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On 28 October, 2020, in a sickly familiar and tragic case, a family of Iranian Kurds trying to enter the UK – Rasul Iran Nezhad, Shiva Mohammad Panahi and their children Anita, Armin and 15-month-old Artin – drowned in the English Channel. The mourning of their loss soon disappeared, in what the language that reports on immigration often call a “flood” of similar cases.
The history of using terms that portray the “immigration problem” long precedes the Trump and Johnson regimes. It is a part of our news system, a fixed and almost retractable idiom that has a deep and menacing political significance. In Western Europe, Australia and the US, the term has acquired increasing potency in recent decades. Like a gremlin, which in its infancy was small enough to be ignored, the discourse has been brought out into the light and metamorphosised into a much larger and uglier beast, one with forced adjacency and deliberate associations with the hairier and scarier problem of terrorism. This once horrible little issue suitable for horrible little political outliers is now the stinking, long-tusked and shaggy woolly mammoth in the room.
For decades, the issue of immigration has simply been a racist dog whistle, peddled by the likes of Enoch Powell or Nigel Farage in the UK and the Le Pens – Jean-Marie and Marine – in France, and their identikit politicians across the global far right. As far back as the general election of 1964, the campaign slogan for the Conservative and Unionist party candidate for the constituency of Smethwick was: “If you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour.” The slogan was a reaction to the arrival of West Indian guest workers, actually British citizens much needed to help motor a booming British manufacturing scene. While the Conservatives lost the national election to Labour with a 3.2% swing, Smethwick swung in the opposite direction by 7.3%, costing the potential Labour home secretary his seat. Amid rising tension and increased level of racist attacks, even Malcom X visited the constituency, his last trip abroad before he was murdered back in the US by a hail of bullets only nine days later.
The issue can also be considered from the opposite perspective, too. By contrast, progressive forces are often keen to emphasise the duty of care written into the UN charter by which every member of the UN is obliged to shelter and protect people fleeing persecution of war or famine. The ambiguity of where a refugee becomes an economic migrant is also a matter of arbitrary interpretation; for the right, including the extreme right, the distinction immediately raises hackles, keen as they are to paint migrants as cheats and uninvited interlocutors who criminally circumvent the so-called official channels for migration. It was Tony Blair’s New Labour that banned asylum seekers waiting for processing of their cases from seeking employment and forced many of them into the black economies of bonded servitude. The other progressive riposte is to point out the economic, social and cultural contribution that immigrants make to a host nation. Jobs that the native British plumber would turn his nose up at are eagerly completed more efficiently by his Polish counterpart, an ageing German workforce is refreshed by an influx of young and often well-educated Syrians. But neither approach gets to the root of the problem because neither political position is entirely truthful to itself before presenting a case to its electorate.
Let us ask some basic questions. Who is an immigrant? How is an immigrant different from a refugee, a guest worker or an expat? Why are some forms of immigration valued as the best fruit of the globalised market economy for a cosmopolitan society and others considered an embarrassing and ugly failure? By the early 2000s, one bumped into British fashion photographers in bars in New York, Russian models in London and Milan, overheard drunken French spoken in hostess bars in Shanghai by the foot soldiers from the armies of McKinsey and Bain, or had earnestly hip, tastefully tattooed young women with art-history degrees from minor universities in the US Midwest show you to your seat at thinly attended but lavishly funded art fairs in Dubai – why did no one think of these people as immigrants? Because they were expats: the blossoms on globalism’s ever-encroaching ivy, wrapping itself around the planet. Immigrants were the hotel chambermaids in Houston and Vienna, the taxi drivers and office cleaners in Berlin and Boston, the dishwasher and construction workers in London and Qatar, the African hawkers in Rome and on beaches of Saint-Tropez. Expats are the bright, breezy and highly desirable manifestations of globalisation, immigrants its unpleasant side-effects. Well you know, every rose has its thorns.
This segregation of immigrants into classes and the pretence that some are legitimate and others not is a classic false dichotomy. The truth this hides is that the two groups present two sides of the same coin and immigrants are just black and brown expats with less glamorous passports doing less glamorous jobs. The only difference in the value of a hawker of fake goods who is forced to work illegally according to the logic of capitalism and the pasty-faced management consultant is their day rate.
Whereas the management consultant raids the economy of the host nation for the benefit of globalised capital, the street hawker raids his or her own economic potential to his home nation by offering extremely cheap productive and unprotected labour that greases the wheels of the economy of his host country. The country and the economy of the management consultant reap the benefits from their exploitation of other economies by taxing their income during their productive years. The home country is richly rewarded for having invested in their birth, health and education.
It is true that remittances by migrants are an important part of many economies. The Filipino nanny, the Bangladeshi labourer and the Syrian asylum seeker are all likely to support a network of dependents in their home countries – India alone received an inflow of $83 billion in remittances in 2019, roughly equivalent to the entire GDP of Sri Lanka – yet that support actually short-changes countries that export raw human labour just as West African nations lose the potential added value of unrefined cocoa that is processed in Belgium.
The lesson often described as “playing the immigration card”, largely but not exclusively a hand played by those on the right, has been well learned by successive generations of ghastly politicians in every party. They have habitually reached for it whenever times are hard. The populist engine that powered the political drive towards Brexit was the fear and loathing of immigrants. In fact, a fictional horde of Turkish workers supposedly flooding the UK was one of the Leave campaign’s two communication pillars. The so-called genius behind the strategy Dominic Cummings, who now runs the government agenda in all but name, knew full well that “taking back control” was just a polite version of the 1964 slogan about unwanted neighbours.
In a vain attempt to square the hellish circle of the Brexit negotiations, the current home secretary, Priti Patel herself a child of immigrants, has recently been exposed as drawing up barbaric and draconian plans worthy of a trainee Bond villain: deport asylum seekers to Ascension Island, 4,200 miles away, store them in barges or disused oil platforms in the North Sea, or why not build a seabed fence to pierce the inflatable boats? Well she can relax. The English Channel is proving pretty efficient at conveying a message of unwelcome unaided.
Immigration becomes the “problem of immigration” only when it is regarded from the point of view of the relatively poor people in richer countries. The immigrant is often more tolerated by the rich in richer countries because they are a convenience. They garden for them, drive them around and clean their shit, but the rich don’t live near them or queue with them at the GP; only the poor in rich countries have to do that. The undeniable inconvenience for the poorer communities in richer countries is not remotely comparable to the tragedies faced by all of the people in poor or troubled countries. The poor in poorer countries pay with their lives; they die in their thousands to make it over the increasingly brutal barriers, with no option but to continue onwards as their way back is blocked.
What’s more, the Australian banker or the French businessman in China is never expected to forget their home cultures. God forbid, they would even be expected to speak minimal Mandarin. They are simply allowed to shout louder. It is the hosts who are admonished for failing to learn English to a higher level. The US soldier or big pharma executive in Germany is similarly absolved, while the difficulty of an Arab woman in acquiring German or French is a sign of her intransigence and her head covering a flag of dissent.
When an apartment is flooded and water is leaking to the neighbours below, only one of three possible solutions is currently offered by our politicians. The so-called left wants to put down buckets to catch the drips, the centre wants to block the water by repainting the ceiling, and the right wants to go upstairs and beat up the tenants. Perhaps it’s time to try a novel technique, never seriously attempted: let’s call a plumber and help the folks upstairs to fix the leaking taps. I know a great guy and he isn’t even Polish. Masoud Golsorkhi