Mind the Gap

I’m sure no one has forgotten about the 19 Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay back in 2004. Today, G2 has an article about what has happened to their families since losing what was often the main breadwinner: orphans, piles of debt, and poverty.

This is one of the few occasions I remember where illegal immigrants became visible in the UK press. Usually, you mainly see gross misinformation through the tabloids: people coming into the country from all over the globe, all specifically going to the UK because of the benefits system and free healthcare, taking all the jobs, being lazy and on benefits, raping kids, and being generally responsible for all crime ever. Oh, and they stay in five-star hotels on taxpayers’ money and generally muss up the areas full of decent, hard-working middle-class people where these luxury resorts are located, driving down the house prices. And this is not a caricature. It also affects the public’s perception of refugees and illegal immigrants, judging by some co-workers’ comments I’ve overheard in various places I’ve worked: secretaries boasting about turning away a swarthy man with a foreign accent (“I think it was an illegal immigrant, we don’t want none of them!”), expressing outrage that all terrorist activity was the work of “bloody foreigners”, and even joking among the float secretaries about having to change desks (“I’m a displaced person, but at least I’m not an illegal immigrant!”). I should also explain that “foreigner”, “asylum seeker”, “illegal immigrant”, “bloody ethnic”… were all synonymous, in that office, with “darkie”.

First, note the choice of terminology on the part of the press. “Illegal immigrant” speaks for itself: if they’re illegal, they’re breaking the law, so we should take a tough but firm attitude to them, at best. As for “asylum seeker”, well, they want something from us, just like those scrounging single mums on benefits and those homeless people who have a host of cunning stratagems to guilt-trip passers-by into giving them pocket change in a huge feat of organised white collar crime (sometimes they all share the same dog you know!). If the press used the word “refugee”, maybe it would make people wonder what people have to seek refuge from, and why, and it would make it a lot more difficult to refuse a fellow human adequate food and shelter.

Faced with this barrage of misinformation, it’s quite hard to stay clear-headed and not go and bang a few heads together. Instead, I’ll share what little information I have on the situation of refugees in Europe. So here goes.

First, the idea that all refugees go to Europe is wrong: according to Human Rights Watch, “Asia hosts 45 percent of all refugees, followed by Africa (30 percent), Europe (19 percent) and North America (5 percent).”.

Now for the first-hand information: I had the opportunity to regularly visit a refugee home in France over roughly eighteen months. I had little to no awareness of the existence of refugees beforehand, or rather, I pretty much thought they all lived in muddy fields somewhere far away in poor countries, they might as well have been little people living inside the TV set for all I knew. This meant, however, that I was also ignorant of any press coverage on the matter. Regardless, it was the beginning of a political awakening for me.

Let’s start with the five-star hotels. The refugee home I saw was a three-story concrete block just down the road from some student halls, hidden among some trees. The people I knew living there were mostly single and in their twenties, some of them sharing a room with one other person, but there were quite a few families with three to four children staying all together in rooms which were roughly 15 square metres, with beds, bedside tables, and a sink. There was one set of toilets and showers per floor, most of which didn’t lock and were only ever cleaned when there was an inspection due on the same day. There was no privacy whatsoever, and it would have been quite easy for someone to walk in on you while you were showering, or just peer over the top of the cubicle door. The food was leftovers from canteens, often past its use-by date. I was there at mealtimes a couple of times, and the unpealed, partially-boiled sprouts were the least of the problem. There was sometimes maggoty meat, and on one occasion, a huge handful of hair in the middle of a stew. The residents were not supposed to cook in their rooms, but understandably most of them did, which was undoubtedly a fire hazard that could have been avoided if the food provided had been fit to eat for anyone or anything other than maggots.

As if that wasn’t enough, the staff would often heckle the residents about the quality of the food, saying that French people would be grateful to eat as well. But that wasn’t the extent of the abuse the residents suffered from the staff. One thing I heard, but can’t confirm, was that a lot of the money destined to the refugees wasn’t reaching them, and that in fact they were left with the equivalent of £30 per month, which, considering they pretty much had to buy their own food or risk being very ill, isn’t very much. They were also frequently intimidated by the director of the home, who threatened them with eviction. The women were badgered into taking the pill even if they didn’t choose to, and one woman who refused was told “Don’t come running to me when you get pregnant”. The healthcare was generally shoddy, and most ailments, even serious ones, were treated with painkillers. The crowning touch was when the cook sexually abused girls as young as four, and although he was sacked after a few months and went to jail, the whole affair was silenced. The new cook was better, but he did take advantage of his position as an in-road with the ladies, which, though much better than molesting children, is still not exactly admirable behaviour.

Then there were a few volunteers from a neighbouring church, and some of the stuff I heard coming out of their mouths was completely dumb-founding, such as “you’re eating French people’s money and not giving anything in return”, or “You should be less greedy and thank God for what He’s given you”, or “I’m glad that person wasn’t granted asylum because he’s a Muslim”. Note: I was actually present to hear all of those utterances, in fact the first one was less of an utterance and more of an hour-long lecture to a woman who’d just given up volunteer work at a hospital.

Being granted asylum isn’t as easy as the tabloid press make it look either, it’s not just a question of walking into the country and renting a flat there. You can be stuck in one of those hostels for months, or even years, and nine times out of ten be refused and have to move on to another country. It’s also often humiliating: you have to undergo interviews to determine whether you’re telling the truth about where you come from. Some of the questions might include “Why didn’t you stay at home with your mummy?” This was asked of a 25-year-old woman I knew. You then have weeks of waiting for the outcome of your interview, which will often result in you being sent on to another country where the whole process will be repeated. And this is the daily life of some of the luckier ones among 14.9 million refugees worldwide, and these are the people with refugee status. I hate to think of what it’s like for people who are just plain illegal immigrants and don’t have any status at all: the Chinese cockle-pickers gave us a brief glimpse, which highlights a whole lot of very thorny problems indeed.