Читать книгу Hostile Environment - Maya Goodfellow - Страница 8

What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things.

Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways

An industrial estate on the edge of central Birmingham might not sound like the place to find out about the difficulties of migrating to the UK. But in a building nestled behind a car park and overlooking the network of canals that branch off to the nearby town of Smethwick, a group of around thirty people met up on a cold, rainy October evening to talk about their problems with the immigration system. Overstretched lawyers and immigration specialists were on hand to offer advice. As is typical of a winter’s day in the UK, the darkness of evening descended far too early, and rain bounced off the pavement as we all made our way into the building, but the room was warm and buzzing with activity when I arrived. People were introducing themselves and getting to know each other while tucking into complimentary homemade samosas taken from a deep bowl that sat next to tea and coffee laid out on one side of the room.

Coming from all over the world, some of the people there that night had struggled alone to navigate disorientating immigration rules while others had to find a way through for their whole family. In the room were children of various ages – from curious babies to bored seven- or eight-year-olds. Some had been born in the country, others had migrated with their parents. But for all of them their future in the UK was uncertain. What united these people was the time, effort and money – often money they didn’t have – they were spending to try to stay in this country. About fifteen minutes after I arrived, people took their seats, forming a circle in the middle of the room. As the meeting began, almost immediately their anger and worry spilled out of them. They shared stories of being fleeced by lawyers, going into courtrooms where the people they’d paid to represent them didn’t even know the most basic details of their case, and explained the desperation they felt when their claims were repeatedly rejected.

For all the focus on the supposed importance of defending our national borders from outsiders and tales of immigration bringing problems to the UK, too few debates are concerned with how difficult it can be to be a migrant in this country.

One of the people I met in Birmingham was Diana.¹ She came from Zimbabwe as a visitor and began studying before going on to marry an EU citizen. But her marriage quickly deteriorated: ‘I had to come out of the relationship because of domestic violence.’ She says she left her partner to save her life. She knew nothing about the asylum process, but in 2013 she was told she could apply for refugee status. Diana quickly learned how many people are out there who are ‘ready to mislead you’. One of her lawyers didn’t give her the right information about applying for asylum, which meant that, when she went to court, she didn’t present relevant facts that might have helped her case. Other lawyers she paid barely gave her any time and didn’t go through her case properly. At each appeal, she was refused the right to stay in the country.

Understanding all the intricacies of what happened to Diana, and all the other people I talk to, takes time and requires countless follow-up questions. It’s unclear how anyone manages to make sense of and navigate the disorientating process she describes. But she is still determined to secure refugee status, and she puts her lack of success at least partly down to poor representation. Still, she isn’t giving up. ‘One of the things I’ve found and that has encouraged me to be who I am today is you learn the hard way: ignorance is expensive – and ignorance is not bliss at all.’

Diana isn’t alone. She and Kelly, another person I speak to, live in different cities and have had completely different lives, but their experiences of the immigration regime are remarkably similar. Calling the UK home since she was nine years old, Kelly came here after her dad brought the whole family – Kelly, her sister and her mother – from West Africa on a diplomatic visa. Ten years later, when Kelly was in the middle of her first year of university, he abruptly left the country and she was told she didn’t have the right to stay in the UK. With her mum and sister, Kelly applied for a family visa, but when that was rejected, she decided to apply for the right to stay in the country alone.

‘I went through three lawyers,’ she says. The first one didn’t understand her case and after he submitted her application, the Home Office said there was no cogent argument in the papers, so they had nothing to consider. That cost her over £1,000. ‘At the time I didn’t understand the case, so I was dependent on him to explain,’ Kelly remembers, shaking her head. ‘There was no communication … so … I was chasing him every second and then when the Home Office refused it there was not much done.’

Kelly waited three years for her appeals to be processed. With no right to work and unable to access state support, she had to resort to living between friends’ houses and she nearly became homeless. ‘It’s ridiculous to be honest because you’re not allowed to work, so where do you expect me to get the money from?’ she asks. ‘I think the cost is just to frustrate people to just give up and go back.’ She asked multiple agencies for financial support and legal help. She was a ‘novice’ and had no idea ‘what was going on’. It’s not chance that makes Kelly’s and Diana’s experiences so similar. As well as exorbitant fees for visas and applications, support for immigration and asylum cases is almost non-existent unless you happen to have the money to pay for it, and when you’re not allowed to work, for many people, funding legal representation is an impossible task. Even for those lucky enough to be able to afford it, there’s no guarantee that the advice you get is going to be reliable.

‘In the late 90s when New Labour came in, it was a sort of a golden age for legal aid … because there were a lot of asylum claims at that time the government was really throwing money at solicitors’ firms to get them to open immigration departments … to get solicitors trained up in immigration law so they could take on all these asylum claims,’ former immigration barrister Frances Webber remembers. The legal aid she talks about is money the state gives to people who need it to pay for advice or representation. It was available for people regardless of where they were born, so it could be used for people trying to regularise their status or claim British citizenship. But within about three years, New Labour started cutting back. ‘It was like this great tidal wave of money was then retreating, retreating, retreating,’ Webber says.

