a discourse bounded on the one side by
hatred and prejudice, and on the other by complacency and moral laziness? How
many people have to die before the right develops a conscience, the centre-left
develops a backbone, and Britain starts talking about the subject of
immigration like a country of responsible adults?

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