Not in the Same Boat

Why the UK's Refugee Crisis is a Manufactured Crisis

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

Warsan Shire

In a world that overflows with content, it can be difficult to decide what to watch and read. But millions of people in the UK would benefit from watching Sally El Hosaini’s stirring film The Swimmers, which you can see on Netflix. The film tells the story of the teenage Mardini sisters, who were on their way to becoming Olympic swimmers in Syria, before the civil war broke their country to pieces.

As a result they were forced to become refugees in 2015, and made their way to Germany, where they were able to settle as a result of Angela Merkel’s open-door policy. One of the sisters went on to swim for a specially convened Refugee Team at the Rio Olympics in 2016.

That’s the bare bones of ‘the plot.’ But there is so much more to The Swimmers than plot. Films about refugees don’t have to be uplifting. Those of us who have never been stateless and never had to live outside our national borders without a passport, and whose government is actively seeking to make life worse for those who do, cannot expect a warm glowing feeling as the credits roll on the rare occasions when refugees become the subject of semi-fictionalised dramas.

In depicting the journey of the Mardini sisters, The Swimmers shows with painful clarity the journeys that thousands of refugees made in 2015, the year of ‘Europe’s migrant crisis’. It shows the route from Syria to Turkey, across the sea to Lesvos and then through the Balkans and into Orban’s Hungary and then Germany.

It shows the rip-off merchants and the predators, the would-be rapists, the wire fences with police, guards and dogs all deployed specifically to snag refugees at the border. There is a long and particularly terrifying sequence in which an overloaded dinghy nearly sinks between Turkey and Lesvos - a voyage that will be taking place somewhere in the world even as I write these lines.

The film also captures the hope, resilience, courage and determination of the men and women who made these journeys - and the little acts of humanity performed by some of the people who help them. It shows their dreams, aspirations, and friendships, their ties to each other and their families, and their personal conflicts.

It’s a funny, moving and even joyful film that deepens our understanding of humanity and what it means to be a stateless human being in our century of proliferating walls and fences.

It chimed very powerfully with my own memories of the migrants and refugees I met during my journeys to Europe’s borders between 2010 and 2012, to research Fortress Europe. Too many Europeans are accustomed to seeing refugees as a faceless mass of desperation and human misery, worthy of pity rather than respect - often without being aware of how easily pity can dehumanise the people it is extended to.

I don’t want to imply that refugees are generically better or worse than any other category of humanity. But I can say that I met many men and women who I regarded as genuinely heroic - if sometimes reckless and naive - in their determination to risk everything to help their families, and their refusal to accept the ‘paper walls’ or the formidable barriers placed in their path by some of the most powerful governments on earth.

Needless to say, the refugees I met, and the refugees who appear in The Swimmers, are not the refugees depicted by the UK government and the rightwing media, or the endless fascistic ‘Stop the Boat’ trolls who pollute Twitter day after day with their sinister depictions of ‘young men of military age’, ‘parasites’, ‘rapists’, and ‘benefit scroungers’ arriving in the UK.

In a powerful piece in the Guardian last week, Aditya Chakraborty reported on the protests taking place at the Stradey Park Hotel in LLanelli, where asylum seekers were expected to be housed while waiting for their applications to be processed. So far this has not happened, but the likes of Katie Hopkins, Richard Tice, Anne-Marie Waters and GB News have all gone to Wales to pour douse more petrol on the bonfire of fear and hatred that one local anti-racist activist called ‘far-right radicalisation in real time.’

In effect, Stradey Park has become one more flashpoint in the ‘Stop the Boats’ nightmare that we can’t wake up from, in part because the UK government doesn’t want us to wake up from it.

A Manufactured Nightmare

In the same week that I watched The Swimmers, it was announced that the UK asylum backlog has reached 175,457 - 44 percent higher than it was last year. This means that 175,457 people are living or partly-living in the UK at the state’s expense - or rather at the expense of the ‘the taxpayer’’ as our saloon bar racists like to put it - with no permission to work, study, or do anything that might enable them to live the semblance of the normal lives that the rest of us live even in these abnormal times.

Instead they are housed in hotels, detention centres, and barges - where they present a constantly visible ‘problem’ that can be picked on week after week. Either they are living in the lap of luxury, according to the ‘we must look after our own people’ lobby, and all the racists who leap onto that bandwagon in an attempt to give themselves a semblance of moral gravitas. Or as Lee Anderson helpfully reminded us, they are ungrateful for not accepting the worst conditions we can give them.

The government knows this is happening, and does nothing to challenge it. Not one tiny dicky bird, or even the ghost of a whisper to suggest that it is not the fault of asylum seekers if they end up in hotels.

Instead it presents deportations to Rwanda as some kind of magical formula that will ‘Stop the Boats’, even though it has yet to produce even a shred of evidence or a convincing argument that the removal of a few hundred migrants to Rwanda would have any impact whatsoever on reducing Channel crossings.

It simply asks the public to believe in Rwanda, like a cargo cult in reverse, in which people will miraculously vanish from the Channel as soon as the first planeload takes off to fulfil Suella Braverman’s ‘dream.’ And then when these flights don’t take off, because the government hasn’t even done basic legal research into what is possible, it whines about ‘activist lawyers’, politicized charities, the ECHR and anyone else it can blame for sabotaging its ability to implement the ‘will of the British people.’

In a way its win-win, even if the ‘illegals’ always lose. But it’s also awful, pernicious clownery.

The previous week, the Home Office took 39 asylum seekers off the Bibby Stockholm barge, only a few days after putting them on it, because Legionnaire’s disease was discovered in the water supply. It was then revealed that the Home Office hadn’t carried out the safety checks it was asked to do, and said it had done.