In 2007, the government introduced a flat fee for legal aid asylum cases, which meant lawyers were paid a fixed amount regardless of how many hours they worked on a case. ‘If you did go over a certain number and if you could justify that … then you would get paid by the hour,’ Webber explains, but getting to that stage was very complicated and difficult. These changes incentivised a factory-style process: encouraging ‘rubbish firms who do no work or do very little work’ and penalising those who took ‘great care’. Firms were expected to subsidise work on asylum cases with money they received from more straightforward legal aid cases. Then the Coalition government cut legal aid in 2013, including the money available for most immigration and asylum cases.² ‘When we talk about legal aid cuts and we talk about other aspects of austerity,’ journalist Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi says, ‘we don’t also talk about immigration.’

New Labour had cracked down on fraudulent lawyers but, as costs spiralled and legal aid was hacked away, the chaos left people once again exposed to predatory lawyers. What has essentially been solidified is a two-tier justice system.

Reliable help is now extremely hard to come by. Two of the biggest not-for-profit immigration and asylum centres, Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ, formerly the Refugee Legal Centre) and the Immigration Advisory Service, closed in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Between them, they represented around 20,000 clients and employed hundreds of staff. The reason for their failure was massive cash issues; RMJ said this was brought on by changes to legal aid, which meant bills wouldn’t be paid until a case was finished. When they went under, they were owed £2 million by the Legal Services Commission, which ran the legal aid scheme in England and Wales from 2000 until 2013.³ ‘You just don’t have the bodies helping people, so you are going to see more rejections,’ explains Alison Moore, director of Refugee Women Connect, an asylum organisation in Liverpool, which caters specifically for women. ‘It’s not an area where you shouldn’t have a legal representative with you.’

But the issue is also the cost. ‘Initially they were very modest,’ Webber says of immigration fees. They were increased by a small amount when the Home Office claimed they weren’t covering administrative costs. But then they skyrocketed to the levels they are now, and they’re still soaring. In 2016–17, fees for settlement, residence and nationality increased by 25 per cent. They’re constantly changing, but at the time of writing, if you want to become a permanent resident of the UK, it will cost you £2,389.⁴ That’s on top of £50 for a ‘Life in the UK’ test, which you have to take when you apply to become a British citizen or for permanent residency and, if you’re required to take one, £150 for an English exam.

Playwright Inua Ellams had discretionary leave to remain and so had to refresh his status every three years, costing £900 each time.⁵ Being able to stay in this country, he tells me, is ‘expensive – it’s thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pounds’. It’s even gotten to the stage where the Home Office is charging £5.48 every time you require a response by email.⁶ This inevitably impacts poorer migrants disproportionately, people who might not be able to pay to get the reply they need, which risks subsequently preventing them from successfully resolving their claim.

Having cash is not an automatic guarantor to frictionless movement, but money lubricates the whole system. As of 2010, if you have £2 million or more to invest in the British economy, you can apply for an ‘investor’ visa – and if successful, come to the country for three years and four months and bring immediate family members. The right to settle after two years has a £10 million price tag, and £5 million buys the same entitlement after three years.⁷ For everyone else, the cost of it all can shape their whole lives.

While successive governments have extolled the virtues of family life, immigration controls have kept people apart. Since July 2010, migrants from outside the European Economic Area and their spouses in the UK have been separated by borders and the associated price tags. Under Theresa May’s plans to ‘get numbers down’, a UK citizen or settled resident (someone who has the right to stay in the UK with no time restrictions) had to earn £18,600 per year before tax if they wanted their non-EU partner to join them. The cost rose by £3,800 if that included bringing a child, and an extra £2,400 for every additional child.⁸

For decades, non-EU spouses and family members have been treated with suspicion when all they wanted was to join their loved ones: couples are quizzed over the most intimate details of their relationship and asked questions often based on racist stereotypes; children’s teeth and wrists are X-rayed to try to ascertain their age; and older relatives have been left continents apart from their closest family simply because they have a relative in the country they’re in – even if that person isn’t available, able or willing to look after them. It’s virtually impossible for elderly non-Europeans, whether grandparents, aunts and uncles or siblings, to come to live in the UK.⁹ And it’s not always easy to visit either.

It’s these strict, costly rules that left five-year-old Andrea Gada’s family desperate. Walking home from school with her father and brother on a winter’s day in Eastbourne, Andrea was hit and killed by a car. When her grandparents and aunt applied to come from Zimbabwe for her funeral, they were denied a visa. According to their local MP, then Liberal Democrat Stephen Lloyd, they were deemed ‘too poor’ to be granted a temporary visa to come to the funeral in the UK. The Home Office offered a more technical verdict: they hadn’t previously left Zimbabwe, couldn’t show they had regular incomes and therefore were considered at risk of absconding.

