footsteps to freedom

Migration by numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 04:33:00 +0000

Today is International Migrants’ Day. To mark it, I could easily write you a thousand words on the injustices suffered by refugees and asylum-seekers; on the fears that have seen anti-immigration parties rise across Europe; on the everyday struggles of the often-undocumented, and nearly always low-paid migrant men and women who clean our houses and our streets.

Yet it seems to me that too often on both sides of the migration debate, appeals to our emotions are crowding out the evidence. So instead, I want to talk numbers. Because if we’re going to have a migration debate that’s dominated by facts and not by fear, the numbers are a good place to start.

Of course numbers offer no objective “truth” in and of themselves. If the last four years of sensationalist headlines about “net migration” can teach us anything, it’s that. But I think careful scrutiny of the numbers can tell us a surprising story about migration, and offer a check against the worst distortions of politicians’ weasel words.

So, without further ado: here are 10 numbers we should all remember on International Migrants' Day:

1. 3%. In 2013, according to the World Bank, there were 232 million people living outside the country of their birth. This is a significant number: but it isn’t overwhelming. It means that just 3% of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants are international migrants. The real puzzle about the age of global mobility is arguably not why so many people are moving across borders, but why so many are not.

2. 740 million. Most of us, if we move at all, do so within the borders of our own country – from Manchester to London, or from New York to California. In fact, we are at least six times more likely to migrate across a country (from one region to another) than we are to move across a border. There are at least 740 million domestic migrants. Few today would suggest we should restrict these migrations – in fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly prohibits such restrictions. But however obvious this may seem to us, your right to move within the borders of your own is relatively recent. The US Supreme Court, for instance, only definitely confirmed US citizens’ ‘fundamental’ right to ‘move at will from place to place’ across state lines in 1920.

3. 5.6 million. Emigration is not a one-way flow: Western citizens leave their home countries too. Today, at least 5.6 million British citizens live permanently abroad. And while some of them may prefer to call themselves “expatriates”, 40% – an estimated 2.2 million UK citizens – are EU migrants by any other name. That balances neatly with the 2.3 millions other EU migrants who have come to the UK.

4. 31.8%. How many migrants live in the UK? If you ask the public, 31.8%. Problem is, that’s a gross overestimate. The UK’s 2011 census suggests that the proportion of foreign-born British residents is closer to 13%: this is the same as in the US (where respondents guessed 37.8%). Across the West, the public consistently overestimate the number of immigrants in their country by a factor of nearly three. Poll after poll shows that the average Briton or American clearly thinks that there are too many migrants. But the same polls show that they also believe there to be almost three times the number of immigrants than are actually here.

5. £18,600. Fallen in love with a foreign passport holder? If you want to live in Britain, you better have a well-paying job. In July 2012 the British government introduced new family migration rules, requiring anyone wanting to sponsor their non-EEA spouse’s visa for the UK to show that their annual income exceeds £18,600. This rises to £22,400 for a spouse and a child, with an additional £2,400 asked for every further child. Those affected aren’t paupers, just average families. In fact, it has been estimated 47% of the British public – and 60% of women – would fail to meet the minimum income required to sponsor a foreign relative into the country.

6. 86%. Ten years ago, developing countries hosted 70% of refugees. Today in 2014, they are home to 86% of the world’s refugees. The 49 least-developed countries – places like Chad, Malawi, and Yemen – provide asylum to 2.4 million exiles. By whatever measure you choose, the idea that the West is under siege from would-be refugees flies in the face of statistical evidence. In Pakistan, there are 552 refugees for every dollar per capita GDP; that number is 303 in Ethiopia, and 301 in Kenya. For the US, UK and Australia, the equivalent numbers are 5.4, 4.7 and 0.9.

7. 21p. In 2012, Serco, G4S and Tascor were awarded contracts to supply housing for asylum-seekers across six regions worth up to £1.1 billion in revenue. The main objective of the outsourcing was ‘to reduce the cost of asylum support’, saving the Home Office £140 million. In 2013, Serco Chief Executive claimed that it made just 21p per asylum seeker accommodated per day, but had chosen to enter the space because for Serco ‘accommodation management [is] an important development area’. Such low financial margins, however, come with human costs. Within months of these companies taking on the accommodation contracts, charities and local government associations began raising concerns about the poor quality of housing offered – providing evidence that tenants were suffering from pest infestations, a lack of heating and hot water, windows and doors that could not be locked, and a failure to provide basic amenities like cookers or sinks.

8. 10.5%. Until 2008, Swedish labour migration was among the most restrictive system in the developed world: trade unions ‘had, and used, an informal veto on recruitment’. Today, its labour migration system is one of the most liberal. Employers – having first advertised the job to the local EU market for 10 days – can effectively recruit any worker, for any job, from anywhere. The result? Swedish workers working for firms recruiting labour migrants earn on average 10.5% more than those working in firms that don’t. The recent rise of the far-right Swedish Democrats risks pulling apart this liberal – and successful – immigration model.

9. 45%. That’s the drop in violent crime that the US has experienced since 1990. During the same period, the number of unauthorised migrants climbed from 3.5 to 11 million, and the percentage of the population who were foreign born rose from 8 to 13%. Correlation, of course, is not causation. But it is a good indication that more migration does not translate into more crime. And in fact, researchers from the US have similarly concluded that ‘broad reductions in violent crime during recent years are partially attributable to increases in immigration’. In the UK, immigrant “enclaves” – defined as neighbourhoods where at least 30% of the residents are immigrants – have lower levels of crime and victimisation than similar socio-economic areas without a large immigrant presence.

10. 1 000 000 years. We can all agree that the exploitation of migrant labour by unscrupulous employers should stop. But low-wage immigration is in part a reflection of broader societal inequalities and the consistent failure to adequately police exploitation. In one recent report on low-skilled immigration, for example, the Government’s own Migration Advisory Committee pointed out that ‘a firm can expect a visit from HMRC inspectors once in every 250 years and expect to be prosecuted once in a million years. Such enforcement effort hardly provides an incentive to abide by the national minimum wages’.

Think the numbers suggest its time to rethink immigration politics? Want more facts? Then download my new book – The Huddled Masses: Immigration and Inequality. In numbers: just £1.99 for 100 pages. In words: why if we really want progressive politics, we need to think differently about migration.

Why "low skilled" migrants can be "good" migrants too

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 20:02:00 +0000

Pantomime season began early this week, set to the beat of a calypso drum. And part of the soap-opera drama of UK immigration politics – all dodgy peerages and unpaid bills this week – surely stems from the ease with which the “truth” is bent to our own convenience. So Migration Watch has ‘improved public understanding’ of immigration; Sir Andrew Green has ‘no political axes to grind’. In this world-turned-upside down, this is Democracy in Action: not the loss of a measured, meaningful debate on migration in favour of prejudice.

Because after all, who wouldn’t hold these truths to be self-evident: that immigration must be controlled, that Eastern Europeans have overwhelmed the UK, that low-skilled migrants steal British jobs. That we’re not against immigration: just the wrong sort of immigration. We don’t want the huddled masses: give us your brain surgeons and entrepreneurs.

That, at least is how it’s presented by people like Anna Firth, who wanted to stand as the Conservative candidate in the upcoming Rochester by-election. Endorsing UKIP’s plans for a point-based system, Firth’s argument that ‘if you come to this country with skills we really need – say you’re a brain surgeon or something in Australia as opposed to someone who has no skills, a fruit picker in Romania – then we say yes... but otherwise we need to say we can’t support you’ speaks to the idea of “common sense” migration.

Few would find this unreasonable. High-skilled migration good: low-skilled migration bad. It’s not just an argument made by the right: there are shades of the same thinking in the writings of the left – such as John Harris’ opinion that the ‘shrill voices’ of the migrant-supporting metropolitan elite need to acknowledge the negative consequences of low-wage migration, and have a ‘real debate’ about freedom of movement. And – despite all the easy targets for outrage this week – it’s been this quiet, under-the-radar story, this idea that what we really need to do is “fix” low-skilled work by “fixing” (i.e. removing) low-skilled migrants, which has made me most angry.

Because here’s the problem. Sometimes you don’t want to admit what’s good for you. And there’s actually plenty of evidence to suggest that when it comes to migration, there’s an inconvenient truth. We need Romanian fruit-pickers.

