It has been a bad week for migrants. 400 drowned off the coast of Libya; over 20 were badly burned in a cooking gas explosion and then forced by traffickers onto a boat without treatment, rescued only days later, adrift at sea; and 12 were thrown overboard by fellow migrants, to their deaths, simply because they were Christian[1].
And then, this morning, while you were eating your toast and I was still lying in bed, another 650 people are thought to have drowned trying to reach Europe’s shores, trying to reach a better life. If no other survivors from the boat are found, it will be the single greatest loss of life in the Mediterranean. These deaths make a new total of 1,600 people that have died since January while crossing the Mediterranean, on boats so cramped passengers throw people overboard, so old they break down and drift for days, boats so full that people capsize them by rushing to one side when they see help on the way.
The EU will tell you that Mare Nostrum, the extensive, and expensive, search and rescue operation that saved 100,000 people in 2014, had to end because it was too much of a pull factor, because it encouraged people and traffickers too much – though, since its end only the number of deaths has changed, tenfold, and not the number of arrivals. Katie Hopkins, our self-elected national columnist of controversy, will tell you that what we need are gunboats to chase these people back to their shores, not rescue boats, which only lead to aggressive young men in Calais and turn our towns into ‘festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money’[2]. And Nigel Farage will tell you in one breath that the catastrophe unfolding in the Mediterranean is the fault of our current government, for bombing Libya, and that a UKIP government would consider bringing some of the Christians to the UK, and in another breath that migrants are to blame for everything wrong with the UK[3].
But there are times that our humanity fails us, in amongst our policies, our fear and loathing, and this is one of those times.
Whatever your political opinion, whatever you think we should offer these people upon arrival in Europe – asylum, housing, healthcare, a return ticket to Libya – we have got to do more to stop these deaths. It may not be our responsibility, we may not have caused the conflicts, political regimes, or poverty these people flee, we may not have made them risk their lives to get to Europe, but our world is surely a poorer and less humane place if we are willing to turn our heads and close our eyes and say ‘this suffering, these deaths, are not our responsibility’.
The problem is that this is all too easy to say, and it is made easier by the way in which we think and talk about migrants. In a confusion of labels – immigrant, migrant, refugee, asylum seeker, economic migrant, illegal immigrant – our humanity, and the migrant’s, can start to get lost somewhere. Amongst all of the numbers, the vitriol, the blame, it’s easy to forget something quite simple: migrants are people too.
It is not difficult to rob the migrant of their humanity, their very personhood, because the way in which we talk about migrants is arguably the last step in a long process of dehumanisation. The journey of the migrant, both physically and metaphorically, is a journey from person to statistic, from individual to immigrant, and their humanity is reduced at every step.
Migrants have countless reasons for leaving their homes, though for many of those attempting to cross the Mediterranean the dehumanising process begins in their home country, where they are victimised for their sexuality, their political opinion, their gender or race, or where they are debased by poverty, unable to feed their families, unable to think of a future[4].
To escape they might save for months or years, borrowing money, selling all of their worldly possessions, doing whatever it takes to get out, to survive. Most will be unable to get a visa, some will not have enough money for a plane ticket, many will be unable to leave the country legally due to border restrictions or due to having travel restrictions imposed upon them[5]. Many, therefore, will pay a trafficker for fake documents or to smuggle them out of the country. If they do not have enough money, they might pay just for their child, or just for themselves, hoping one day to be reunited with their families. Often alone, the migrant is now at the mercy of the trafficker, who effectively controls them, because they are their lifeline, but also capable of abandoning them, reporting them, handing them over to authorities. Some migrants will be forced into prostitution or indentured labour, under the guise of paying off their debt, but from which they might never escape.[6]
Some migrants will make it to Libya, having travelled hundreds or thousands of miles across Africa, and wait nervously for a boat. If they are not caught and detained, where they are likely to be subjected to torture[7], they might instead be taken to a boat in the dead of night, a boat that is too small for the number of people, and forced aboard at gunpoint.
If their boat doesn’t capsize or sink, if they don’t drown nameless and faceless in the Mediterranean, the migrant might make it to Europe. But here their troubles are unlikely to end. Some will enter the asylum process in Italy, and begin their wait for refugee status. Others will enter undocumented, and travel on, in search of a future, living on the streets, eating when they can. Some will travel to Calais and wait months or years in the Calais jungle, a shanty town of migrants hoping to cross the Channel.[8]
The lucky few who make it all the way to the UK, likely months or years after they first left everything behind, face detention or at the least a life on £36 a week and a protracted asylum process in which they might be told that their own life story is a lie, or where they might lie in the hopes of a better future.[9]
The migrant’s journey is neither one of status nor privilege, arriving in the UK often destitute and vulnerable, reliant upon our state, they are an easy target for political points-scoring and unpleasant posturing. It is therefore no surprise that Katie Hopkins, scourge of the vulnerable and voiceless, has chosen them as the subject for her latest attack. Arguing that ‘what we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country’, she calls the migrants crossing, and drowning in, the Mediterranean ‘cockroaches’. In fact, nowhere in her 565 word rant does Hopkins refer to migrants as people. She calls them ‘aggressive young men’, ‘this plague of feral humans’, ‘populations’, ‘migrants’, ‘vagrants’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘Africans’ (incorrect as many are from Eastern Europe or the Middle East[10], but hey, what’s a bit of continental confusion when you’re making totally unjustified accusations and criticism), even ‘survivors’. But not people. She comes close, when she opens and urges ‘show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.’, but even this seems confusingly unrelated to the migrants, often swaddled in clothes and of indeterminate weight, and is about as humanising as ‘feral humans’.
