NEEDED: AN HONEST CONVERSATION
Dr Ruth Cigman
Hostile public attitudes towards asylum seekers are generally based on fear and misunderstanding, fomented by inaccurate claims from right-wing politicians and media. These attitudes hamper national and international progress towards resolving the growing crisis of mass migration. They also intensify the suffering of traumatised asylum seekers in the UK.
The vast majority of asylum seekers bring true stories about human rights abuses in the countries from which they have fled. The high grant rate of asylum applications in the UK (around 76 - 80% in the last few years) shows that, despite its shabby treatment of these vulnerable people, the Home Office knows this. So do many members of the public, yet hostility persists, and asylum seekers continue to be demeaned with labels like ‘illegal immigrant’, as though they are criminals.
Most asylum seekers are honest, but there are exceptions, as there are in any other group. In this piece, Ruth Cigman raises some challenging questions. Does idealising asylum seekers produce reactive hostility that potentially harms them all? Could the national conversation become less polarised and more productive by absorbing complexity and – in its wake – the compassion that most asylum seekers richly deserve?
The Cotton Tree aims to provide a good service for a few rather than a mediocre service for many. Time as a precious resource. You can’t provide what many asylum seekers need through a rigid appointment system. We provide “relaxed time”: time to chat as well as focus on the law, accommodation, food etc. Our members reciprocate by offering “relaxed time” back to us.
This symmetry is essential and must be respected. Many people think that asylum seekers have all the time in the world, but nothing could be further from the truth. Asylum seeking is hard work. You have to report to the Home Office, spend hours on helplines, deal with faulty appliances or bad smells in your dismal lodgings, hunt for food you can barely afford. You have to fight poor nutrition, poor physical and/or mental health. Time may be stolen by a roommate who talks loudly on the phone all night, or by a journey you can’t afford to make on public transport, forcing you to walk halfway across London to a food bank or a clothes bank.
We try to help with these things. But our resources, our finances, are limited, and we can’t provide everything we would like to provide. Welcome to the world of asylum seekers and the people who, in small part, share their frustrations and difficulties.
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I have encountered remarkable generosity from some of our members. Some years ago, at a workshop, we asked a group of asylum seekers to imagine that the empty chair in the room was occupied by a Home Office official. Together we painted his portrait in words. He is wearing a suit and tie. He has pale skin, straight fair hair. He is in his early forties.
The group was asked: “How do you feel about this man?”
There was a thoughtful silence, then someone said, “I feel sorry for him. He’s used to sitting behind a desk, making decisions, and he has no protection in this room. He’s a human being and he suffers, just like us.”
Instead of anger or envy, this man expressed sympathetic concern towards a person he saw as stripped of his defences. Most asylum seekers are acutely conscious of human vulnerability, but some had been waiting years for a Home Office decision, or received a decision they saw as unjust, and were angry with our imaginary guest.
Everyone, however, was capable of thinking, listening to other points of view. No one did what Lee Anderson did recently when he said that migrants who didn’t like their accommodation should “f*** off back to France.”
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Team Compassion versus Team Reality: which side are you on?
The match is underway. Team Reality is in the lead. The Illegal Migration Bill was passed by the house and the nation is hopeful that numbers will come down. But no – small boats week was a disaster. Numbers soared; six migrants died in the channel. Team Compassion gains ground; Team Compassion takes the lead. The Brits have had enough of broken promises. Team Compassion have scored! What a day for Team Compassion!
Is this how it is? Is it how it has to be? The Bishop of Dover, the Archbishop of Canterbury and liberals call for compassion. Sunak promises the numbers will come down. This government will not be deterred. Reality will prevail.
Compassion towards whom? Which reality? Can’t we be compassionate realists?
In Llanelli, Wales, 96 people lost their jobs when a popular hotel was turned into a hostel for asylum seekers. It was a devastating blow for local people. How should supporters of Team Compassion feel about this? Should their compassion extend to UK citizens?
How about supporters of Team Reality? Are they realistic? When Lee Anderson said migrants should “f*** off back to France”, Labour MP Diane Abbott said the Tories had “fallen to a new low”. Anderson snapped back, “I meant illegal migrants should f*** off back to France, not genuine asylum seekers.”
But almost all the people he was calling illegal migrants, people arriving by boat, apply for asylum. They acquire rights, one of which is the right to basic accommodation and a paltry living allowance while their stories are investigated. Around 80% will be believed and granted asylum, showing that most of the people who are derided as illegal migrants will eventually be seen as truthful and abused.
Asylum seekers complain about all sorts of things: the accommodation, the living allowance, the inability to work. You would do the same in their position. But the majority – in my experience – appreciate the opportunity to rebuild their lives, and many speak of gratitude. Their attitudes are complex and, given the appalling conditions in which they are expected to wait for answers, this can be impressive. I see them, most of them, as generous people. They are desperate to ‘give back’, help to build the economy. It isn’t compassion they want as much as dignity and justice, in recognition of the realities they have suffered.
