Then there’s the problem of movement. All refugees, by definition, have to cross a national border, yet countries including the UK have made that more difficult, with the introduction of increasing numbers of visas in the 80s, which makes travelling to a country to seek refuge hard. While tourist visas and work visas exist, for people fleeing war and persecution, there isn’t a specific visa they can apply for.
It’s a catch-22, Frances Webber explains. Until she retired in 2008, Webber worked as a barrister specialising in immigration, refugee and human rights law. If you come into the country on a visitor’s visa, she says, you might be considered an ‘illegal entrant’ because you’ve lied to a visa officer about the grounds on which you’ve entered the UK. All of this can have an impact on the credibility of your asylum claim.
As Nora found out, as well as making it more difficult for people to get to the country, successive governments have made it harder for people to live here. The 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention means that people given refugee status are still supposed to be provided with basic rights, but there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the resources available to people seeking asylum, and make it so that for some only temporary refugee status is offered until they can return home without fear of persecution – essentially leaving them in limbo.
‘The big argument of the Blair years was that it was all about pull factors,’ Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott says disapprovingly when we meet in her Westminster office. Politicians have operated on the baseless belief that jobs and social security are so-called pull factors – things that attract people to move to a particular country or part of the world. There’s been a suggestion that either migrants are pretending to be refugees to get into the UK to access support or that people seeking asylum are coming to the UK rather than anywhere else because of what they’ll receive. It was thought that ‘only if you made it less attractive for immigrants and asylum seekers’, Abbott says, ‘would you be able to “bear down” on numbers’.
In 2014 the Coalition government withdrew its support for search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. As people just like Alan Kurdi and his family made the journey across what had become a watery grave off the coast of Southern Europe, the then minister of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Baroness Anelay, justified the decision by saying the government had removed a ‘pull factor’ that encouraged ‘more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing’. When EU support for search and rescue was drastically scaled back, people did not stop coming, the crossing just became more treacherous – and more people died.39
Regardless of what politicians say, newspapers print or the public believe, there has never been any proof that significant numbers of people are coming to the UK to ‘cheat the system’ or claim benefits. A Home Office study from 2002 found that there was little evidence the people they spoke to ‘had a detailed knowledge of: UK immigration or asylum procedures; entitlements to benefits in the UK; or the availability of work in the UK’. Eight years later, a Refugee Council report came to similar conclusions.40 Almost everyone I talked to for this book who has experienced immigration rules first hand was confused by the maze they entered into. ‘I had no idea what the laws were about different forms of entitlement, I was just scared that I was rejected so I had to hide in case I got caught,’ Nora tells me. ‘It can cost lives, I lost so much because I didn’t even know what the laws were about an asylum seeker or a refugee or seeking refuge in different countries.’
The rules work against asylum claimants; they’re forced to find alternative, dangerous and often unofficial routes to safety. Controls compel people to take risks; they can create ‘illegality’.41 ‘I sort of fell through the system,’ Nora explains. ‘You hear the sirens and you’re scared they’re going to catch you and deport you because you don’t have any form of documentation … you shouldn’t feel like that at eighteen.’
‘You live in fear,’ she adds.
Being denied refugee status has proven unthinkable for some people. In 2001, twenty-six-year-old Iranian national Shokrolah ‘Ramin’ Khaleghi, who had been a political prisoner in his home country, was found dead in his room at the International Hotel in Leicester just one week after his asylum application was rejected. He had taken an overdose. Two years later, thirty-year-old Israfil Shiri, also from Iran, died after setting himself on fire in the Manchester branch of the charity Refugee Action. He had just been thrown out of his council flat and denied benefits.
Since 1989, the think tank the Institute of Race Relations has kept the most accurate record possible of all those who had passed through the UK’s immigration and asylum system and subsequently died by suicide.42 Robertas Grabys, Saeed Alaei, Nasser Ahmed, Souleyman Diallo, Shiraz Pir, Mariman Tahamasbi, Mohsen Amri and Sirous Khajeh are just some of the people who feature on their records between 2000 and 2002.
In 2010, ignoring the police who tried to talk him down from the railings of a seventh-floor balcony in Nottingham, and as others taunted him from below, Osman Rasul died by suicide after nine years of trying to get status. ‘His life was governed by an interminable waiting’, one of his friends said after he died, ‘for meetings with solicitors, for correspondence with the Home Office, above all for an end to the paralysing uncertainty in which he had lived for the best part of a decade.’43
Borders seem as natural as day and night; firming up territories by demarcating where the nation state begins and ends. We tend to treat them as if they’ve always been there and always will be. But borders are created and recreated. They are policed and enforced within countries. Transcending the very things they seek to fortify, expand and sharpen, politicians work together across borders to make it more difficult for people to move, while capital is allowed to flow freely. The border you’re born within can determine the conditions of your life and death; what rights and resources you can access and where you can go. If only we spent the same amount of time scrutinising borders as we do championing their importance, then instead of pandering to the demands of those who complain about people desperate enough to leave their home country to cross them, we might try to dismantle them.
Seen as representing strength and protection, they are, if you look at them more closely, violent and discriminatory in all kinds of way. Borders are not only where the lines on the map tell us they are. They are also drawn between people, with the use of words like ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’. By crossing a border, you can cease to be a human being to the people around you, becoming an (‘illegal’) immigrant or a (‘bogus’) asylum seeker. These words we use to talk about people aren’t just descriptive or neutral categories; how they’re used doesn’t always and only coincide with their legal meaning; they’re laden with other associations.44 Just look at the term ‘migrant’.
Twisted to apply to specific groups of people at particular times, there is no hard and fast rule of who is an immigrant and who isn’t. In the public debate, ‘immigrant’ comes to mean all kinds of different things; messy and shifting, it is, at times, conflated with race or ethnicity, and it’s applied to people seeking asylum or who have refugee status.45 Immigrant has, then, become this catch-all term, referring to all kinds of things at once. In 2016, journalist Liz Gerard found two of the UK’s tabloid papers ran 1,768 articles about migrants – which made ‘an average of more than three per issue for the Mail and two for the Express (which has far fewer news pages)’ – and according to Gerard, almost all were negative.46
For something talked about so much, there’s a lack of clarity about what immigration refers to; between who falls or is pushed into the category ‘immigrant’, who resides on its edges and who, despite moving across borders, never comes anywhere near to it. Race, class and gender decide how so-called non-citizens are seen, because they certainly aren’t all seen the same way. When people talk about immigrants, they aren’t usually thinking of white, wealthy Americans.
There is no