British farmers rely on foreign labour. As the Government’s Migration Advisory Committee detailed in 2013, this isn’t to do with wages. Very, very few locals are willing to do the work. Picking crops is hard, physical labour: we are increasingly too fat and too unfit to work in the fields. We’re also over-qualified: who’d choose to break their back picking strawberries if they can sit in an office chair instead? The work is predominantly in isolated, rural locations and – thanks to the demands of 24-hour supermarkets – shifts can run all night to keep up with demand, so on-site accommodation is part of the job. Oh, and turns out agricultural work really is seasonal (who would have guessed) – so labour market needs fluctuate, and what you need really is a temporary, mobile work force. So far from being a drain on society, Romanian fruit-pickers are a crucial part of our British food chain: even more so since the sixty-year old Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme was closed in 2013.

This is not just a “British Problem”: it’s a Western one. Every developed economy relies upon poor, low-skilled migrant workers to bring in the harvest: Mexicans in California’s Central Valley; Jamaicans in the Canadian wheat fields; Pacific Islanders from Australia. Even recession-hit Catalonia hires Colombians, not Spaniards.

And be wary too of buying into any spinning of “lazy British welfare scroungers” versus “noble peasants”. As the MAC report details It’s fairly clear that most of the migrants who work in agriculture do so either because they lack other skills, or (more often) because they lack opportunities to work legally in other parts of the economy. Once Polish and other A8 migrants were allowed access to the whole of the UK labour market in 2004, they pretty soon stopped digging potatoes and found jobs that were not necessarily better paid (the average seasonal fruit-picker will make over £300/week), but offered more sociable hours, greater opportunities for integration and less dirt.

So the real worry isn’t that there are too many Romanian fruit-pickers flooding the UK: it’s that there soon won’t be enough. The result? Most likely, ever greater reliance on technology and upon gangmasters to supply workers, with all the attendant risks of migrant exploitation and a race to the bottom.

This underlines that it’s a knee-jerk reaction to assume that all low-skilled migration is bad migration: that letting the poor move always equates to a Migration Crisis. The truth is, when it comes to agriculture we should see the global development opportunity instead. One thing the developing world has lots of? Agricultural workers. The opportunities for mutual gain – for farmers to find workers, for migrant workers to send remittances home and even to learn new skills – are tangible. Australia, New Zealand and Spain already frame their agricultural workers’ schemes in precisely these global development terms.

Such programmes need to be well-run; to work with trade unions to ensure migrants are paid decent wages for decent work. And still there is something faintly Victorian about the spectre of tied labourers shipped onto farms in the English countryside: it’s hardly the heady stuff of free movement. But given our current fear of migration, this at least is an opening to rewrite low-skilled migration as something more than a scourge.

I think that too often the middle-class distaste that’s expressed for low-skilled migrants is really just general distaste for everyone poor: a poisonous reminder of how much Britain is still hung up on class distinction after a century of “meritocracy”. John Harris is wrong: it’s not low wage migration that’s the problem: it’s low wage work.

And in fact, migration can and should be a part of fighting against that stratified economic world. The relationship between immigration and inequality is more complicated than easy lines that talk about “low-skilled” and “high-skilled” as catch-all, easily-defined categories suggest. When borders become something that only the rich can cross, armed with degrees and corporate job offers, we all lose. Migration should offer a chance for not just spatial but social mobility: the old cliché of the beginning of a better life.

The real lesson? Migration policy deserves to be debated in something more than grand terms and vague patriotic statements. We need to talk in statistics and specifics: to avoid lazy assumptions about who’s a “good” and whose a “bad” migrant. Some kinds of low-skilled migration can further social justice and our own self-interest – while some kinds of highly-skilled migration do neither.

What makes me most angry is that this kind of reasonable, measured, progressive conversation is being lost in the noise of a calypso circus. And sure, it’s an impressive conjouring political trick. But when the show is over, there will one day be a hell of a mess to clean up. And it won’t just be the migrants who have lost out in the meantime.

From Far Away

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 20:08:00 +0000

One of the reasons why I’ve struggled to write in the past few months is that this has been a year of transitions. A transatlantic, transcontinental move form London to San Francisco, and a career shift from full-time academic to something as yet undetermined but best summed up as “freelancer” have left me wondering both who I’m writing as and where I’m writing from - both crucial questions when it comes to thinking about migration.

Geography first. In the past six months I’ve acquired new identities. I’m now immigrant and emigrant. I’m still a British citizen, but one separated by five thousand miles of space and eight hours of time from current affairs. The result is a disconnection. Among the most disconcerting experiences I’ve had is that of listening to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme from California at 10pm and realizing that tomorrow is already happening. By the time I wake up the next morning, it has happened. At first you race to catch up: but very quickly you become a spectator, watching politics at home unfold with an eight hour broadcast delay. It can leave you powerless, watching with freeze-framed slow-motion horror from the other side of the glass as voters elect UKIP’s first MP. It can leave you without a sense of perspective, detached from reality by the extremes of medial coverage. You find yourself asking would you, could you, should you ever return to live in a country that now seems to be largely populated by bigots and xenophobes, chasing migrants’ shadows, where UKIP might win not one but 30 seats?

More practically, it’s hard to know how to engage in long-distance debate. Without those conversations over coffee or in the pub, without everyday exchanges in shops and buses, you’re left with nothing but your own convictions and the thin truths repeated in the media. What can you add from afar? Perhaps the answer is to switch focus, to write about the politics of immigration here. After all, there are plenty of migration stories to tell in San Francisco too, about DREAMers and DACA and rent controls. And I am undoubtedly part of at least the last of those stories. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m an observer, a supporter from the sidelines at best. These are not my fights. This is not – not yet – my political community. And somehow it feels less desperate, less urgent, than the news I read that makes me feeling England is slipping away. Humanitarian crises on the border in Texas and Arizona leave me outraged: but they belong to another America a thousand miles away, and I am not a citizen there either. I’m an outsider, with neither the power nor the right to demand change. But nor can I be charged with responsibility for the failures of today’s American immigration policies.

And so I turn back to Britain. But Britain is still 5000 miles and a working day apart.

If that’s geography, what about occupation? I’ve long wrestled with the question of what academia’s for. Oh, I believe in learning as liberation and the power of knowledge – of course I do. But when increasingly our migration battles are being fought not on the power of facts but the strength of feelings – in blind disregard of existing empirical evidence – I can’t help but think that what we need are not more university researchers, but more advocates. The two need not be mutually exclusive: in the end the most powerful and persuasive arguments that build the foundations in fact. But I’m not convinced we need more theory-heavy, technocratic, data-driven conclusions on the minutiae of migration as thousands drown in the Mediterranean or collapse in the Sonoran desert. Peer-reviewed journals are not a substitute for action. And so I’ve reached at least one conclusion: whatever academia’s for, I do know that – in its purest form – it’s not for me.

The plan is still to write about migration – but over the next two years, to move slowly towards developing something akin to investigative reporting: a campaigning organization built on solid research. Ambitious? Yes. Vague? Maybe. Exciting? I think so. But the real challenge is to work out what comes in between: how to keep the authority of academic expertise without spending my hours jumping through the wrong hoops. How to make sure I’ve still got something to say that’s worth more than an opinion. And however certain I am that I want to leave my lecturing days behind, choice can be paralyzing. Too many times in the past month I’ve thought about writing a blog, only to hesitate, uncertain about exactly who I’m writing as.

But that’s enough in the way of self-reflection masquerading as apology. After all this over-thinking (all that academic training dies hard) I’ve come to the conclusion that if I want to be a part of the British migration debate – however dark its current direction – then the only real trick is to just keep writing. Because once you refocus your gaze, you begin to appreciate the new perspective you can gain from a long-distance view, and from living migration yourself. I can be emigrant, immigrant and local, activist and academic.

So, to end: a paragraph on politics, with the promise of more to come. That, after all, is what you’re here for.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has found themselves reading this blog that I’m no UKIP voter. But there are members of my own family who are sympathetic to Farage, who like being told who to blame for austerity and alienation. They are undoubtedly wrong to buy UKIP’s arguments. Xenophobia’s a cheap answer, and it’s an easy answer, but that doesn’t make it the right answer.

But here’s the thing: defending migration is not about denying UKIP voters the right to be angry. They are right to be angry. But they are being taught to be angry about the wrong things, and that is dangerous. We all should be angry: not about migration, but about the slow dismantling of the NHS, about the exploitation of low-paid workers (whether local or foreign), about growing inequality and stagnant poverty in our communities. But please, don’t believe for a second that banning immigrants will rescue you from this grim future. UKIP may provide a temporary hit, the brief high of mob righteousness. But if it is ever able to exercise real power, UKIP’s policies would leave Britain with the worst hangover of its collective national life. In my next post, I’ll explain why.

Hello World (again)

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 20:05:00 +0000

Yeah, it’s been a while. There are only so many words I can write in a day (never mind how many of them are worth reading). And in the past few months the words have been spent on other projects: there’s a whole ebook coming out on Immigration and Inequality in just a few months, a new website in the works, even a novel taking shape. I haven’t been entirely silent in the “blogosphere” either: some of you may have seen this piece for OUP.