The three grieving relatives – Mona Lisa Faith and Grace and Stanley Bwanya – were desperate to be at Andrea’s funeral. They tried every solution possible, from offering to wear electronic tags to saying they would report regularly to a police station while they were in the UK. Recognising how unfair the rules were, people rallied around their cause. Lloyd guaranteed that, if they were allowed to enter the UK, he would personally make sure they left the country after the funeral, and members of the community raised £5,000 to help cover travel costs. But the government rejected the application for a second time. Then slowly their case began to make headlines. The attention resulted in a petition asking the government to reverse their decision. Over 120,000 people signed it. Finally, the Home Office relented. Without public pressure and media attention, this could have been just one more story among countless others in which people are kept apart by uncaring and inflexible immigration policies. ‘Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty’, wrote essayist James Baldwin, ‘knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.’¹⁰

Worryingly and somewhat inevitably, the few organisations that exist to help people struggling with their status are overstretched, laden with more responsibilities than they can manage and struggling to survive. But they are vital. ‘It’s become almost impossible for people with most kinds of immigration issues to get any advice,’ says Benjamin, who gives assistance to destitute migrants. ‘And it’s become much more difficult for people who’ve got that legal advice to find routes to regularising their status.’ And as successive governments have talked and acted tough on immigration, migrants – documented and undocumented – feel able to trust very few people. ‘Just from the point of view of people who have jobs in the sector and get paid to do advice work it’s really frightening. Caseworkers are burning out, and it’s only possible to imagine that services are just going to become more and more strained than they already are,’ Benjamin explains.

He calls charities that hold regular drop-ins for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees ‘advice factories’; they’re under immense amounts of pressure, people can’t stay in the line of work for long and, as they leave, knowledge goes with them. This slowly depletes the level of experience within organisations, which is necessary to help people navigate what is an intentionally onerous and complex set of rules.

‘It’s hard not to feel like the government is doing it deliberately, not just to create a hostile environment for people who are here “illegally” but also to make it more difficult for people supporting them … and I think everyone anticipates that at some point there will be legislation deliberately aimed at the organisations that support, for example, undocumented people to make it more difficult for them to be accommodated and to make it more difficult for people to get advice.’

This advice is essential because it’s hard to make sense of the UK’s labyrinthine network of ever-changing rules and regulations. While politicians claim immigration is a taboo subject, one estimate suggests that, since the early 1990s, there has been, on average, a piece of legislation on immigration every other year.¹¹ Between 2010 and 2018, over the course of the Coalition and then Conservative governments, there were seven immigration bills containing all kinds of changes.¹²

‘It’s actually designed to isolate you, to bring you down, to make you want to give up and pack your bags and just go,’ Diana, who has tried to claim asylum here, says. ‘People have to really own their situation, you can’t rely on somebody else. You have to know your rights and without that … you’re headed for downfall.’ She adds, ‘I’m not really a bad person. You’ve [Britain] treated me so bad for just wanting to have a life to live.’

Diana isn’t the only person I meet who feels like that. After applying multiple times for the right to extend her study visa and then being detained in the notorious detention centre Yarl’s Wood, Christina agreed to go home. But when the day came for her to pack up all her belongings, take them to the airport and board a Nigeria-bound plane, she was left standing at the check-in desk without her passport. The Home Office was holding it hostage. Numerous emails, letters and meetings with her lawyer hadn’t been enough for them to relinquish it. She was in a country that didn’t want her to stay but that wouldn’t let her leave. When I met her in early 2018 she was still struggling to either get papers that would enable her to finish her studies or to go home. ‘I feel like I just want to talk to them face-to-face to ask them why they’re not doing their job. I’m thirty-one, I came here when I was twenty-two; it’s drained my years.’

As well as being at the forefront of giving advice and support to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, support organisations see first-hand some of the biggest problems with the UK’s immigration rules. Lindsay Cross runs West End Refugee Service (WERS) in Newcastle. Hidden among housing estates and beside a church in the west end of the city is a small detached house that WERS have turned into office space. When I first arrive in the middle of the afternoon at what looks like someone’s home, I’m not sure if I’m in the right place. But I knock on the door and as soon as I’m welcomed inside, I see the appeal of having the organisation in what might be considered an unconventional building; it’s a homely, unintimidating atmosphere and it’s where WERS offer support and advice for people seeking asylum.

Like so many other immigration and asylum services, WERS struggle from year to year to make the money they need to support everyone that comes to them for help. They rely on volunteers giving their time and energy to stay in operation. As well as struggling to survive in a climate hostile to organisations like them, WERS have also witnessed what this environment has meant for asylum seekers. Some have been left destitute and hopeless, and many others have suffered thanks to private companies who provide asylum housing.

People who have been given refugee status or who have indefinite leave to remain have very similar housing and welfare rights to British citizens. But since the 1990s, people seeking asylum have had their rights stripped back through successive immigration and asylum acts, including the ability to choose where they live.¹³ Introduced by New Labour, under the ‘forced dispersal’ policy, people seeking asylum are sent all over the country, usually to some of the poorest areas, regardless of whether they know anyone there or anything about the place.¹⁴ ‘It’s not easy to start a whole life again,’ says Diana, who was sent from Nottingham, where she had friends, a job in the NHS and a rented flat, to Birmingham, a place she didn’t know at all. But the disorientation that comes with being shipped off to an area you don’t know can be made even worse if you get to your new home only to find it damp, rotting or infested with insects, mice and rats.¹⁵