Now Suella Braverman is proposing to return the asylum seekers to a barge that the Fire Brigades Union has called a ‘floating death trap.’ Asked what she thought of these warnings, Braverman accused the Labour-affiliated FBU pf carrying out a ‘political attack’.

This is a level of debate that makes the average primary school playground conversation look like high diplomacy. The most charitable explanation for these failings would be to assume that those responsible are merely epically incompetent. But the longer the crisis goes on, the more difficult it is not to conclude that the government is deliberately allowing it to continue, in the hope of extracting political benefits from it.

If that means dehumanizing asylum seekers, and setting them up to a resentful public as objects of fear, hatred, and resentment, then so be it.

Braverman - one of the most atrociously dishonest and inept politicians this country has ever produced - has openly pandered to such dehumanization by calling asylum seekers ‘criminals’ and describing Channel crossings as an ‘invasion’, which is exactly what every common or garden racist says it is.

This isn’t just incompetence. It’s so much worse than that. For the first time in British history, there is now an open - as opposed to covert or surreptitious - alignment between the UK government and the far-right on the issue of migration and asylum.

All this is being done entirely to protect the political interests of the Tory Party. The government clearly hopes that it can use Channel boat crossings to present Labour as ‘soft on migration’ and scrape some more votes from the bottom of the barrel that might enable it to keep its grubby fingers on the nation’s throat. And the Head Boy and his team are desperate to distract from the ‘cost of living crisis’ by turning popular anger and resentment towards anyone but them.

It’s all so brazen and transparent, as well as unbelievably cynical and downright dangerous. Because once these lines are crossed, anything becomes possible. And if you can convince the public to see performative cruelty as an antidote to the problem you helped create, then you can also crank up the cruelty.

The UK isn’t entirely unique in this regard. Most European countries, and the EU have been playing the same game for many years now. Long gone are the years when Vietnamese ‘boat people’ were grudgingly accepted as worthy refugees because they came from a communist country.

We are far from that now, in a world where national borders have progressively hardened in response to international problems, in an attempt to halt or at slow down the movements of people seeking to escape their own countries. This is a world where migrants and asylum seekers can be shot down by Saudi or Spanish border guards, abandoned to drown in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, ‘pushed back’ across the Evros river or the Río Grande, or ‘offshored’ to Naura Island.

Until migrants began crossing the Channel post-Brexit, the UK hadn’t seen such movements actually unfolding on its borders, because many of the refugees and migrants who wanted to enter the country were trapped long before they got here, by the EU’s ‘external’ borders and de-territorialised border controls that reached even further outwards.

The present ‘crisis’ is unfolding at a particularly dangerous moment in the country’s history, when all kinds of political possibilities are emerging that didn’t seem possible before. There is a lot of anger and resentment that, like our overflowing sewage system, seeks an outlet, and an empowered and virulent ethnonationalism has taken control of the Tory Party which feeds politically on foreign threats.

The government knows all this, but can’t or won’t do anything about it. Instead it has treated the crisis as a problem but also as an opportunity, and a populist metric.

It’s no use Braverman, Jenrick, Sunak, Tugendhat & co churning out the tired ‘evil criminal gangs’ rhetoric to disguise the fundamental cruelty at the heart of the government’s refugee policy. Because it is so obviously targeting asylum-seekers, not criminal gangs. And in doing so, it is giving the public a license to fear and hate the former.

You can’t sink much lower on the scale of political depravity than that. But there is another side to this nightmare. And other paths that we might take. The Swimmer shows us what they are. And so does the open letter which the 39 asylum seekers sent to the Home Office last week:

We are writing to explain that we were running from persecution, imprisonment and harsh tortures, with hearts full of fears and hope from the countries we were born in, to find safety and freedom in your country and our new refuge.

It is hard to Imagine that we, who used to live under harsh tortures and danger of persecution in our country, have been forced to leave our homes, our jobs and our families, and some of us haven't seen our families for months.

This abandonment and separation from our family has been bitter and painful, and has been accompanied day by day with anxiety and nervous stresses and only a combination of hope and fear remains within us.

We shouldn’t need to be told this. We should be able to hear these voices and take them seriously. We should not have the temerity to even suggest that such people have risked so much simply in order to live on a barge on £36 a week. We should have enough imagination and enough humanity to be able to imagine the humanity of the people who come here seeking refuge and a chance to rebuild their lives.

We should be able to give them a chance to do this and make it possible for them to play a positive role in our society. We should listen to the 39 asylum seekers who told us ‘respectfully and hopefully’:

Now, we seek refuge in you and hope to walk alongside you on this path with your support and unity. We believe that with our joint effort, we can overcome these unfavourable conditions and achieve the peaceful and secure life that we aspire to.

We need to accept that invitation. We need an asylum system that works effectively. We need safe routes. We need cooperation with other countries that is not centred on hardening borders, building ‘deterrents’, trapping people and exposing them to hardship and death.

To achieve any of this, we need to recognize that all of us are in the countries we are in out of luck and the quirks of fate and the vagaries of politics, and not because of our individual brilliance.

Our good fortune doesn’t give us the right to dismiss stateless people as ‘illegals’ and invaders if they come to our shores looking for help or simply a chance to stand on their own feet.

We shouldn’t allow the difficult times that many of us are going through to turn us against people who have also been in difficulty, in many cases much worse than ours.

So watch The Swimmer, because in this world of trouble, it tells a story that we haven’t been hearing, that deserves to be heard, and which too many of those who claim to want to ‘put our own people first’ don’t want us to hear.

And if we start listening to them, we might just be able to imagine a different kind of future to the dystopia we are currently constructing.