Refugee identity is often shrouded in suspicion, speculation and rumour. Of course everyone wants to protect “real” refugees, but it often seems – upon reading the papers – that the real challenge is to find them among the interlopers: the “bogus asylum seekers”, the “queue jumpers”, the “illegals”.

Yet these distinctions and definitions shatter the moment we subject them to critical scrutiny. In Syria, no one would deny a terrible refugee crisis is unfolding. Western journalists report from camps in Jordan and Turkey documenting human misery and occasionally commenting on political manoeuvring, but never doubting the refugees’ veracity.

But once these same Syrians leave the overcrowded camps to cross the Mediterranean, a spell transforms these objects of pity into objects of fear. They are no longer “refugees”, but “illegal migrants” and “terrorists”. However data on migrants rescued in the Mediterranean show that up to 80% of those intercepted by the Italian Navy are in fact deserving of asylum, not detention.

Other myths perpetuate suspicion and xenophobia. Every year in the UK, refugee charity and advocacy groups spend precious resources trying to counter tabloid images of a Britain “swamped” by itinerant swan-eaters and Islamic extremists. The truth – that Britain is home to just 1% of refugees while 86% are hosted in developing countries, including some of the poorest on earth, and that one-third of refugees in the UK hold University degrees – is simply less convenient for politicians pushing an anti-migration agenda.

We are increasingly skilled in crafting complacent fictions intended not so much to demonise refugees as exculpate our own consciences. In Australia, for instance, ever-more restrictive asylum policies – which have seen all those arriving by boat transferred off-shore and, even when granted refugee status, refused the right to settle in Australia – have been presented by supporters as merely intended to prevent the nefarious practice of “queue-jumping”. In this universe, the border patrols become the guardians ensuring “fair” asylum hearings, while asylum-seekers are condemned for cheating the system.

That the system itself now contravenes international law is forgotten. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan asylum-seeking mothers recently placed on suicide watch – threatening to kill themselves in the hope that their orphaned, Australian-born children might then be saved from detention – are judged guilty of “moral blackmail”.

Such stories foster complacency by encouraging an extraordinary degree of confidence in our ability to sort the deserving from the undeserving. The public remain convinced that “real” refugees wait in camps far beyond Europe’s borders, and that they do not take their fate into their own hands but wait to be rescued. But this “truth” too is hypocritical. It conveniently obscures the fact that the West will not resettle one-tenth of the refugees who have been identified by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as in need of resettlement.

In fact, only one refugee in a hundred will ever be resettled from a camp to a third country in the West. In January 2014 the UK Government announced it would offer 500 additional refugee resettlement places for the “most vulnerable” refugees as a humanitarian gesture: but it’s better understood as political rationing.

Research shows us that undue self-congratulation when it comes to “helping” refugees is no new habit. Politicians are fond of remarking that Britain has a “long and proud” tradition of welcoming refugees, and NGOs and charities reiterate the same claim in the hope of grounding asylum in British cultural values.

But while the Huguenots found sanctuary in the seventeenth century, and Russia’s dissidents sought exile in the nineteenth, closer examination exposes the extent to which asylees’ ‘warm welcome’ has long rested upon the convictions of the few prepared to defy the popular prejudices of the many.

Poor migrants fleeing oppression have always been more feared than applauded in the UK. In 1905, the British Brothers’ League agitated for legislation to restrict (primarily Jewish) immigration from Eastern Europe because of populist fears that Britain was becoming ‘the dumping ground for the scum of Europe’. Similarly, the bravery of individual campaigners who fought to secure German Jews’ visas in the 1930s must be measured against the groundswell of public anti-semitism that resisted mass refugee admissions.

British MPs in 1938 were insistent that ‘it is impossible for us to absorb any large number of refugees here’, and as late as August 1938 the Daily Mail warned against large number of German Jews ‘flooding’ the country. In the US, polls showed that 94% of Americans disapproved of Kristallnacht, 77% thought immigration quotas should not be raised to allow additional Jewish migration from Germany.

All this suggests that Western commitment after 1951 to uphold a new Refugee Convention should not be read as a marker of some innate Western generosity of spirit. Even in 1947, Britain was forcibly returning Soviet POWs to Stalin’s Russia. Many committed suicide en route rather than face the Gulags or execution. When in 1972, Idi Amin expelled Ugandan’s Asians – many of whom were British citizens – the UK government tried desperately to persuade other Commonwealth countries to admit the refugees, before begrudgingly agreeing to act as a refuge of “last resort”. If forty years on the 40,000 Ugandan Asians who settled in the UK are often pointed to as a model refugee success story, this is not because but in spite of the welcome they received.

Many refugee advocates and NGOs are nevertheless wary of picking apart the public belief that a “generous welcome” exists for “real” refugees. The public, after all, are much more likely to be flattered than chastised into donating much needed funds to care for those left destitute – sometime by the deliberate workings of the asylum system itself. But it is important to recognise the more complex and less complacent truths that researchers’ work reveals.

For if we scratch the surface of our asylum policies beneath a shiny humanitarian veneer lies the most cynical kind of politics. Myth making sustains false dichotomies between deserving “refugees” there and undeserving “illegal migrants” here – and conveniently lets us forget that both are fleeing the same wars in the same leaking boats.

Anyway, enough excuses. Time to write.

On Elections

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 22 May 2014 04:14:00 +0000

From 5000 miles away, the EU elections being held today seem unreal. Much like the antics of the Tea Party observed from Britain, the surge of support for UKIP and Nigel Farage plays out like a pantomime farce: except the consequences will be deadly serious. I wonder daily whether I’ll ever be willing to return home to a Little England shrinking further daily into self-regarding conviction that it’s not really racist to blame immigrants: that it’s not really the same as blaming blacks.

I’m tired of calls to “respect” the public’s hostility. I’m not sure where the blurred lines lie between listening and pandering, between democracy and populism, but I think we’ve crossed them. Yet writing the latest chapter for my book today (first draft to be complete in about six weeks time), I was reminded that this is not the first time that migration policy has been dictated by the politics of prejudice and not the principles of progress. Mending Migration is a book that tries to untangle the messy politics of immigration and inequality – and in doing so, it traces some of the miserable compromises made in the name of the electorate:

Between 1948 and 1981, all those born or naturalised in the UK or its colonies held UK and Commonwealth citizenship – and it was this status that facilitated the significant post-war migration waves from the West Indies, India and Pakistan to Britain. We have all heard – and many times condemned – Enoch Powell’s foretelling of ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’, an England overrun with ‘wide-grinning piccaninnies’. Yet what is less remembered is that as early as 1962, the UK Government had already begun to curb non-white migration, imposing new and tougher entry restrictions in the face of public hostility. These controls would be tightened still further in the decades to come, as anxieties over levels of immigration reached fever pitch.

From the 1960s, migration policies were successively tightened – and citizenship “renationalised” in order to prevent further waves of non-white immigration. Yet these migration and citizenship policies were driven by the weight of public opinion and electoral arithmetic – and flew in the face of both principle and economic evidence. As Richard Crossman, Labour Minister for Housing and Local Government, wrote in his diaries at the time, after his government voted to impose further immigration restrictions in 1965:

‘We have become illiberal and lowered the quota at a time when we have an acute shortage of labour… nevertheless, I am convinced that if we hadn’t done this, we would have been faced with certain electoral defeat… Politically, fear of immigration is the most powerful undertow today’.

My hope is that in forty years time, UKIP’s rhetoric will be considered as taboo as Powell’s chilling words are now. But I fear there may be Government ministers writing those same words in their diaries today – and announcing a new raft of “tough” immigration measures tomorrow.

Present participation

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 01 May 2014 20:56:00 +0000

I have not written much here in the past three months. As some of you know, I’ve been occupied with moving my life – from cats to cutlery – from Oxford to San Francisco. It turns out migrating doesn’t leave much time to write about the politics of migration. But now I’ve migrated, I hope to have much more time to write about the personal and the political, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Adventures in America. No. 1: in which I am not deported

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 01 May 2014 20:55:00 +0000

Long before I saw America, I recognised America. America’s skylines, suburbs and cities were known quantities, reflected in a thousand Hollywood movies and syndicated sitcoms. This familiarity is disconcerting: it encourages a false sense of security. Arriving in San Francisco ready to start my own American adventure, I half expected the immigration official to beam “Welcome to America!” as if I’d arrived not in an airport, but a 1980s Eddie Murphy comedy.