In 2012, estimated to amount to £620 million, six contracts shifted housing provision into the hands of three private companies, G4S, Serco and Clearel. It wasn’t ever apparent what qualifications the first two had to be given this responsibility; only Clearel had any experience of providing housing.¹⁶ When the new housing providers were announced, security firm G4S was probably best known for having been involved in the death of forty-six-year-old Jimmy Mubenga when, in 2010, three of the company’s guards restrained him on board a flight to Angola. After seventeen years in the UK, Mubenga was being deported to the southern African country and in the process being separated from his wife and five children. One passenger claimed they heard him cry, ‘Let me up, you’re killing me. You’re killing me. You’re killing me. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.’¹⁷ He died in seat 40E of the plane as it sat on the tarmac at Heathrow. A year later an inquest concluded that he had been unlawfully killed but a subsequent trial ended with the jury finding the three guards not guilty of manslaughter. Sixty-five racist texts found on two of the guards’ phones weren’t shown to the jury; defence lawyers argued they would ‘release an unpredictable cloud of prejudice’. But a coroner’s report that had been written three years after Jimmy’s death said the texts were ‘not evidence of a couple of “rotten apples”’ but seemed to ‘evidence a more pervasive racism within G4S’.¹⁸ By the time the report was released, G4S had already been given the asylum housing contract.

Before the switch went ahead, a mix of local authorities, housing associations and private contractors had been responsible for the accommodation of asylum seekers. Cross says the shift away from local authorities was ‘very obvious’ and the private sector offered much lower cost contracts, but that came with ‘absolute pairing down in the contracts’. Support for people was ‘pretty much annihilated’, putting more pressure on organisations like WERS. Though these private companies claim to take housing quality into account, there is a growing body evidence to the contrary.

In 2016, G4S – a company that paid no corporation tax in 2012, the same year it was given the contract – was fined £5.6 million for the low standard of the asylum housing it provided in 2013/14. In Middlesbrough, when G4S inspected housing provided by Jomast – a company G4S subcontracts to – they found urgent defects in 14 per cent of properties. Later, Home Office inspections found urgent defects in 91 per cent of properties. Jomast was reported to be taking £8 million from the taxpayer.¹⁹ As asylum seekers were being sent to live in squalid conditions, the government was still handing millions of pounds’ worth of contracts to the private housing providers.

The people I speak to aren’t just victims of the immigration regime; they’re much more than their immigration status. But they’re angry about the way they’ve been treated; they talk about their experiences to expose the impact of the UK’s immigration and asylum rules and to advocate for change. ‘You know they’re really brutal the way they treat people,’ Kelly says. ‘I’ve been here since I was nine years old. I feel like they treat me like some kind of alien. There’s no sympathy or any form of understanding. They have to look at everyone as an individual, not just “you’re a migrant, get out”.’

Kelly describes the treatment she receives when she goes to sign in at the immigration reporting centre at London Bridge – part of the requirement for those waiting for a claim or appeal to be processed, so the state can keep track of them. She has been made to queue outside in the rain – ‘When we told them oh it’s raining, they’re like “it’s only water, do you not bathe?”’ – and describes the policy proscribing phone use: ‘Because they know that if you use your phone you can record something. If you use your phone, they’ll kick you out.’ One undercover report exposed an official at this same reporting centre telling a thirty-nine-year-old man,

We are not here to make life easy for you. It’s a challenging environment we have got to make for people. It’s working because it’s pissing you off. Am I right? There you go. That’s my aim at the end of the day, to make it a challenging environment for you. It’s pissing you off. You’re telling me it’s pissed you off. There you go, I’ve done my job.²⁰

It’s become common sense to think too much immigration of a certain kind is bad for the UK in all kinds of ways – for wages, public services but also ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ – and that ‘controls’ are a solution. But look at what they do: force people to leave the country, even if it means being separated from friends and family, or stop them from staying long enough to make local connections if they want to. ‘Controls’ are making people’s lives a misery; they are part of the problem.

To find an example of the inhumanity of migration policy in the UK, look no further than ‘immigration removal centres’. This name works as a sanitiser, obscuring the brutal reality of these ‘centres’. Andy knows this all too well.

Originally from Ghana, his family – made up of his dad and his younger siblings, two brothers and two sisters – moved around before they settled into life in the UK in 1997 when Andy was twelve years old. Andy never knew the specifics of his dad’s job, just that he was often away on business: ‘I remember my dad always travelled, no matter where we lived he always travelled.’ One day, the woman who was looking after Andy and his siblings while his dad was away with work packed up and left: at the age of fifteen, Andy had to become the adult of the household. Without any means to contact their dad, he dropped out of school, got a job in a nearby market and looked after the family. His dad never returned. To this day, Andy still doesn’t know what happened to him.

Before long, the circumstances of their makeshift family were discovered. With Andy still under the age of eighteen and trying to support his siblings single-handedly, his brothers and sisters were taken into care and social services told him he could go into accommodation provided by the council, but that he needed ID.

‘Low and behold I get there and they say – first time in my life – “Where’s your passport or birth certificate, where’s your ID?” What? What’s an ID? I don’t know. They say, “Well unless you’ve got one of these things we can’t help you”. So, I went back to social services and they said go and search the house. I turned the house upside down. Nothing.’

Andy was left homeless. He got protection from, though never joined, a gang. But it was enough that he’d entered the gang’s network. To survive on his own and find a way out, he left London and bought an ID from someone who specialised in identity fraud. Desperate to get a job and without any form of documentation – not so much as a birth certificate – he felt he had no choice.

