Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘They are legally voiceless.’ The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families attempts to deal with this. It is concerned with protecting the human rights of anyone who crosses a border for work, regardless of their status – that is, whether they’re documented or not. The treaty is designed to ensure human rights are applied to all migrants and to establish a minimum set of legal protections, which among other things requires states that have ratified the treaty give migrants and their families freedom of speech, the freedom to join trade unions and rights equal to citizens in terms of pay and working conditions. At the time of writing, only fifty-four countries have ratified the treaty; the UK is not one of them.⁶¹

      When New Labour immigration minister Barbara Roche declared in 2000 that ‘we are in competition for the brightest and the best’, she was playing right into the framing that turns people into commodities.⁶² Dividing migrants into ‘the best and the brightest’ vs. ‘the rest’ or ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, as politicians still do, erases the complex, important work done by people who don’t fit into the former categories. It creates a hierarchy of human value. ‘There’s a wholly artificial distinction between high-skilled people and low-skilled,’ says Diane Abbott. ‘For instance, care workers are described as low-skilled, but they’re vital. If Eastern European migrants stop coming here tomorrow, social care in London and the South-East would collapse because they can’t get the labour.’

      Even for people classed as ‘highly skilled’, the very immigration controls that governments claim are necessary for safety and security can produce precarity. If you’re tied to your employer for your right to be here, as you might be on some visas, your status is essentially reliant upon their support. It’s not that all employers who sponsor members of staff are out to actively and grossly exploit them; a licence could cost up to £1,476 (at the time of writing), depending on the size of the company and type of visa, and then they have to pay for each worker they sponsor. But there’s a risk for employees: if you’re struggling with a boss who is forcing you to work unpaid overtime and treating you badly, or you’re just not happy in the job and you can’t find another employer who will sponsor you, it might be more difficult to challenge mistreatment.⁶³ As Swiss writer Max Frisch once observed, ‘We asked for workers and human beings came.’⁶⁴

      A global working class – the majority of whom are of colour – keeps the world economy going. Politicians in a number of countries know they need workers from all around the world and that an unfair, imbalanced global economy paired with climate breakdown means some people need to migrate. But that doesn’t mean that everyone can do so, or that those who do then have freedom, choice or decent rights.

      In 2001, twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ayaz from northern Pakistan broke through security at Bahrain airport and launched himself into an opening on the bottom of a Boeing 777 headed for London. He had been working as a labourer in Dubai and, like so many others who feel like they have no better options but to take this same route, he got into huge amounts of debt to get there. But he wanted to make it to England. The combination of the cold and lack of oxygen had most likely killed him on the long journey and, early on Thursday morning, his body fell from the undercarriage of the plane. He was found dead in a Homebase car park near Heathrow. In the years that followed, two others – thirty-year-old Carlito Vale and twenty-seven-year-old José Matada – died in similar circumstances. ‘He always spoke about going to work in America or England,’ Ayaz’s brother, Gul Bihar, said. ‘But they don’t give visas to poor people like us.’⁶⁵

      We like to tell ourselves a very particular version of the UK’s past. One in which we’ve held the door open to people fleeing conflict and persecution, and welcomed others from all over the world. Whenever the brutal realities of this country’s asylum system make newspaper headlines, the Home Office response almost always includes some variation of the following: ‘The UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need it.’⁶⁶ But while there are tales of warm reception, and people from all over the world have made a life for themselves in this country, there are at least as many stories of doors slammed shut in people’s faces and faceless walls of bureaucracy confronting those who arrive.

      The asylum regime that became increasingly restrictive from the 1980s and through the 1990s and 2000s only got worse from 2010 on. Seeing that people were fleeing conflict, famine and political persecution, the Coalition barely squeaked the door ajar to asylum seekers; between 2010 and 2015 they resettled just 143 refugees who had escaped violent civil war in Syria. So far, well over 5 million refugees have left Syria. During the largest refugee movement since the Second World War, it was only under intense public pressure that Prime Minister David Cameron committed to take in up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years. But in comparison to countries like Germany, this was a tiny number, and when compared with the countries in the so-called ‘developing’ world, which host the vast majority of refugees, it looked even smaller.⁶⁷

      But when the Coalition government was put under the spotlight for failing to take in refugees from Syria, campaigners lobbied politicians to take in child refugees by drawing on national mythology. Conjuring up images of Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransport, they argued that the UK should not betray its history. This proved to be an effective campaigning tool that tapped into existing thinking; one 2011 poll found that 84 per cent of people said they were proud to be British and 82 per cent believed protecting the most vulnerable is a core British value.⁶⁸ But certain ‘children were unaccompanied, and their Jewish parents left behind in Nazi Europe’, Louise London reminds us, they were ‘excluded from entry to the United Kingdom [and] are not part of the British experience, because Britain never saw them’.⁶⁹

      The shameful present, in which refugees are turned away, asylum seekers are left destitute on the streets, migrants are indefinitely detained and members of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ are deported, is often compared to an imagined past, as activists and outraged politicians indignantly ask: What has this country become? The problem is, this is the kind of place it has long been.

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       ‘Keeping’ the Country White

      Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history.

      Stuart Hall, Old and New Identities,Old and New Ethnicities

      ‘Western society historically was white, that’s how it works,’ right-wing commentator Melanie Phillips told me during a 2017 BBC Radio 4 debate.¹ In the middle of a live recording, I’d been quietly brought into a small studio to talk to people I had never met but whom I sat with long enough during what was a brief segment for them to quiz me about so-called virtue signalling – a supposed phenomenon where people publicly and smugly say or do something ‘morally good’ for the principal purpose of demonstrating their rectitude. I hadn’t been invited on the programme to debate ‘race’ or the history of ‘the West’, but that’s where Phillips steered the conversation. Caught off guard, I explained why Phillips’s statement wasn’t true, but it seemed she had a point to prove; adamant that it was entirely logical that some people in the UK wanted to defend a Europe that she seemed to believe was once exclusively white.

      Other people share Phillips’s anger at the supposed disruptive change that has taken place in Europe. When a BBC children’s cartoon used images of a multiracial family to explain life СКАЧАТЬ