Real life isn’t like the movies. I could tell as soon as I arrived at the front of the queue and heard the officer shout ‘next’ that I’d drawn a Grumpy Guard. There were no smiles: this was the sort of official that measures bureaucratic effectiveness in increasing degrees of administrative officiousness. Still, my papers were in order. I stepped forward confident in the belief that – while this conversation was unlikely to win any awards for human warmth – it would be a straightforward administrative exchange, and I’d soon be waiting for my suitcases to turn up in baggage reclaim.

Ha.

I knew from previous experiences that Canadian passports often perplex US immigration officials. Although there’s nothing approaching EU citizens’ rights of residence across member states, Canadians also don’t need to apply in advance for a visa – so provided they meet the criteria, they can simply get the necessary stamp at the border. I smile apologetically as I put my passport and my papers down, “I’d like to apply for L2 status please”* But the man who stares back isn’t confused. He is actively hostile.

“You want to do what? Did you seriously think you could just turn up and apply for status here? Er, yes. I checked. Multiple times. “Who told you that?” Well, my immigration lawyers. The US Government’s own website. I have all the right documents, look: here are copies of my husband’s visa, my marriage certificate. (Never mind how strange it is that my right to come is entirely dependent upon providing public proof of a private relationship). But ask whatever questions you choose: you know I will have to answer politely. Right now, I am the Supplicant: you are the Administrator.

The officer shakes his head slowly, an exaggerated gesture. This is dramatic performance, although I’m not sure for whose benefit. “These lawyers, they mess with peoples’ lives”. The sympathy is synthetic: the next moment he returns to an aggressive bark: “you do have a return ticket?”

Well, no. That’s the point: I’m emigrating.

I no longer know who’s right: the lawyers or the immigration officer in front of me. But right and wrong are irrelevant: all that matters is that the officer has all the power. Sociologists like David Graeber writes about the threat of structural violence that lurks beneath all rigidly enforced bureaucracies. Face to face with the border guard, the threat of violence shimmers on the surface of every bureaucratic word, every arbitrary action. We will choose whether to let you in: or we will deport you. My interrogator sucks in his teeth, scrawls something on my papers and motions towards a small door in the wall marked Secondary Immigration. He exhales slowly, “Goooood Luuuck. And I mean it. Goooood Luuuck”.

By now I am alarmed. I enter Secondary Immigration: a small, windowless waiting room. An officer staffs the reception desk: high on testosterone and administrative power, he refuses to answer any questions about anything. Exhausted after an 11 hour transatlantic flight, I’ve no idea what time it is: but when I pull out my mobile phone to check, he’s quick to call out “No Cells!”. I reflect how easy it would be for undesirables to be disappeared from this windowless room, as if they had never arrived at all. My husband is waiting for me in Arrivals. But no one knows I am here, in this room, in bureaucratic limbo.

The room is mostly empty: an Indian family are waiting for their temporary Green Cards. A Nigerian woman is being questioned: a circular inquisition that seems to centre on why anyone in his or her right mind would want to live in Lagos. To the official interviewing her, this is simply incredible.

I’m not so much frightened as frustrated: I reason that in the worst case, I will buy a flight to Vancouver, and stay there overnight until the paperwork is cleared. I picture myself making angry phone calls. I consider how ironic it would be to be deported back to a country I haven’t visited since I was a teenager.

Thirty minutes later, my name is called. Perhaps it is simply that this third official is less concerned with exuding machismo. Perhaps it is just that she is kinder: she speaks to me. She is firm: the papers are not in order, there is no way they can admit me as an L2 without advance notice. But she is also conciliatory: they’re prepared to let me in as a visitor for six months. I seize the chance: within the hour, I’ve left the airport.

As I thank her, I realise I am close to tears. Because when you are entirely powerless, you become grateful for the smallest of official kindnesses -- even when those kindnesses mask continuing mistakes. For as I establish the next day, all the border guards were wrong. My papers were in order.

That’s why, one week later, I find myself in downtown San Francisco in the company of an immigration lawyer, applying to correct my immigration status so I can be admitted as an L2, and begin the process of applying for further bureaucratic permits – a driving licence, a social security number, authorisation to work. As we walk in the early Spring sunshine, the lawyer confides that while such mistakes aren’t frequent, they’re also not uncommon. US immigration codes are hugely complex: border guards are often poorly paid and poorly trained. The system is dysfunctional. The result is immigration officials messing with peoples’ lives.

On the tenth floor of the office block, we enter another waiting room. This one has windows, with views that stretch down to the Bay. This immigration officer smiles: he apologises for his colleagues’ error. In just a few minutes, one entry in my passport is crossed out, a new one penned in. Now, I am welcome in America.

My immigration “detention” lasted less than hour – and was fixed in about as much time. Yet it was an uncomfortable reminder of how bureaucracies exercise power over the weak in arbitrary ways. As a well-educated, wealthy and white woman I rarely experience such powerlessness: this was an important reminder of how quickly injustice can be done, how impotent you can become, raging against the machine.

But there is a clear political lesson alongside the personal. I might have the social and financial capital to beat the bureaucrats at their own game. But this isn’t proof of the system’s essential soundness: quite the opposite. When your immigration code is too complicated for your own officials to understand, when crossing a border becomes dependent upon bureaucratic whim and lawyers’ billable hours, the system isn’t fair: it’s broken. Sure, it’s just one minor incident: but it’s one further, personal confirmation that American immigration reform is long, long overdue.

*for those of you who haven’t yet needed to master the complicated language of US immigration, there are several dozen different visa categories. The “L” is for intra-company transfers – the “2” denotes I’m here as the dependent spouse of the transferee.

500

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 12:17:00 +0000

Let 500 in. 2.3 million Syrian refugees, and Britain can find room for 500. Not any refugees, of course – only the ‘most vulnerable’; the ‘most traumatised’; the rape victims; the children who need medical support. And on our own terms – no UN quota that might collide with net migration targets.

Of course we could argue numbers all day. How many is too many, when 2.3 million Syrians have been uprooted? But the fact is, while the Syrian emergency may have concentrated minds, there is a chronic shortage of resettlement places and has been for years. UNHCR estimates that, worldwide, around 800,000 refugees are in need of resettlement: there are about 80,000 resettlement places made available every year – and three-quarters of those are in the US. Only 1 in every 10 recognised refugees who have been identified as needing resettlement will get resettled. So here’s another number for you: the average refugee now spends 17 years in a camp.

So let’s debunk one resettlement myth right now: resettlement is not a heroic act and resettlement states are – with rare exceptions – not particularly generous. When it comes to Syria, Hungary is taking 10. Spain is taking 30. Switzerland 50. So are we in the UK now 10 times more generous than Switzerland, or 20 times less generous than Germany? Of course lives are saved with such token gestures too, but the danger in praising states for doing very little is that in the long run, very little begins to look like enough.

This is a real problem when it comes to resettlement. There’s an unspoken code among those working on refugee and asylum issues that almost all resettlement is to be welcomed, that every newly promised place is to be greeted with praise, all criticism to be tempered. Resettlement is an industry as well as an act of charity: many NGOs are reluctant to bit the hands that feed them. Others point to the fragility of states’ commitments to refugees and asylum seekers. In this light, every grudging concession is re-spun as a generous gesture. But does this really protect the space left? Or simply allow states to claim kudos for doing very little at all? Is 500 really enough to claim that we are among the ‘most open-hearted countries’? A press release from the Refugee Council has just landed in my inbox, telling me that ‘Britain has a proud tradition of protecting and welcoming refugees and we will continue to lead the way in offering refuge to people in their greatest hour of need’. Is that what 500 means?

It rings hollow. So it’s to be welcomed that Yvette Cooper is already arguing for the UK to match Germany, offering 10,000 places. That would certainly go some way from turning a token gesture into a significant contribution. Yet while Cooper is right to question the numbers, she’s fully on board with the idea that offering resettlement places demands exceptional suffering. In many ways, it’s this trend that worries me most, for it carries with it the implication that a normal crisis is no longer enough. To qualify for resettlement, you must now be the most vulnerable. It is not enough to just be a refugee. This is an insidious logic, one that has already poisoned the Australian government’s asylum policy as the public are told repeatedly that “real” refugees wait in camps, that “deserving” victims don’t skip to the front of the queue.

Of course, given the gap between supply and demand, resettlement has to be rationed. But it’s also worth remembering that economies that trade in vulnerability encourage new vulnerabilities. Refugees are often desperate: they are rarely stupid. Time and time again, refugees will explain that they cannot get a job, that they cannot support themselves: because then they will never get resettlement. Arbitrary lines are drawn too, so that some vulnerabilities become more valuable than others. I still vividly remember one woman in Uganda asking me to explain why single women were being prioritised for resettlement. In her view, it was the women who still had husbands who were really worse off – because they were the ones who were still being beaten. How do you define fair in that context? Or explain to the bright ambitious young English-speaking engineer that he will never get resettled through official channels, because he just isn’t vulnerable enough - and he will never be able to migrate anywhere either, because he doesn’t have a passport. In the end, there are just too many to choose from.