It might seem like an issue of semantics, but it is not. Indeed, much public and media discussion in the UK is of immigration, and rarely of migrants[11]. And it is important, because when we manage to see others as somehow less than or fundamentally different to ourselves, we are able to do to them, and excuse being done to them, terrible things. Amongst the many words and phrases Hopkins uses to dehumanise the very real people dying and suffering in the Mediterranean, the most striking is ‘cockroaches’. Invoking the bestial, infestation, those unwanted but hard to get rid of, ‘cockroaches’ has been used before. It was used repeatedly before and during the Rwandan Genocide in propaganda designed to incite ethnic hatred and violence against the Tutsi ‘cockroaches’. Katie Hopkins is, I hope, not trying to start or incite genocide, she is probably unaware of the parallel. But intended or otherwise, there is an echo of the deliberate reduction and dehumanising of another to justify an action or thought. When Hopkins calls the migrants anything other than people, she manages to demonise them so completely that her claim that whether confronted with bodies or coffins, she doesn’t care, somehow doesn’t seem so bad.
A consistent focus in the UK upon our ‘immigration problem’, of migrants stealing our jobs, claiming our benefits, overstretching our NHS, causing the housing crisis, creates a narrative that allows us all to easily to demonise the migrant, to blame them for problems they may not have caused, and not to have to question. When the migrant is a cockroach, a feral human, an illegal who only wants to steal our jobs and homes, it is easy to be unconcerned for the 1,000 that have died this week in the Mediterranean. We cannot see their faces and we do not have to imagine their lives. They are migrants, part of that shadowy, threatening group and we do not need to think or question. We do not need to ask if we should be doing more. It is not our responsibility. We did not cause those people to flee; 400, 1,000, 1,600 does not seem that many.
But the trouble is, whatever the cause, whosever responsibility, 1,000 men, women and children died horribly this week, likely in terror and confusion, simply because they wanted a better life. With the death toll rising rapidly in the Mediterranean, it has never been more important to humanise the immigration debate, to consider why people migrate and flee, and to question our assumptions about why people are so desperate to reach Europe’s and the UK’s shores. It might not be our fault, and it may not be our responsibility, but if people are willing to risk everything to have a chance at a life we were simply born to, we ought to be asking more questions about what we can do to at least stop them dying for that chance.
For more information about migrants (though slightly out of date) see https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/people-on-the-move/
The European Commission adopt a new Agenda for Migration next month. Save the Children have a petition asking the next UK Government to push for a significant scale up of search and rescue in the Mediterranean and better protection for migrants under international law. Sign it here: http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/restart-the-rescue
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/400-drowned-libya-italy-migrant-boat-capsizes; http://www.unhcr.org.uk/news-and-views/news-list/news-detail/article/burns-victims-rushed-for-treatment-in-lampedusa-after-high-seas-ordeal.html; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32337725
[2] http://www.sunnation.co.uk/hopkins-rescue-boats-id-use-gunships-to-stop-illegal-migrants/
[3] I might be at risk of hyperbole here, but given that Farage once blamed migrants for tailbacks on the M4, I’m giving myself this one. M4 incident here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-30370570, other things migrants have ‘done wrong’ here: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/ten-other-things-nigel-farage-has-tried-to-blame-on-immigration–ey8RKw_kFg
[4] http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c125.html
[5] This is particularly the case for those in Eritrea, where you need government approval to leave the country, though it is seldom granted to anyone between the ages of 18 and 40 and where mandatory and indefinite military service is held to breach human rights so poor are the conditions – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24413144. Similarly, for outspoken opponents of political regimes, arriving at the airport with your own passport is likely only a fast track to detention and torture – http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinese-artist-ai-wei-wei-arrested-in-latest-government-crackdown/2011/04/03/AFHB5PVC_story.html
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/18/africas-lone-child-migrants-face-robbery-and-torture-on-journey-to-europe
[7] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/22/libyas-detention-centres-accused-torturing-migrants-refugees
[8] http://www.unhcr-centraleurope.org/en/photos/life-as-an-asylum-seeker.html
[9] http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/policy_research/the_truth_about_asylum/facts_about_asylum_-_page_5
[10] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24636868
[11] In their manifesto launched this week, UKIP interesting divide migrants from immigration, saying ‘immigrants are not the problem, it is the current immigration system that is broken’ http://www.ukip.org/manifesto2015
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