Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

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      But as long as 4.2 billion people live in poverty and the income gap between the Global North and South is still growing, people will have to move.⁵³ ‘What they’ve managed to do is create this idea that people are simply moving for economic reasons,’ says Asad Rehman, director of global justice charity War on Want, when describing the term ‘economic migrant’. ‘And in people’s minds that means you’re moving from one wage to another, you’re simply moving for a higher salary, rather than actually saying that people are survival migrants. What people are surviving is global inequality.’

      We talk about poverty like it’s natural. Global leaders hold grand summits where they lay out everything that needs to be done to reverse extreme inequality, as if extractive capitalist economies, colonial histories and racialised hierarchies of power haven’t produced it.⁵⁴ Through crippling debt and colossal interest rates, unfair trade deals, war and global corporations being given carte blanche to plunder natural resources all around the world,⁵⁵ money flows out of poorer countries into richer ones. In 2008, Angel Gurría, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.⁵⁶ When the world is designed this way, it’s not surprising that some people feel the best option is to move.

      Originally from the Philippines, Marissa Begonia ended up in the UK when she couldn’t find a job that would give her and her three children a decent standard of living. ‘It was the most difficult and painful decision to leave my family behind in search for a decent job in a foreign land where I was even unsure of what kind of life awaits me but this was the only way I could think of.’⁵⁷

      As a last-ditch option, Marissa became a domestic worker at the age of twenty-four. Trying to find decent employment, she shuttled back and forth between countries. First, she worked in Singapore, where her wages were so low it wasn’t worth it. Then she went to Hong Kong, where an abusive employer made her life unbearable. When she quit, she was so scared of what her employer might do that when she went to hand in her resignation, she did so holding a knife behind her back. She returned home to the Philippines, but nothing had changed; any work she could find paid so little she could barely afford to look after her children. And so she decided to try again. She went back to Hong Kong, and from there her employers moved her to London, where she still lives and where she is chair of the Voice of Domestic Workers, a grassroots organisation established in 2009 to empower migrant domestic workers to stand up to discrimination, inequality and abuse.

      In the end, people like Marissa should have the right to stay and live a decent life in the country they are born in, as well as the right to move if they so choose. The problem is that, for some people, staying becomes an option they can no longer realistically entertain, even if moving, in a world hostile to migrants, can be dangerous. Many migrants, even if they only move temporarily, aren’t poor as a result of laziness, stupidity or inability: they are trying to make a life for themselves in a global economy that is deeply unequal and that is destroying the places they call home.

      Climate breakdown is increasingly going to make it impossible for people to stay where they’re born, and it’s likely people of colour will be disproportionately impacted. Set against a long history of decimating indigenous communities, who are imagined as unable to master the environment for profit as the ‘superior’, ‘civilised’ world can, extractive, growth-obsessed capitalism is destroying the planet. But under the legal definition of the refugee, written in the 1950s, people aren’t protected: there are no internationally recognised rights for people who have to leave their home because of climate change.

      Inequality and climate degradation meet in Bangladesh. The eighth most populous country in the world, it’s thought to be one of the most vulnerable to climate change. But in 2014 it produced around just 0.44 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person, compared to the United States’ huge 16.4 tonnes.⁵⁸ It’s also a hotbed of global exploitation. Making cheap clothes for other parts of the world, people – predominantly women – have organised to demand better pay and conditions. But while the UK uses fossil fuels that destroy the Bangladeshi environment and buys clothes made by its citizens, the people from this country aren’t exactly welcome to move here or welcomed when they do.

      ‘I hate when the term “economic migrant” is assigned to us. Everyone moves around for economic reasons, not only us,’ Ake says. He’s been in the UK for over ten years, studying full-time at Kingston University when he arrived as well as clocking in thirty-five hours a week or more as a security guard. He used to be a union organiser, founded a group that protects migrants’ right to work and, having completed a master’s in international human rights law, is about to do a PhD. Well-acquainted with the disorder of moving, through his own experiences and his work, Ake points out that ‘economic migrant’ is applied selectively. People from ‘Africa or developing countries’ are ‘economic migrants’ but if someone leaves the UK and goes to Germany, they’re likely to be called an ‘expat’. ‘They are people and we [are] less than human,’ he says.

      Making sense of terms like ‘economic migrant’ is not just about understanding how and why people move, but also how they’re treated when they’re here. As she talks to me in the café at the Unite the Union offices in Central London, Marissa doesn’t hide her anger; it seems to drive her campaigning. Over the chatter of people milling in and out of the canteen during the lunchtime rush, she describes how her pitifully low salary, painfully long hours and controlling employers pushed her to join together with other domestic workers and fight back.

      When the Coalition government came to power in 2010 domestic workers, who are predominantly women, were in trouble. At the end of the 1970s, visas for domestic workers were scrapped. For many, the proof that they were legally in the country consisted of a stamp in their passport that named their employer as the only person they had the right to work for. If they left their employer, they lost status and were classed as undocumented. After decades of domestic workers agitating, organising and campaigning, in 1997 the rules were changed. Under New Labour, domestic workers had the right to change employers without being deported. As a result, they could access a route to staying in the country and they were recognised as workers, entitled to workplace rights and time off. In 2008, the government threatened to strip away the rights workers had fought for, but were forced to abandon their plans because of the strength of resistance.

      However, a new government in 2010 meant new ministers, with new resolve. In 2012, to widespread condemnation, the Conservative-led Coalition changed the rules so that domestic workers could only come to the UK for six months, had no right to renew their visas and were tied to their foreign employer. According to the Guardian, over 2016–17, the Home Office issued 18,950 Domestic Workers in a Private Household visas; if people brought into the country under one of these visas left an employer who was abusive or who was exploiting them, they became undocumented. This sat uncomfortably with that same government’s aim to end modern slavery.⁵⁹ ‘Theresa May is this great advocate for measures to protect people from modern slavery,’ says former barrister Frances Webber, ‘while at the same time her ministers are removing protection against extreme exploitation.’

      Evidence shows that migrants are far more likely to be employed in lower paid, monotonous and dangerous jobs, with little or no trade union influence – yet they tend to be educationally and experientially overqualified for the work they do.⁶⁰ ‘There are reasons behind why people are moving from their home land to Europe,’ explains Ake, who came to the UK from the Ivory Coast via France. ‘Like anybody else, we have dreams for ourselves and our families, and rights we are entitled to. And when you are denied these basic rights, your instincts switch onto the survival mode.’

      While most of us are asleep, a multinational workforce is cleaning the expensive offices of people on six-figure salaries, doing shifts in high-end hotels all hours of the day or looking after older people in care homes.

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