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The government keeps asylum seekers destitute, unproductive, virtually imprisoned, in an effort to counteract what it calls the tug factor. Is this ethical? Is it OK to keep some people miserable in order to deter others from following them? Doesn’t this mean treating some people as means to our political ends – the end of controlling migration?
Treating human beings purely as means to ends is the gravest moral abuse. Slavery does this, and it is rife in 21st century Britain. The recently passed Illegal Migration Bill is a gift to slaveowners. On the day that the bill becomes operational, slaveowners and traffickers will be able to tell their mutinous victims: “No point running away. The government doesn’t care. You’ll be sent back home or to Rwanda.”
Thankfully, some Conservative as well as Labour ministers are fully aware of this. (Credit to Theresa May, who is slavery’s – and therefore the Illegal Migration Bill’s – fiercest opponent.) Politics isn’t as quite simple as the football analogy suggests. But the immigration debate has reached a dangerous impasse. There has to be another way.
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Journalist Simon Jenkins says what everyone knows:
A procedure that should take a matter of hours and, in most cases, result in swift admission to Britain’s needy labour force, now constitutes an unprecedented 173,000 potential refugees under house arrest and awaiting a decision. This is more than double the number of ordinary UK prisoners. The policy beggars belief, given that they are able-bodied workers of whom Britain’s public and private sectors are chronically in need.
“The policy beggars belief”. Others say more simply, “the UK is mad”. This is never more poignant than when it comes from asylum seekers. In our organisation we have health workers (including a doctor, a pharmacist, a nurse) who are desperate to ‘give back’ to the UK and will eventually, after a long, undignified limbo, be allowed to do so. Why, they ask, can’t they work and wait? We are unable to provide an answer.
What does madness mean in this context? It means that the policies do not further proclaimed goals: to boost the economy and NHS, win elections, protect some of the most vulnerable people on the globe. On the contrary, they undermine these goals. Public sympathies towards migrants are growing, the NHS and economy are in crisis, and the Tories are lagging behind in the opinion polls.
It’s rather like saying you want to improve your health and choosing to drink a cup of poison rather than fresh orange juice.
* * *
Many years ago, I ran a workshop called Myth & Clay with an art psychotherapist. We told stories – personal and traditional – moulded clay and asked many questions. We had a roll of lining paper on the table before us, on which we scribbled, drew, wrote words and poems in an atmosphere of freedom and discovery. We took inspiration from the words of artist Paul Klee: drawing is taking a line for a walk.
We took questions for a walk too and followed them wherever they led. What is justice? What is friendship? What is courage? When a political fugitive or trafficked woman asks such questions, a rich discussion follows. We called this ‘philosophy’, but in truth it’s a model for fruitful conversation and enquiry on any topic at all.
Can we take our questions about immigration for a walk? Can we ask difficult questions without yelling and putting other people down? When we asked, ‘what is justice?’, we weren’t dogmatic. No-one shouted; no-one swore. There was a satisfying sense of going deeper in an atmosphere of absolute respect. We were developing insights by talking and listening to each other.
Elections must be won; power must be handed on. But electorally driven debates don’t enhance policies or the quality of debate. They divide the nation in order to secure a following. Dogma is part of their style and clarity is redundant. If you think illegal migrants are bad and genuine asylum seekers are good, that’s just fine!
* * *
We should be less like Lee Anderson and more like Andrew Marr. Marr calls out Tory lies and bigotry and generally speaks for the left. Yet these words from an article he published in the New Statesman do not sound left leaning at all:
The left hates talking about immigration because it thinks any kind of controls, anywhere, are racist... So, what is the problem, you might very well ask? It’s got little to do with “values”… The problem is capacity… In a country with limited space and resources, we need that honest conversation to reach towards the problem of maximum density for a happy, livable society.
Marr is shaking things up here, nudging left leaning thinkers to step out of their comfort zones, consider possibilities they normally reject. He goes too far. The left (whoever that is) do not uniformly resist all immigration controls ‘because they are racist’ or for any other reasons. Nor is it true that the immigration problem has little to do with values and everything to do with capacity.
But Marr is right: an honest conversation is the only route out of the immigration muddle. There are questions to ask and standards to meet. Rudeness isn’t nice but treating asylum seekers as criminals is worse. Abbott is right: we have sunk low. Does Lee Anderson have no idea of what happens in reality? Doesn’t he read the newspapers, study the stats? Is spitting venom and being quoted in the Daily Spit simply much more fun?
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We need to do what most asylum seekers do: think generously, think complex thoughts. Dialogue is needed between those who wish to welcome asylum seekers to the UK and those who view them with suspicion or distrust. Can we unite around the goal of realistic compassion? We welcome contributions to this conversation.
