Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

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СКАЧАТЬ girl is so quick and really good at the till, she is quite slow.” I know I am slow because … I haven’t done so much … so I had that problem where I struggled to find work.’ The whole process left her feeling insecure: ‘I’m struggling … you have low self-esteem, you try … to catch up to people my age … they have degrees … and they’ve achieved so much and I’m just trying to catch up.’

      When Nora arrived, the prevailing atmosphere within the country was hostile toward those trying to seek refuge. Anti-asylum seeker stories adorned the front pages of the UK’s major tabloids.³² In the years before, during Conservative prime minister John Major’s time in office, then home secretary Michael Howard had warned of ‘bogus asylum seekers’, and their successors followed suit. Pitting the ‘deserving’ against the ‘undeserving’ and the ‘legitimate’ against the ‘illegitimate’, when Tony Blair talked about immigration and asylum, he littered his speech with toxic qualifiers. Labour were committed to ‘fair’ rules for ‘hard-working taxpayers’, ‘those who genuinely need asylum’ and ‘those legitimate migrants who make such a major contribution to our economy’.³³

      In a 2004 by-election campaign – orchestrated by future deputy leader Tom Watson for the candidate Liam Byrne, who later became minister of state for borders and immigration – Labour attacked the Liberal Democrats as being on the side of ‘failed asylum seekers’. ‘Labour is on your side,’ they claimed. The basis for this message was that the Liberal Democrats, along with some Labour MPs, had tried to challenge the government’s plan to take away welfare support from asylum seekers with children after their claim had been rejected. Labour won the by-election by a margin of 460 votes.³⁴

      Fast forward just under a decade and a 2013 report that examined all of the content on migration in twenty British newspapers between 2010 and 2012 found that the most common word used with ‘asylum seeker’ was ‘failed’.³⁵ This makes it sound like people are routinely cheating the system, when in fact, everyone has the right to seek asylum in another country.³⁶

      The UK is one of 148 countries signed up to either or both of the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, which are ‘the centrepiece of international refugee protection’.³⁷ Under the terms of the Convention, a refugee is someone who is outside their country of nationality and who has a well-founded fear of persecution within that same country on the grounds of nationality, political opinion, religion, or membership of particular social group or race.³⁸ So this means that all kinds of sociopolitical factors – from fleeing climate breakdown to economic collapse – aren’t covered.

      Applicants for refugee status are classified as asylum seekers throughout the processing of their applications. Only once this is accepted does the applicant become a refugee, which under the Convention should confer certain rights – the right to housing, the right to work and immunity from prosecution for illegal entry. For the people whose application is rejected, the possibility of more uncertainty and distress is very real; they might be granted the right to appeal in country or they might be swiftly deported.

      One of a number of drawbacks is that the Convention enables individual states to interpret who is a refugee. Contrary to what most people think about asylum, ‘failed’ applicants are not simply, automatically duplicitous liars, and not all decisions are fair or right, especially considering the prevailing culture of disbelief and the fact that evidence of eligibility – in a system that often demands you prove the impossible – can be difficult to provide.

      Then there’s the problem of movement. All refugees, by definition, have to cross a national border, yet countries including the UK have made that more difficult, with the introduction of increasing numbers of visas in the 80s, which makes travelling to a country to seek refuge hard. While tourist visas and work visas exist, for people fleeing war and persecution, there isn’t a specific visa they can apply for.

      It’s a catch-22, Frances Webber explains. Until she retired in 2008, Webber worked as a barrister specialising in immigration, refugee and human rights law. If you come into the country on a visitor’s visa, she says, you might be considered an ‘illegal entrant’ because you’ve lied to a visa officer about the grounds on which you’ve entered the UK. All of this can have an impact on the credibility of your asylum claim.

      As Nora found out, as well as making it more difficult for people to get to the country, successive governments have made it harder for people to live here. The 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention means that people given refugee status are still supposed to be provided with basic rights, but there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the resources available to people seeking asylum, and make it so that for some only temporary refugee status is offered until they can return home without fear of persecution – essentially leaving them in limbo.

      ‘The big argument of the Blair years was that it was all about pull factors,’ Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott says disapprovingly when we meet in her Westminster office. Politicians have operated on the baseless belief that jobs and social security are so-called pull factors – things that attract people to move to a particular country or part of the world. There’s been a suggestion that either migrants are pretending to be refugees to get into the UK to access support or that people seeking asylum are coming to the UK rather than anywhere else because of what they’ll receive. It was thought that ‘only if you made it less attractive for immigrants and asylum seekers’, Abbott says, ‘would you be able to “bear down” on numbers’.

      In 2014 the Coalition government withdrew its support for search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. As people just like Alan Kurdi and his family made the journey across what had become a watery grave off the coast of Southern Europe, the then minister of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Baroness Anelay, justified the decision by saying the government had removed a ‘pull factor’ that encouraged ‘more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing’. When EU support for search and rescue was drastically scaled back, people did not stop coming, the crossing just became more treacherous – and more people died.³⁹

      Regardless of what politicians say, newspapers print or the public believe, there has never been any proof that significant numbers of people are coming to the UK to ‘cheat the system’ or claim benefits. A Home Office study from 2002 found that there was little evidence the people they spoke to ‘had a detailed knowledge of: UK immigration or asylum procedures; entitlements to benefits in the UK; or the availability of work in the UK’. Eight years later, a Refugee Council report came to similar conclusions.⁴⁰ Almost everyone I talked to for this book who has experienced immigration rules first hand was confused by the maze they entered into. ‘I had no idea what the laws were about different forms of entitlement, I was just scared that I was rejected so I had to hide in case I got caught,’ Nora tells me. ‘It can cost lives, I lost so much because I didn’t even know what the laws were about an asylum seeker or a refugee or seeking refuge in different countries.’

      The rules work against asylum claimants; they’re forced to find alternative, dangerous and often unofficial routes to safety. Controls compel people to take risks; they can create ‘illegality’.⁴¹ ‘I sort of fell through the system,’ Nora explains. ‘You hear the sirens and you’re scared they’re going to catch you and deport you because you don’t have any form of documentation … you shouldn’t feel like that at eighteen.’

      ‘You live in fear,’ she adds.

      Being denied refugee status has proven unthinkable for some people. In 2001, twenty-six-year-old Iranian national Shokrolah ‘Ramin’ Khaleghi, who had been a political prisoner in his home country, was found dead in his room at the International Hotel in Leicester just one week after his asylum application was rejected. He had taken an overdose. Two years later, thirty-year-old Israfil Shiri, also from Iran, died after setting himself on fire in the Manchester branch of the charity СКАЧАТЬ