Journalism that humanises migration or shows the realities of the UK’s immigration rules – however harrowing, hopeful or challenging to the dominant discourse it might be – is not sufficient to entirely dislodge the public misconceptions about migrants. ‘You get a lot of these biographical stories and stories of individuals or individual triumph or injustice,’ Dr Gavan Titley, lecturer in media studies, says about coverage and understanding of immigration. ‘And fine, we know all of that and how that operates in terms of empathy, but it’s not necessarily a politics.’
This is what Charles Husband and Paul Hartmann found in their study from the 1970s, which showed how the media had covered the racism that migrants faced in the UK, in doing so, performing a ‘valuable function’. But journalists of the day also depicted these people as a ‘threat and a problem’, ‘a conception more conducive to the development of hostility toward them than acceptance’.29
Once in a while a news story does seem like it might rip apart a long-established narrative. When a photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s limp body, face down on a Turkish beach having drowned at sea, made front-page news all around the world, it seemed like there might be a shift. The boy and his family – his dad Abdullah, his mum Rehanna and his five-year-old brother Ghalib – along with nineteen others, had been making the trip from the Turkish coastal town Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos, which at the shortest route are separated by a stretch of water four kilometres long. Reportedly carrying twice the number of people it could hold, the boat Kurdi was on capsized five minutes into the journey, throwing all of its passengers – including Alan and his family – to the mercy of the unforgiving Aegean Sea. Alan, Rehanna and Ghalib were among the people who died that morning.
The attention Alan Kurdi’s picture received sparked action in some countries, including the UK, Germany and Canada, who agreed to admit more refugees. But after momentarily softening their stance toward refugees, EU politicians competing with the far right wanted to show they retained a tough stance on refugees. Domestically and at the frontiers of fortress Europe they continued to reinforce and make sharper the many methods used to keep people out. Within months, if not weeks, tabloid newspapers that were outraged by Kurdi’s death resumed normal service, running an endless stream of anti-refugee scare stories. Hostile coverage punctuated by compassion, positivity, pity or outrage – whether about detention or deaths – isn’t going to fundamentally change policy or the myriad of negative ways immigration and asylum are represented, even if there is a shift in public opinion. A year after his son’s picture became world news, Alan Kurdi’s father, Abdullah, said, ‘Everybody claimed they wanted to do something because of the photo that touched them so much. But what is happening now? People are still dying and nobody is doing anything about it.’30
Nora knows better than most about the brutality of the UK’s immigration regime. Arriving in the UK at the age of just seventeen with her younger cousin, thanks to tickets their families bought by selling off their valuables, the two were helped out of a country in north-east Africa in 2001, escaping violence in the region with the aim of securing an education and with it a better life.
Nora’s first asylum rejection was followed by another four. When her final appeal was refused, Nora, who by now had turned eighteen, was told she was no longer eligible for state support. ‘They said I could go back … since I was an adult and they wouldn’t help me anymore with my application … that was a bit confusing for someone who had just turned eighteen, not knowing what to do, where to go, how to get help.’ Worried about disappointing her family back home and with no one to turn to, she was at a loss as to what she should do.
In 2005, while New Labour prime minister Tony Blair was claiming that the government was ‘dealing appropriately with the issues in asylum and immigration’, Nora was sleeping rough.31 She would continue to do so for the first ten years of her adult life. ‘I started hiding. Social services couldn’t look after me anymore because I was an adult so I was kicked out of the hostel we were living in,’ she explains. ‘I started staying with friends, sometimes on a bus. I was jobless so I couldn’t work because I didn’t have a work permit and no forms of identification. So it was pretty tough, for ten years I lived that way, sleeping on streets and in tube stations.’ Things got so bad that after nearly five years of being homeless, Nora decided to go back home. She went to the embassy of her home country, only to be told that with no proof she had come from there, they wouldn’t let her go back. Nora was left in limbo.
Having to live on the streets for ten years took its toll. Sitting across from me in an almost empty coffee shop is someone who looks like they’ve got it together; Nora seems quietly self-assured. But as Christmas songs blare out from nearby speakers, she explains what happened after she eventually got her papers. ‘I missed out on a lot, I mean without … documentation you don’t have access to any form of higher education so after … I turned eighteen I couldn’t apply for any university … I missed out on communication skills, on IT skills.’ Nora got a job in retail, but she felt like she was at a disadvantage. ‘You know you could overhear the managers: “A seventeen-year-old 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.