500 lives are 500 lives. When I wrote the first draft of this blog last night, I wrote that I could not imagine how anyone reading could needs persuading of the scale of the Syrian crisis, nor of the needs of Syrian refugees to find a sanctuary beyond bare survival. After all, when even Nigel Farage is fighting the refugees’ corner, you’d think not much room would be left for moral ambiguity. Yet reading below the line today, it seems there are plenty who think 500 is far too many, convinced that it’s the UK that’s shouldering an unfair burden. So let me be clear. Resettlement matters. But resettlement needs to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end. And to be truly meaningful, this conversation needs to go beyond tired humanitarian tropes: beyond the languages of desert and purity. There are bold gestures that could be made beyond the language of victimhood and vulnerability. Why not, for instance, allow suitably qualified UNHCR-recognised refugees to apply for high-skilled work alongside EU nationals? Why not empower the ambitious, as well as save the needy?

The answer, of course, is that we cling to the insistence that refugees aren’t migrants: that they are victims, not workers. And in the end, that’s why we cling to the familiar humanitarian tropes about refugee resettlement -- because it lets us believe, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that the borders we’ve built are humane. So let the 500 in. But let’s be clear: this is gesture politics. It is not generosity.

Collier, Refugees and The Point of No Return

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 21:28:00 +0000

Paul Collier’s Exodus: Immigration and Multicultursim in the 21^st century has quickly gathered headlines and attention in the months since it’s been published. Two pages in The Economist; 8 in the New Statesman (and a front cover). Op-eds on both sides of the Atlantic. Here, after all, is a renowned Oxford Professor with a message that’s attractive to both public and politicians. In Collier’s view, worrying about the migration of the poor isn’t just the self-interest of the rich. In fact, it’s not a right so much as a duty to restrict migration, because the poor should be stopped from moving for their own good – or at least the good of their community.

Collier tells us that in cutting adrift the ‘chain of lifeboats headed for the developing world’, and restricting migration from the poorest societies, we’re really doing the poor a favour, saving their struggling societies from a future without the ‘fairy godmothers’ who would otherwise escape beyond the borders – the educated, the young, and the ambitious seeking a life beyond conflict and poverty. In essence, it’s protectionism resurrected: with visas guarding human capital, in place of cars and steel tariffs shielding nascent industrial capacity.

This troubles me, although for weeks I’ve struggled to work out where to begin to unpick Collier’s assertions. This is not for a lack but a surfeit of entry points. For all the heavyweight intellectual reputation on which Exodus rests, there’s often not a lot of expertise on migration underpinning it – and this leads Collier to some seriously flawed conclusions.

Some of my unease, in the end, is about the fundamentals, the values that underpin Collier’s work. Should people be tied to nations not of their choosing, when the World Bank estimates 50% of our wealth is determined not by any conscious action we take, but by the citizenship we’re assigned arbitrarily at birth? Another part of my concern is probably the disquiet of someone who works on the complex, messy realities that are lived between and beneath migration policies, rather than economist’s models. That’s not to say I think policy doesn’t matter – it really does – but some of the policy prescriptions that follow from Collier’s observations are startlingly naïve, the product of neat laboratory hypotheses in which it’s imagined that governments’ string-pulling and fence-raising can really control immigration.

In some places this is disappointing: in others settings, it’s dangerous. And none more so than when Collier deals with refugees and repatriation, something I spent five years researching. Collier considers the subject almost as an afterthought, on pages 262-3 of his 273 page book, but the arguments were reproduced much more prominently in Sunday’s New York Times. In Collier’s own words, the essential claim is that ‘the right to refuge need not imply the right to residency’. In short, ‘a fit-for-purpose migration policy would target asylum on those few countries in the throes of civil war, brutal dictatorship, minority persecution or equivalent severe social disturbance’. Asylum would be granted ‘swiftly and generously’: but ‘when peace is restored, people would be required to return’, so that ‘the right to refuge could include sunset rules linked to peace settlements and the monitored efforts of post-conflict governments’.

How neat it sounds: what a pity that the facts don’t fit.

In fact, this is exactly the same type of thinking that Sir John Hope-Simpson warned fellow statesmen against in the 1930s, when Europe dreamed of repatriating the Jews, writing again and again that ‘a programme of action cannot be based on uncontrollable speculation’. For here’s the truth: refugees rarely get to ride off into the sunset. Today, the average refugee spends 17 years in exile. Two decades ago they spent nine. Cycles of conflicts in places like Somalia, Congo and Afghanistan haven’t been broken in decades. We should all hope for peace: rejoice in the rare cases when swift return proves practicable, or when war ends. But to suggest that we should deny the right to residency in the interim two decades? That’s to place lives in legal limbo. To suggest the children of refugees should be required to return to a home they’ve never visited, a community whose language they do not speak? That’s to ignore the inevitability of integration and social transformation in spite of the prohibitions of the law. This is policy in no one’s interest, even if it chimes with political wishes.

What’s more, our politicians are poor prophets. In 2003, then-UK Home-Secretary David Blunkett asserted that ‘when you are no longer threatened... there is a moral obligation to return and assist in the rebuilding of [your]country’. He was talking about Iraqi refugees who had fled Saddam’s now-toppled dictatorship – but speaking just months before the bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad heralded the descent of Iraqi into vicious civil war. There are already legal provisions – known as the cessation clauses – that allow for an end to refugee status. Governments already often engage in linguistic gymnastics in order to escape the weight of the “refugee” label. As early as 1996, Germany chose to deport Bosnians provided with ‘temporary protection’ during the Balkan conflicts. But peace and war are not binaries: the very South Sudanese officials who Collier reports bemoaning their educated citizens’ expat tendencies are ignoring the fact that peace has been a long time coming to South Sudan, and that it is still not certain. It also ignores the uncomfortable fact that quite a few post-conflict governments tend to be run by previously expat elites with rather autocratic leanings. Rwanda and Afghanistan, in different ways, are reminders that elites are rarely united, and "peace dividends" are rarely shared equitably.

Yet what makes me most angry about Collier’s high-minded view that ‘the duty of rescue does not absolve high-income society from the duty to think through the implications of their policies’ is that his own reasoning doesn’t stand up to this scrutiny. We can all agree that, when peace comes, we should want to encourage sustainable returns of refugees, including elites. But in all the conversations I’ve had with refugees and policy-makers, no-one has suggested that the best way to achieve this is to turn repatriation into an obligatory burden. In fact, quite the opposite is true: it’s often in having that second passport that refugees find the courage to return. Exit strategies make return a possibility. Safety nets are essential for refugee returns to succeed as state-building. We should be granting more refugees dual citizenship: do this, and we'd see more returns.

Collier writes about refugees in the black-and-white of classroom print, but there are just too many gaps to justify such confidence on his part. Last Friday, at a debate in Oxford, Collier was asked by an M.Sc. student what he thought his argument meant for non-refoulement – the prohibition against forced return which, as anyone who’s ever worked on refugee issues knows, is the basic building block of our refugee protection regime. Collier did not recognise the term.

Given the power Collier has to speak and be heard, such a failure to learn the basic contours of what we already know about refugee return is not just careless, it’s irresponsible. For there are plenty out there who would gladly work non-refoulement into something less absolute: who would happily insist on revoking all refugees’ rights to remain at the first sign of a fragile peace. Collier’s reasoning allows them to claim this is all done in the interest of refugees’ themselves, a benign exercise of imperial power. I doubt this is Collier’s intention. But in the end it’s refugees, not us, who have to make such journeys: and good intentions if poorly conceived can pave long roads to hell.

An Apology

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:23:00 +0000

Saying sorry when you’re English is habitual. But in the last year, I’ve found myself saying sorry more often than I used to. Saying sorry to my long-time Bulgarian friend (she with the M.Phil from Cambridge). Saying sorry to my Romanian cleaner (who doesn’t see her husband all that often, because when she’s finished work at the end of the day, he’s about to start the nightshift).

Why? Because it’s increasingly hard for me to understand why they stay here, contributing to our economy – in some case doing jobs few Britons are qualified to do, in other cases doing jobs for low wages that few Britons want to do – when the public and the politicians are so convinced they’re to blame for our discordant communities. Eastern European migrants are not welcome here: that’s obvious to me as well as them. Yet it’s a hostility that makes no sense to me in either intellectual or emotional terms.

