No one in their right mind thinks accommodating asylum seekers in hotels is a good idea. No one in their right mind thinks we should just live with undocumented, life-threatening migration routes into the UK. And no one in their right mind thinks the experiences endured by most migrants could be a rational choice for anyone. Forget for a moment the ludicrous, inflammatory posturing of many who should know better; we ought to be able to begin from these shared acknowledgments.
Using hotels for housing vulnerable migrants is the equivalent of what prison reform campaigners have long called warehousing – make sure a problematic group is simply corralled somewhere more or less secure, and hope their issues will somehow sort themselves out. The chaos and under-resourcing of the legal processes involved and the shocking levels of delay mean that the conditions are created for maximal insecurity and rootlessness – at worst, resentment and criminality. And we have to face the fact that, so long as safe and legal routes for asylum seekers are inadequate, we are colluding in the flourishing industry of lethal and illegal systems whose effect is to create communities for whose safety and integration government is unable to plan, and who are trapped in a situation both dehumanising for them and challenging for localities where they are placed.
Not a new issue: I have vivid memories of meetings more than 25 years ago in the post-industrial town in south Wales where I then worked, trying to broker discussion between local groups from socially deprived areas and various community and religious organisations, in the wake of what came across as a casual announcement from the government of a new initiative to settle significant numbers of asylum seekers in the town. Anger and bewilderment, yes, and an element of real hostility – but also a plaintive sense that yet again local voices had been completely ignored in a way that was all too familiar.
But here’s the point of contact. We have become used to the insidious language of the “migrant crisis” as a matter of the interests of “ordinary people” over a consolidated mass of threatening, predatory, incomprehensible strangers – typically the young, foreign (and usually minority ethnic) male. The horrors of Southport last year, which had nothing to do with the immigration system, instantly produced a reinforcement of this perception that has grown stronger and stronger. But the truth is that the migrant, too, is an ordinary person. Anyone who has spent time with refugees – in Ukraine, in Syria, in Sudan, in Kent or Swansea – knows the conversations that are likely to happen. I never thought I could find myself here. I only want to make sure my children are safe. I miss my garden. I don’t know where my parents are. I don’t know how I can continue my education. To speak as though these people are anything other than ordinary is to reinforce the violence they have already experienced, the refusal to see them humanly.
People in hotels, hostels, detention centres, are not there as a lifestyle choice – which is why it is not only unjust but absurd to punish them for being there. And to threaten such people as a way of pressurising the government to do something different is simple blackmail. Collective blame and indiscriminate violence are always the beginning of real moral corruption. A lot more work needs to be done to make audible the voices of actual individuals in the system, a lot more listening to the ordinariness of what they want and what they are afraid of. And at the moment, thanks to the rhetoric of both the nationalist right and some voices in or near government, what causes most fear among settled and newly arrived migrants is that they are assumed without argument to be criminal, morally alien, actively hostile to the communities around them. Can we stop talking about such people as not ordinary? Can we stop assuming that “ordinary people” are on one side of a zero-sum war?
Much has been written about the failure of government and others to produce a counter-narrative around migration. But this needs to be not only a matter of generalisations about the benefits of diversity or whatever, but a story about the kind of vulnerabilities that people in the streets in the UK can identify with – something that amplifies the voice of the ordinary migrant and helps it to be recognisable. And this is most effective when grounded in local, face-to-face encounters, not only “official” exhortation. As with so many issues, facilitating proper deliberative and reflective opportunities within local communities is an urgent priority – perhaps the only thing that just might be able to challenge the standoff between the ordinary and the alien, and help each to recognise in the other some of the shared experience of being silenced and vulnerable.
Still, the real counter-narrative issues goes deeper. The flags running up all around us are supposed to declare a pride in our identity and heritage. But what is it that we are proud of? What is it that we are defending? It is always moving when you hear, say, a student from a refugee background tearfully proclaiming their debt to Britain and their abiding loyalty to a country that has given them what they hardly dared hope for. We have good reason to be proud in the face of this. Internment camps, Ice-style snatch squads, payments to homicidal regimes for receiving returned migrants – none of this adds up to much in the way of “values”.
It is natural and proper to be loyal to your neighbours and your history. But if this loyalty is no more than a sullen self-congratulation for just being where you are, it is not a project in which it is possible to take much pride. If we listen a bit harder to some of our migrant voices, we might be clearer about what others think we might have cause to be proud of. And we might start some proper cross-party conversation about what an immigration regime might look like that was committed to the safety and dignity of all the “ordinary” people involved in it.