A hard worker, he did well, but after one of many promotions, he was eventually found out. He went to prison for identity theft. His sentence was supposed to be ten months, then, out of the blue, the day before he was going to be released, he was told he was being put in immigration detention. But even that didn’t happen straight away. ‘I was supposed to be released from prison on 21 May 2010. That was the day. That was my release date. I stayed in prison until 13 June 2011, over a year.’²¹ No one ever explained why.

After a year in Morton Hall, a detention centre in Lincolnshire, Andy was moved to Brook House, next to Gatwick airport. When he arrived, he realised what was in store for him: he was going to be quietly put on a plane and deported to a country he hadn’t been to since he was a child; a place where he knew no family or friends.

Andy had already been encouraged by a volunteer in Morton Hall to apply for asylum: he is bisexual and could face persecution if he goes back to Ghana. To stop what he believed was a plan to deport him, he pointed out he was waiting on the asylum decision, so they could not deport him until he heard the outcome. This gave him more time. After applying for bail fourteen times, he was finally successful, and in October 2016 he was granted asylum by the courts, but the Home Office decided to appeal the decision. When we meet he’s still in limbo, forced to carry around a biometric ID card – a policy introduced under New Labour – which is his only official piece of identification. He takes it out of his pocket to show me and the first thing I see is the words it has stamped across it in bold black writing: ‘forbidden from taking employment’. Andy ended up being abandoned by the state because he had no ID; now he’s made to carry one that marks him out as different. ‘I’ve been out three years,’ he says. ‘I can’t work, I’m not allowed to work paid or unpaid, I can’t work but they expect me to survive … I don’t get nothing.’

Between 2009 and 2016, 2,500 to 3,500 people were in detention at any given time. Most were held for less than a month, but some much longer. It’s thought the longest someone has been detained for was 1,156 days.²² In 2015, the Chief Inspector of Prisons noted in a report that high numbers of women put in Yarl’s Wood detention centre were released, which, he wrote, ‘raises questions about the validity of their detention in the first place’.²³

Until the 1990s, the UK didn’t have any permanent detention centres; people were put in prisons or held in a converted car ferry called the Earl William. Within two years of being in office, New Labour had dramatically increased the number of detention centres, and the country now has one of the biggest immigration detention estates in Europe. Almost as soon as they came into existence, these centres have been sites of hunger strikes and suicide attempts.²⁴ Andy says his experience of detention was worse than prison.

Fenced off from the rest of the world, presumably in the hope that no one would ever discover the mistreatment going on inside, there is one detention centre that has become a symbol of state cruelty. Alongside resistance and protest, report after report has made small holes in the bottle green barrier that surrounds Yarl’s Wood, helping expose fragments of what goes on inside this notorious detention centre. This has been a collective effort. Channel 4 has sent investigation teams there. Women detainees on hunger strike inside have claimed column inches in the Guardian to explain their protest. Periodically, campaigners from all over the country have made the trip out to Bedford, surrounding Yarl’s Wood, making as much noise as possible to show solidarity with people inside and demand its closure. And the Independent and the Telegraph newspapers have reported on the alleged abuse that goes on within its walls.²⁵

But the coverage of what goes on inside Yarl’s Wood can too easily become disconnected from the anti-immigration politics – the kind which presents immigration first and foremost as negative – that makes such an institution a reality, and that is perpetuated by our press and our politicians.

The former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt describes to me the culture at the tabloid newspaper that helps make detention acceptable. When he was at the paper, there was a constant pressure, he says, to find stories that fit in with a particular anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim narrative. The Daily Star was no insignificant player. In December 2011, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABCs) figures showed that the Daily Star was the third most widely bought newspaper that month, below the Sun and the Daily Mirror and with a circulation figure of 616,498, almost double that of the Financial Times’.²⁶

Peppiatt, who in a widely publicised letter to his boss, media mogul Richard Desmond, quit his job in 2011 after two years at the paper, recalls being sent to pursue a story about a family from Somalia who were seeking asylum in the UK and who had been put up in a luxurious townhouse in Chelsea.²⁷ ‘These stories seemed to pop up every week’, where the message would be ‘asylum seekers are basically getting the absolute run of the pitch and being put up in expensive houses,’ he explains.

When he got there, every other right-wing tabloid newspaper had a journalist camped outside the house. ‘We could tell there was people in there,’ he says. ‘Quite an intimidating situation with photographers and journalists hanging about this house … putting notes through the door … the curtains would twitch occasionally and a photographer would try and flash off a shot to catch a picture of them.’ Unsurprisingly with all these journalists on their doorstep, no one from the family came out of the house. So, despite intense pressure from editors back at the Daily Star, Peppiatt left, along with all the other reporters, as the night was drawing in. The next morning in the newsroom, Peppiatt’s manager stormed over to him. ‘What the fuck is this, I thought you said they didn’t come outside?’ he said pointing at the Sun, which had a quote from the father. ²⁸ ‘I said’, Peppiatt recounts, ‘they didn’t come outside, 100 per cent, they didn’t come outside!’ The news editor responded, ‘You know what, you need to be a bit more canny.’ You can make your own mind up was what he meant by that.

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.

One of a number of drawbacks is that the Convention enables individual states to interpret who is a refugee. Contrary to what most people think about asylum, ‘failed’ applicants are not simply, automatically duplicitous liars, and not all decisions are fair or right, especially considering the prevailing culture of disbelief and the fact that evidence of eligibility – in a system that often demands you prove the impossible – can be difficult to provide.