Some might say I should “check my privilege” – that I don’t understand the white working poor and their anxieties. Fear not: it hasn’t escaped my notice that I’m wealthy and I’m well-educated, and that means I have far less to fear about the future than many others, whose livelihoods and cultural identities are precariously balanced on the edge of a retreating welfare state. There is, absolutely, a hell of a lot to be angry about: we live in an increasingly unequal and increasingly socially immobile country. Equality of opportunity? We should be so lucky.

But while fear of immigration may well reflect the season of our discontent, immigration isn’t the cause of these ills. By far the worst thing about David Cameron’s announcement today that new EU migrants will face vastly restricted access to benefits is not so much the content of the policy itself, but the fact it claims to offer a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist in the first place.

Others like Jonathan Portes have already pointed out that this is political pandering to tabloid-induced hysteria, not evidence-based policy. The number of EU migrants claiming benefits is small: the numbers doing so maliciously or dishonestly tiny. But as a funder told me in a telephone call last week, immigration policy is increasingly no longer about evidence or research. It’s just politics.

So convincing a fairytale has been spun around immigration, with immigrants as the villains, that the truth doesn’t matter anymore, as all the political parties rush to insist that they’ll do the best job of protecting “our” poor by keeping the bastards out. At the Guardian reported this afternoon, it now seems ‘as if there is no one left in the Commons willing to defend immigration from Eastern Europe’.

When Teresa May waves the Daily Mail in the House of Parliament to “prove” her point, it’s not just political theatre. It’s dangerous. For this is a stampede of rhetoric, trampling those much-trumpted “British” values like tolerance and fair-play into ground refashioned to fit a new mean-spirited nationalism.

There’s irony, then, in the fact that it’s these Westminster politicos, who are so desperate to preserve the Union, that are pursuing the small-minded and nasty politics of xenophobic hysteria, while in Scotland it’s the Nationalists who are trying to build a more open, progressive, migration policy.

The White Paper published yesterday by the Scottish government outlined what an independent Scottish immigration policy would look like. There are few surprises: but there’s a welcome relief in the recognition that UK immigration policy is driven by the politics of marginal seats in the South-East, and that immigration has a compelling – even a crucial – role to play in a Scottish future, not least because of the essential demographic contribution migrants have and will continue to make.

As commentators have pointed out, it’s important not to assume that such plans carry with them the support of the nation: Scots as a whole are only marginally less opposed to immigration than their English neighbours. But it is proof that it is possible to open up a space where you can talk about immigration in progressive political terms: that the contours of the immigration “debate” don’t have to be restricted to working out how to be toughest on immigration.

Of course public opinion, north and south of the border, matters. Yet some way beyond democracy lies demagogy. Just because 85% of Daily Mail readers think that migrants are putting huge pressure on the NHS and schools doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s a convenient distraction from the choices that have been made to strip back our welfare state, to let the rich loose from social responsibility.

I’ve long known the Tories are the “nasty party”. But I don’t want to believe England is – yet – a “nasty country”. However, I think it is in danger of succumbing to a self-righteous `anti-migration frenzy, and that is self-defeating, for it will leave the UK much poorer, in both monetary and moral terms.

So to all the European migrants reading this: sorry, once again. It’s not much consolation, I know – but for my own sake, I want to say once more: this is not being done in my name.

On striking

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 14:43:00 +0000

I am on strike today.

I’m striking -- like most others I know -- without much hope or expectation that it will effect change. After all, in the past four years UCU’s ballot papers asking me to support industrial action have landed so regularly on my doorstep they’re more ritual than revolution. I’ve also yet to manage to withdraw my labour in a way that inconveniences anyone other than myself. Unless a strike can be called between 2 and 4 on a Tuesday, the work I won’t get done on any one day is the work I want to do, not the work other people need me to do. Flexibility and independence are my greatest joys as an academic: but they rather dilute the impact of one-day industrial action on other people.

So why strike? Why strike, if it will change little and perhaps not even be noticed beyond an out-of-office email reply? In part it’s because it’s a question of principle: there are well-reasoned, persuasive arguments that pay agreements in higher education are not fair. It’s also, of course, because strikes are a collective action. But this is not simply some automatic union-member reflex. Choosing to join a strike demands personal conviction – especially when there’s no personal injury involved.

As in this case. For this strike – over the need for fair pay in higher education – is not really about me. I earn more than 75% of the UK population: I have a permanent job. I have a final salary pension (just) and sick pay and paid holiday. Equally important is the freedom I have to pursue my own research -- and research funding.

Yet higher education in the UK has become a pyramid scheme, and even if I’ve climbed up beyond the precipice, it gives me no right to forget that the structure supporting me is one propped up by casualised labour. More and more poorly paid teaching fellows and temporary lecturers are dependent upon the precarious favours of patron-professors for their continued employment. I was there not so long ago: many friends are still stuck in the cycle. Yet these cycles of exploitation are increasingly integral to University strategy, as expansions into new student markets – especially at the graduate level – are built on cheap labour underpinning the expensive glamour of a few crowd-pleasing “superstars”, whose pay is increasingly untied from any kind of national pay agreement at all. Superstars, unfortunately, who often appear like shooting stars: blink, and you’ll miss them, as they head out on another research buyout/sabbatical/book tour.

This growing inequality within higher education’s hierarchies mirrors the widening inequality gap in British society as a whole. An elite enjoys disproportionate spoils: the majority are left only with less power and more uncertainty. This makes me angry: this enough is reason to strike.

But the casualization of academic labour is just one part of a much broader search for profit in higher education. In my more cynical moments, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m sometimes selling students a bulk-buy product that can’t possibly deliver on its marketing claims. Qualifications are more than the paper they’re written on. Yet too often I wonder whether the real value of a degree, often taught in the harried margins of professors’ and tutors’ time – equates to the months of time and effort and tens of thousands of pounds in money it has cost the student.

All this leaves me disquieted, unsettled. Fair pay in higher education is certainly a just cause. But a meaningful end to the dispute – one that isn’t simply negotiation and counter-negotiation over numbers – depends on all of us asking bigger questions about the chances in Higher Education. Who should research – and who should teach? Who do we want them to educate – and why? What – ultimately – do we want universities to be for?

Of course the business of higher education can’t take place in an economic vacuum. But nor need it be driven by profit over principle. So I’m on strike today not just for pay or pension – though neither fair wages nor security of tenure are excessive demands. I’m also striking today because I believe that if we don’t stand up now, the Universities I still love – the universities that taught me about power and politics and justice and aspiration, and still often astonish me as places of extraordinary creativity and learning – may well disappear, hidden behind a thousand paywalls, accessible only to the few.

Lampedusa

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 14:23:00 +0000

A piece written for Edinburgh University's Global Justice Academy Blog

The counsul banged the table and said,

“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:

But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Refugee Blues, W.H.Auden

It is easy to be outraged at the injustices suffered by refugees at the hands of their tormentors – arbitrary arrest; torture; forced conscription; rape. Horrors unimaginable in our cosseted lives bring easy waves of sympathy – but too little self-reflection. The drowning of 359 migrants off Lampedusa’s shores on 3 October should shatter our complacency: not because it is a shocking tragedy, but because it is a cruelly predictable one.

We know already that migrants die crossing the Mediterranean: just as we know they die of dehydration crossing the Arizona desert and of asphyxiation in the back of lorries. Who would disagree that the smugglers who rake in billions a year selling a shoddy, dangerous, black market service to their customers are profiteering from human misery? Of course such crooks should not be in business. All this we know.

But we know too that migrants’ journeys are fuelled by a potent combination of desperation and aspiration, and that underpinning the whole irregular migrant economy is a consumer economy addicted to cheap labour. However, you can still only solve the problems you choose to see. And far from coming up with the right answers, we are – quite deliberately – not even asking the right questions. In fact, when it comes to immigration, we are masters of doublethink. We weep at the waterlogged graves of Lampedusa’s dead, and then turn almost immediately to consider how “hostile” an environment we can craft for the UK’s “illegal immigrants”.

These new immigration laws will – as UK home secretary Teresa May has already admitted – appeal not to evidence, but to perception (or prejudice). For the idea that we can stop undocumented migration at all (let along through this set of nasty prohibitions) is selfish fantasy, built upon fragments of political hysteria.

For there is a simple truth underpinning irregular migration. The poor and the oppressed will try and move in search of work and freedom as long as world so suffused with inequalities as this one. After Lampedusa’s shipwreck, we have already seen Malta’s. More will follow. And yet still they come. Yes, a leaking boat on the high seas is a high-stakes, desperate gamble: but when GDP per capita is $504 in Eritrea and $38,514 in the UK, when the alternative is forced marriage, forced conscription or slow starvation, wouldn’t you play on?

This is why the dead of Lampedusa are not just the victims who suffered in lands beyond the sea. They are our victims too. In the twenty-first century, an age of unprecedented global mobility, it has never been more difficult to move legally if you are poor. Low-skilled migrants are shut out as Western economies clamour to attract “the brightest and best”. Freedom of movement is something you have to buy, unless by fortunate accident of birth you ended up with a “good” citizenship.

This does not mean our middle class lives do not depend on cheap, foreign workers to clean our houses and paint our nails. But it does mean we would prefer instead to draw over-simplified lines between local unemployment and immigration, rather than scrutinise the economics of exploitation that explain why many migrants will take jobs citizens won’t. And to continue to comfort ourselves with the platitude that “real” refugees aren’t economic migrants, and don’t have to sail in sinking ships. Such lines have the inconvenience of being untrue: but the advantage of allowing us to castigate both smugglers as demons and would-be migrants as “queue jumpers” and frauds, victims of their own rule breaking.

We know all this: and we know the solution too. Better asylum, long-term development – and legal migration routes. The past week has seen repeated calls – including from EU commissioner Cecilia Malmström – for coordinated action to open up legal migration routes, as well as to fix broken asylum systems stunted by institutional cultures of disbelief and long bureaucratic delays. Yet the likelihood of such reforms happening soon is so small as to be almost non-existent. Lampedusa is a momentary spasm of guilt. In the long run, we prefer our migration narratives with obvious villains, nationalist slogans and a healthy dose of EU scepticism. Secure our Borders; Keep Illegals Out; War on Smugglers. Politicians will happily parrot such phrases: after all, irregular immigrants don’t vote in marginal constituencies.

Yet in the end, smugglers are like dealers, pimps and backstreet abortionists: unsavoury characters, but ones who are simply meeting the laws of supply and demand. Declare war on them, and the prices may rise and the risks increase – but business will continue unless a safe, legal alternative is accessible. So save your scorn for a state that – like some twisted version of Auden’s poem – lauds Lampedusa’s dead as citizens, but incarcerates the living as illegal immigrants. For the British politicians who this Monday will waste their time debating the marginal costs of “health tourism” rather than fixing the UK’s asylum system. And in the end, for all of those here who – safe in the comforts of their own homes – continue to want to believe that this humanitarian disaster has nothing to do with the narrow, mean politics of immigration that public opinion demands.

New Ideas, Old Politics and Real Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 09:43:00 +0000

It wasn’t déjà vu when I turned on the radio on Sunday morning to hear Ed Miliband presenting Labour’s “new” immigration policies: more the discomfort of hearing discordant, distorted versions of new ideas sold short.

Over the past month, I’ve spent time talking to colleagues and friends – including at leading Labour-allied think-tank IPPR – about how to develop more positive migration policies. I believe this will happen not by talking in broad national brush-strokes, but through carefully designing concrete migration policies that could contribute to the pursuit of some of the fundamental goals of progressive politics: social mobility, global development, equality of opportunity.

Say, for instance, by linking the technology sector’s access to the international labour market with new training initiatives boroughs like Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Islington, where Tech City is booming but software engineers work alongside entrenched deprivation. In fact, something very similar to the policy announced by Miliband yesterday, which will require large companies to fund an apprenticeship for every highly-skilled migrant they hire within the existing quota regime. Except with Labour the goals have been inverted: carrot has been turned into stick.

Ideas of course are public property, best improved through discussion and debate. Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in playing the old games, pursuing power and popular appeal, what’s been lost is the chance to make a real contribution to progressive politics. Far from a bold new idea, this is still the empty politics of national numbers: it’s no challenge to the idea that migration, even if it is sometimes a necessary evil, is always a problem, not a solution. But it’s precisely this failure of imagination which helps to explain why the policy is being dismissed just 72 hours after its unveiling.

Critics have pointed out that framing this initiative in terms of “British apprenticeships” is illegal: a lesson not learnt after Gordon Brown’s previous empty promises of “British jobs for British workers”. The problem lies in framing immigration – and employment – in these national terms. What’s really needed is new opportunities for social mobility, especially in deprived areas. Scale back from the blanket imposition of a national rule; focus instead on building local programmes that work with specific local businesses to respond to the needs of local communities. Then you begin to have apprenticeships that make a real and concrete contribution to the progressive politics of social mobility, not the narrow politics of nationalism.

Businesses have also labelled the idea ‘unworkable’. It’s easy to see why. This policy has ostensibly been linked to the publication of the Husbands report on vocational skills training, but offers no real remedy for the problems with apprenticeship that the report identifies: too many low-quality, low-paid schemes that don’t lead to long-term employment. The crude politics of “one migrant, one apprentice” also pay scant attention to questions of labour substitutability or training requirements: it’s a far cry from the “employer-led” apprentice drive the Husband report urges. Instead, by turning such commitments into obligations, apprenticeships risk becoming empty gestures, bureaucratic hoops.

To unworkable should be added unhelpful. By keeping the quota cap in place, and focusing on large companies (many of whom already run apprenticeship schemes) it’s simply not clear how this proposal will add 125,000 additional apprenticeships over five years (let alone the jobs to follow). The policy effectively ignores the migration needs of the small and medium sized businesses, like those that are driving London’s start-up boom. It’s these businesses that often don’t have the capacity to negotiate the opaque rules governing visa sponsorship, but which –when the time is right for expansion – could play a real role in training up new, local software engineers on a small scale, in a dynamic high-wage industry that, with a culture of on-the-job training, is ideally placed to make apprenticeships meaningful.

The Tech Stars apprenticeship scheme has just launched and may provide a model for just such a scheme, though for the moment it’s focusing on IT support and marketing rather than areas of real computing skill shortage. But technology start-ups are unlikely to fully invest in such training when so much of their time is spent searching for the qualified engineers they need now (and who usually aren’t British when they find them). Businesses can’t train the next generation if they’re no longer solvent. Allowing small and medium sized companies who participate in recognised apprenticeship schemes an exemption from existing highly-skilled visa quotas could help both to ease the talent crunch that holds many back and encourage their investment in hands-on training.

Yet the most damning charge is that this new Labour policy amounts to nothing more than an “apprentice tax”. It’s also a tax on migration. There’s no talk of lifting the quota, simplifying the bureaucracy and costs involved in hiring foreign workers, or rethinking the logic driving the push down on immigration. Apprenticeships are simply presented as another hurdle. And this is what really needs to change. We need to start seeing migration not as a problem, but first as an on-going reality – and then as an opportunity.

With some creative thinking, migration could become a lever used to persuade a whole range of actors – from technology companies to farmers to trade unions – to fully commit to a bold socially progressive political agenda, by aligning their private economic interests with public progress towards a more equal and fairer society. But this can only be done by opening up migration – slowly and strategically – not by closing it down. That’s why this is a missed opportunity. Successful 21^st century governance requires innovation, and we undoubtedly need new ideas when it comes immigration policy. Yet instead it seems we’re just going to be offered the same old politics: numbers and nationalism on a road to nowhere.

Moonlighting

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:37:00 +0000

I've been writing in other places over the last month or so, on topics ranging from Syria to US immigration reform to Uganda passports... it's been great to work with editors (and almost certainly even better for those who are reading!). Below are all my guest blogs in one place.

The World Needs to Plan for long-term Syria Refugee Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:33:00 +0000

(First published at The Conversation)

A new city rises up in the Jordanian desert. Zaatari is now “home” – at last count – to 144,000 Syrians. The numbers are scarcely credible. One million child refugees; two million exiles in total; another four million internally displaced within Syria’s borders. Syria is emptying itself. The parallels that experienced aid workers draw are with some of the blackest moments in recent human history: Rwanda, Kosovo, Iraq.

I am writing this as the US Congress debates plans for punitive intervention, finessing “red lines” and weapon inspectors’ reports. Yet one thing is already clear. Whenever this fratricidal war is finally exhausted, there will still be a refugee crisis. For if exile begins in emergency, it does not end when that emergency is over. That is why, as overwhelming as the immediate needs of Syria’s refugees are, it is important not to lose sight of the longer-term challenges.

It’s easy to focus on how the Syria crisis is different, its scaleunprecedented. However, it echoes many other displacements. Today, 15 million refugees and 29 million people are displaced worldwide. Three-quarters of Afghansaffected by conflict have been displaced during their lives; in 2011 one-third of Somalis were displaced. Analysing these crises can help to understand why it’s the decisions the international community takes now that may frame Syrian displacement for decades to come.