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 universally agreed-upon definition of who constitutes an immigrant. The UN describes a long-term international migrant as someone who moves to another country, which essentially becomes their residence, for at least twelve months. But even this explanation has its problems. ‘The time frame of one year is arbitrary,’ Professor Bridget Anderson points out, ‘change that and you can drastically alter how we understand and measure immigration … If, for example, one chooses to define a “migrant” as a person intending to stay away for four years or more … Britain has been experiencing negative net migration for many years.’⁴⁷

And despite definitions like this one, movement is complicated and so the distinction between refugees and migrants isn’t always a straightforward one. Someone might flee war in their home country, arrive in another as an asylum seeker, and be granted refugee status. But after months or years of trying to find work or survive in this new country, they might decide to move somewhere in Europe, where they’re told there’s a chance of work, or where their family lives. Then they might be seen as a migrant.⁴⁸

The ground is constantly shifting under people’s feet; like a carousel, the debate moves from ‘good refugee’ and ‘bad migrant’ to ‘bad refugee’ and ‘good migrant’, as politicians reacting to and feeding global and national events determine who’s acceptable and who isn’t. Rarely is one category of people considered entirely welcome, and there aren’t always unambiguous distinctions between asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, especially not in the public debate, where the potential differences and similarities between different people and their experiences are muddied; the sheer complexity of it all is lost.

Anti-asylum language feeds anti-immigrant narratives in an ongoing negative feedback loop, and regardless of their legal status, everyone who is seen as an ‘illegitimate’ outsider becomes a threat to the nation. Particular people are deemed undesirable, as the media and politicians conspire to give the impression that people who have come to live in the UK are undercutting wages, driving down conditions and diluting ‘British culture’.

But often, amid all this complexity, liberal politicians, some of whom are relatively relaxed about advocating for more refugees to be allowed into the country, claim to have some kind of clarity: the real problem, they say, is economic migrants. Even some parts of the immigration sector have helped sustain a ‘hierarchy of migrants’, Fizza Qureshi, director of Migrants’ Rights Network, says. Some organisations more comfortable with advocating for refugees have sometimes failed to tackle the stereotypes about migrants irrespective of what job they do, where they’re from or how much they earn.

‘Economic migrants’ are thought to choose to move for better wages or a better standard of life, and it’s according to this logic that they’re problematised; it’s assumed they are here to ‘take’ from the UK, out of no real necessity. Not in the country ‘illegally’, they’re still considered illegitimate. But overlooked in the mix of hostility and hysteria about ‘economic immigration’ is an understanding of why people migrate to begin with.

Relocating all over the world, packing up their possessions, making journeys within countries, across oceans and whole continents, people are complex, there isn’t always one single reason they emigrate. It might be for adventure, a new job, to be with family or a change of scenery. They are making these trips with their loved ones or leaving family behind to settle in countries entirely new to them or cities they’ve known only from news bulletins. Choosing whether to leave can be as much to do with where you are as it is with where you want to go.

Money in its most crude form of notes and coins isn’t the only motivation for migration. If all movement were just a case of following the money, author and professor Arun Kundnani writes, ‘everyone in Greece would have moved to Luxembourg where they could instantly double their wages’.⁴⁹ Many people can’t scrape together enough money to move, and many others might not want to move in the first place. The frenzied discussion about ‘mass migration’ ignores that the vast majority of people stay where they are or move within countries. In 2016, estimates suggested only 3.2 per cent of the world’s population were international migrants; in 1960 it was 3 per cent.⁵⁰ The world’s population has grown substantially in this period, so although this amounts to more people moving, it’s not a significantly higher proportion than in the past. What’s also changed over this almost sixty-year period is that the countries people leave are more diverse and the number of destinations is far smaller. The EU, one of the richest parts of the world, is one of the most popular destinations.⁵¹ But, even then, only a small proportion of the population of Europe are immigrants.⁵² I don’t write this to offer reassurance, as if movement is bad, but to provide context.

But as long as 4.2 billion people live in poverty and the income gap between the Global North and South is still growing, people will have to move.⁵³ ‘What they’ve managed to do is create this idea that people are simply moving for economic reasons,’ says Asad Rehman, director of global justice charity War on Want, when describing the term ‘economic migrant’. ‘And in people’s minds that means you’re moving from one wage to another, you’re simply moving for a higher salary, rather than actually saying that people are survival migrants. What people are surviving is global inequality.’

We talk about poverty like it’s natural. Global leaders hold grand summits where they lay out everything that needs to be done to reverse extreme inequality, as if extractive capitalist economies, colonial histories and racialised hierarchies of power haven’t produced it.⁵⁴ Through crippling debt and colossal interest rates, unfair trade deals, war and global corporations being given carte blanche to plunder natural resources all around the world,⁵⁵ money flows out of poorer countries into richer ones. In 2008, Angel Gurría, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.⁵⁶ When the world is designed this way, it’s not surprising that some people feel the best option is to move.

Originally from the Philippines, Marissa Begonia ended up in the UK when she couldn’t find a job that would give her and her three children a decent standard of living. ‘It was the most difficult and painful decision to leave my family behind in search for a decent job in a foreign land where I was even unsure of what kind of life awaits me but this was the only way I could think of.’⁵⁷

As a last-ditch option, Marissa became a domestic worker at the age of twenty-four. Trying to find decent employment, she shuttled back and forth between countries. First, she worked in Singapore, where her wages were so low it wasn’t worth it. Then she went to Hong Kong, where an abusive employer made her life unbearable. When she quit, she was so scared of what her employer might do that when she went to hand in her resignation, she did so holding a knife behind her back. She returned home to the Philippines, but nothing had changed; any work she could find paid so little she could barely afford to look after her children. And so she decided to try again. She went back to Hong Kong, and from there her employers moved her to London, where she still lives and where she is chair of the Voice of Domestic Workers, a grassroots organisation established in 2009 to empower migrant domestic workers to stand up to discrimination, inequality and abuse.

In the end, people like Marissa should have the right to stay and live a decent life in the country they are born in, as well as the right to move if they so choose. The problem is that, for some people, staying becomes an option they can no longer realistically entertain, even if moving, in a world hostile to migrants, can be dangerous. Many migrants, even if they only move temporarily, aren’t poor as a result of laziness, stupidity or inability: they are trying to make a life for themselves in a global economy that is deeply unequal and that is destroying the places they call home.

Climate breakdown is increasingly going to make it impossible for people to stay where they’re born, and it’s likely people of colour will be disproportionately impacted. Set against a long history of decimating indigenous communities, who are imagined as unable to master the environment for profit as the ‘superior’, ‘civilised’ world can, extractive, growth-obsessed capitalism is destroying the planet. But under the legal definition of the refugee, written in the 1950s, people aren’t protected: there are no internationally recognised rights for people who have to leave their home because of climate change.

Inequality and climate degradation meet in Bangladesh. The eighth most populous country in the world, it’s thought to be one of the most vulnerable to climate change. But in 2014 it produced around just 0.44 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person, compared to the United States’ huge 16.4 tonnes.⁵⁸ It’s also a hotbed of global exploitation. Making cheap clothes for other parts of the world, people – predominantly women – have organised to demand better pay and conditions. But while the UK uses fossil fuels that destroy the Bangladeshi environment and buys clothes made by its citizens, the people from this country aren’t exactly welcome to move here or welcomed when they do.

‘I hate when the term “economic migrant” is assigned to us. Everyone moves around for economic reasons, not only us,’ Ake says. He’s been in the UK for over ten years, studying full-time at Kingston University when he arrived as well as clocking in thirty-five hours a week or more as a security guard. He used to be a union organiser, founded a group that protects migrants’ right to work and, having completed a master’s in international human rights law, is about to do a PhD. Well-acquainted with the disorder of moving, through his own experiences and his work, Ake points out that ‘economic migrant’ is applied selectively. People from ‘Africa or developing countries’ are ‘economic migrants’ but if someone leaves the UK and goes to Germany, they’re likely to be called an ‘expat’. ‘They are people and we [are] less than human,’ he says.

Making sense of terms like ‘economic migrant’ is not just about understanding how and why people move, but also how they’re treated when they’re here. As she talks to me in the café at the Unite the Union offices in Central London, Marissa doesn’t hide her anger; it seems to drive her campaigning. Over the chatter of people milling in and out of the canteen during the lunchtime rush, she describes how her pitifully low salary, painfully long hours and controlling employers pushed her to join together with other domestic workers and fight back.

When the Coalition government came to power in 2010 domestic workers, who are predominantly women, were in trouble. At the end of the 1970s, visas for domestic workers were scrapped. For many, the proof that they were legally in the country consisted of a stamp in their passport that named their employer as the only person they had the right to work for. If they left their employer, they lost status and were classed as undocumented. After decades of domestic workers agitating, organising and campaigning, in 1997 the rules were changed. Under New Labour, domestic workers had the right to change employers without being deported. As a result, they could access a route to staying in the country and they were recognised as workers, entitled to workplace rights and time off. In 2008, the government threatened to strip away the rights workers had fought for, but were forced to abandon their plans because of the strength of resistance.

However, a new government in 2010 meant new ministers, with new resolve. In 2012, to widespread condemnation, the Conservative-led Coalition changed the rules so that domestic workers could only come to the UK for six months, had no right to renew their visas and were tied to their foreign employer. According to the Guardian, over 2016–17, the Home Office issued 18,950 Domestic Workers in a Private Household visas; if people brought into the country under one of these visas left an employer who was abusive or who was exploiting them, they became undocumented. This sat uncomfortably with that same government’s aim to end modern slavery.⁵⁹ ‘Theresa May is this great advocate for measures to protect people from modern slavery,’ says former barrister Frances Webber, ‘while at the same time her ministers are removing protection against extreme exploitation.’

Evidence shows that migrants are far more likely to be employed in lower paid, monotonous and dangerous jobs, with little or no trade union influence – yet they tend to be educationally and experientially overqualified for the work they do.⁶⁰ ‘There are reasons behind why people are moving from their home land to Europe,’ explains Ake, who came to the UK from the Ivory Coast via France. ‘Like anybody else, we have dreams for ourselves and our families, and rights we are entitled to. And when you are denied these basic rights, your instincts switch onto the survival mode.’

While most of us are asleep, a multinational workforce is cleaning the expensive offices of people on six-figure salaries, doing shifts in high-end hotels all hours of the day or looking after older people in care homes.

‘In this world, migrants have rights, but no or little way to make use of them or ask for their respect,’ concluded one non-governmental organisation. ‘They are legally voiceless.’ The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families attempts to deal with this. It is concerned with protecting the human rights of anyone who crosses a border for work, regardless of their status – that is, whether they’re documented or not. The treaty is designed to ensure human rights are applied to all migrants and to establish a minimum set of legal protections, which among other things requires states that have ratified the treaty give migrants and their families freedom of speech, the freedom to join trade unions and rights equal to citizens in terms of pay and working conditions. At the time of writing, only fifty-four countries have ratified the treaty; the UK is not one of them.⁶¹

When New Labour immigration minister Barbara Roche declared in 2000 that ‘we are in competition for the brightest and the best’, she was playing right into the framing that turns people into commodities.⁶² Dividing migrants into ‘the best and the brightest’ vs. ‘the rest’ or ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, as politicians still do, erases the complex, important work done by people who don’t fit into the former categories. It creates a hierarchy of human value. ‘There’s a wholly artificial distinction between high-skilled people and low-skilled,’ says Diane Abbott. ‘For instance, care workers are described as low-skilled, but they’re vital. If Eastern European migrants stop coming here tomorrow, social care in London and the South-East would collapse because they can’t get the labour.’

Even for people classed as ‘highly skilled’, the very immigration controls that governments claim are necessary for safety and security can produce precarity. If you’re tied to your employer for your right to be here, as you might be on some visas, your status is essentially reliant upon their support. It’s not that all employers who sponsor members of staff are out to actively and grossly exploit them; a licence could cost up to £1,476 (at the time of writing), depending on the size of the company and type of visa, and then they have to pay for each worker they sponsor. But there’s a risk for employees: if you’re struggling with a boss who is forcing you to work unpaid overtime and treating you badly, or you’re just not happy in the job and you can’t find another employer who will sponsor you, it might be more difficult to challenge mistreatment.⁶³ As Swiss writer Max Frisch once observed, ‘We asked for workers and human beings came.’⁶⁴

A global working class – the majority of whom are of colour – keeps the world economy going. Politicians in a number of countries know they need workers from all around the world and that an unfair, imbalanced global economy paired with climate breakdown means some people need to migrate. But that doesn’t mean that everyone can do so, or that those who do then have freedom, choice or decent rights.

In 2001, twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ayaz from northern Pakistan broke through security at Bahrain airport and launched himself into an opening on the bottom of a Boeing 777 headed for London. He had been working as a labourer in Dubai and, like so many others who feel like they have no better options but to take this same route, he got into huge amounts of debt to get there. But he wanted to make it to England. The combination of the cold and lack of oxygen had most likely killed him on the long journey and, early on Thursday morning, his body fell from the undercarriage of the plane. He was found dead in a Homebase car park near Heathrow. In the years that followed, two others – thirty-year-old Carlito Vale and twenty-seven-year-old José Matada – died in similar circumstances. ‘He always spoke about going to work in America or England,’ Ayaz’s brother, Gul Bihar, said. ‘But they don’t give visas to poor people like us.’⁶⁵

We like to tell ourselves a very particular version of the UK’s past. One in which we’ve held the door open to people fleeing conflict and persecution, and welcomed others from all over the world. Whenever the brutal realities of this country’s asylum system make newspaper headlines, the Home Office response almost always includes some variation of the following: ‘The UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need it.’⁶⁶ But while there are tales of warm reception, and people from all over the world have made a life for themselves in this country, there are at least as many stories of doors slammed shut in people’s faces and faceless walls of bureaucracy confronting those who arrive.

The asylum regime that became increasingly restrictive from the 1980s and through the 1990s and 2000s only got worse from 2010 on. Seeing that people were fleeing conflict, famine and political persecution, the Coalition barely squeaked the door ajar to asylum seekers; between 2010 and 2015 they resettled just 143 refugees who had escaped violent civil war in Syria. So far, well over 5 million refugees have left Syria. During the largest refugee movement since the Second World War, it was only under intense public pressure that Prime Minister David Cameron committed to take in up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years. But in comparison to countries like Germany, this was a tiny number, and when compared with the countries in the so-called ‘developing’ world, which host the vast majority of refugees, it looked even smaller.⁶⁷

But when the Coalition government was put under the spotlight for failing to take in refugees from Syria, campaigners lobbied politicians to take in child refugees by drawing on national mythology. Conjuring up images of Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransport, they argued that the UK should not betray its history. This proved to be an effective campaigning tool that tapped into existing thinking; one 2011 poll found that 84 per cent of people said they were proud to be British and 82 per cent believed protecting the most vulnerable is a core British value.⁶⁸ But certain ‘children were unaccompanied, and their Jewish parents left behind in Nazi Europe’, Louise London reminds us, they were ‘excluded from entry to the United Kingdom [and] are not part of the British experience, because Britain never saw them’.⁶⁹

The shameful present, in which refugees are turned away, asylum seekers are left destitute on the streets, migrants are indefinitely detained and members of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ are deported, is often compared to an imagined past, as activists and outraged politicians indignantly ask: What has this country become? The problem is, this is the kind of place it has long been.