Refugee crises need not become protracted. The short duration of the Kosovan refugee crisis is often forgotten: but in just 11 weeks between April and June, 300,000 not only fled from but then returned to Kosovo. In 1991, the Kurdish refugee crisis in Northern Iraq was resolved almost as quickly. Yet in both cases, the commitment required was decade-long international intervention and the results uncertain. There is small appetite for such projects in Syria.

No quick fix

The likelihood – given the increasingly sectarian and vicious nature of Syrian civil war – is therefore that there will be no swift resolution to either conflict or the refugee crisis. International law draws neat lines between civilians and combatants: but in civil wars, soldiers are sons, brothers, and fathers. Refugee camps are fertile recruiting grounds for extremist causes.

Sometimes a temporary solution lasts for decades. UK Department for International Development

Click to enlarge

From Afghanistan to Rwanda to Sri Lanka, the dangers of blurring the lines between humanitarian space and insurgent forces are clear. One clear challenge in Syria is how to ensure the refugee camps remain apart from the conflict, while simultaneously acknowledging the close links between refugees and those fighting.

There is growing awareness among researchers that when displacement is protracted, lives can not just be fenced into the camp: mobility is crucial. Economic livelihoods and family communications often depend on moving back and forth across the border as war ebbs and flows. Helping refugees maintain links with their home communities also makes eventual return – if and when peace does arrive – far more likely.

Yet fear of protracted refugee crises has driven government policy in the opposite direction, towards exclusion andcontainment. Zaatari can only be understood in the long shadow of the 60-year old Palestinian refuge crisis. Along the Turkish border it’s the century-old Kurdish question that makes camps the compromise extracted for the border remaining open. Kenya and Pakistan are among the states who refuse to discuss local integration of their third-generation refugee populations, and continue to insist on encampment.

Such camps are intended to be temporary, emergency responses: but without peace, the refugees cannot “go home”. So over time, some de facto local integration is inevitable. This need not be a calamity: refugee networks can become development hubs. Dadaab camp in Kenya, home to half a million refugees, is estimated to make a annual net contribution of US$14m to the regional economy.

Dadaab camp in Kenya makes a significant contribution to local economy. US government

Click to enlarge

Need for long-term plan

The difficulty is that asking politicians and policymakers to plan for long-term exile requires explicit recognition that refugees are not just a temporary problem. For even if the Syrian war were to end tomorrow, there could be no instant return: the damage already done is enough.

Roads, public building, houses, power lines: all destroyed. There is overwhelming evidence from recent mass post-conflict repatriations to Afghanistan and South Sudan thatpremature returns are often not sustainable, and lead only to further waves of displacement.

This is not just about the crisis “over there”, aid to be paid for at a suitable distance from Western borders. If Syria shifts from emergency to entrenched crisis, industrialised states should not just be offering money, but also many morerefugee resettlement places and opportunities for Syrian immigration – not least to demonstrate real solidarity with the Syrians' regional hosts.

We should pray for swift resolution to Syria’s miseries: but we should also be pragmatic, and plan for protracted displacement. For this is the norm. Today, two-thirds of the world’s refugees spend five years or more in exile. Decades spent waiting in limbo are a second tragedy, a squandering of human capital that puts peace further out of reach. We may not be able to end the Syrian conflict: but in the meantime, we can and should lessen the poverties of exile

The Citizenship Market

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:30:00 +0000

(First published at Democracy in Africa)

Citizenship is an artifice. It’s a delicate political construction aiming to weave private freedom and public governance into social cohesion. At its most lofty, we can talk about citizenship as the foundation of entitlement, empowerment and equality: but as every good student of government knows, the inverse of such inclusion is the exclusion borne from arbitrary state control of the “right to have rights”. And while the language of citizenship is poetic, the documents of citizenship are bureaucratic prose. Birth certificates; social security numbers; passports: all simultaneously confirming and circumscribing legal identity.

In the Western liberal democracies where national citizenship evolved, and states have the bureaucratic competency to control identity through documentation, the practice of citizenship is complex and contradictory enough. But what does citizenship mean in an African context, when the formal identity officially bestowed by the state so often competes with alternative ideas of belonging bound in blood or tied to the soil?

Thinking about this question, I often come back to Gerard Prunier’s observation – one of those piercing comments that in catching the truth stays with you years after the first reading, ‘The state is always somebody’s state, never the State in the legal abstract form beloved by Western constitutional law’. In many parts of Africa, the state’s version of citizenship may be arbitrary, uneven, hollow, so that everyday security and social rights – making citizenship real– actually depends upon negotiating a host of other protections and appealing to other markers of identity that are anchored to genealogy or geography: tribe, religion, language.

Yet Africa is also continent on the move and nowhere more so than in regions of conflict. If citizenship is often precarious for locals, what does that mean for refugees and other migrants from conflict? These individuals cannot claim protections from their state (either because of active hostility or the absence of effective government). The humanitarian community may offer immediate respite from persecution, but in the longer-term refugees’ freedoms are limited, not least because the documentary identities they are given mark them out as non-citizens, and as a result heavily restrict their ability to claim basic rights.

One such basic right is freedom of movement. Camp passes are often needed to leave the humanitarian ‘spaces of exception’ that can blur the line between protection and imprisonment. Convention Travel Documents (CTDs) were originally supposed to function in parallel with the international passport regime, but in practice access to these documents is rationed: Uganda had a quota of around 500 CTDs in 2011 for a total of 200,000 refugees.Two-thirds of refugees now spend five years or more in exile, in what the international community calls protracted refugee situations. What begins in emergency in effect becomes a form of precarious long-term international migration, without access to a passport. There’s little prospect of formal local integration, because in places like Uganda it’s extremely difficult to meet the criteria for naturalisation. Yet the majority of long-term refugees do not live in camps, but alongside locals, often in urban centres like Kampala.

Last Summer, I went to Uganda to try and write the story of how these refugees and irregular migrants negotiated their documents, identities and ability to travel beneath the ‘legal abstract form of citizenship’. Talking to both Congolese, Sudanese, South Sudanese, Rwandan and Somali refugees as well as Ugandan locals, I wanted to understand how poor and displaced Africans thought about citizenship and belonging: are these the same thing? What about the connections between citizenship and the documents, like passports, that are its modern shorthand? Was it possible that citizenship – or at least some part of it – was for sale?

A year on, I’m still sifting the findings and trying to build a coherent narrative, but it’s clear that the relationship between passports, citizenship and ‘belonging’ is at least as complex as I speculated it might be. That said, certain trends are clear. Firstly, long-term exiles continue to move even after they are labelled refugees: journeys are made to trade, to check on lands, to visit family members. These border crossings are sometimes risky, but nearly always considered too important to postpone any longer, economically or emotionally. Secondly, because of the need to travel there is indeed a vibrant market in the identity documents needed to cross borders: citizenship—or at least its markers – are indeed for sale. I met several refugees who held Ugandan passports, usually purchased for around $100 (three times the official cost for Ugandans). The general consensus – among both locals and migrants – was that ‘money is everything’, and for those with enough financial capital, the trappings of citizenship could be readily purchased.

However I also met many more long-term refugees who were priced out of the citizenship market, and had crossed Uganda’s borders using alternative forms of identity that combined monetary exchange with economies of trust. Local Chairman – LC1 officials – issue local residency cards: for a price, some will list a refugees’ nationality as Ugandan, and write letters of recommendation to facilitate travel across borders. Institutes of Higher Education also issue ID cards, and are often willing to list a migrant student as a Ugandan – providing fees are paid on time. What was most interesting was that these were not new networks created by, or for, refugees. Rather, they were pre-existing local alternatives, developed to facilitate travel for the many Ugandans who also could not afford a passport. Here was an informal, hybrid market that depended upon accepted social norms – in particular, the social status afforded to local officials and universities – to lower the costs associated with freedom of movement.

Yet both locals and refugees were emphatic: facilitating travel and providing the documentary evidence of a legal identity was not the same as belonging. Both groups recoiled from idea that documents they exchanged for money were about identity or collective entitlement – a passport did not make you ‘one of us’. Instead, what seemed to emerge was a bifurcated view of citizenship, in which the protections and entitlements of social belonging were separated off from individual, private freedoms. The attitude was often that trustworthy refugees should, at their own risk, be able to enjoy negative liberty. Building a system that circumvents state control of passports simply helped to facilitate that and avoid the inconvenient demands of a corrupt, inefficient state. But no simple document could entitle a stranger to positive freedoms like entitlement to land: that depended upon blood and brotherhood.

For these locals, the state did indeed appear as an abstraction: distant, irrelevant and largely unconnected to the poor. This may help explain both the ready willingness of locals to bypass state control in issuing identity documents, and their clear understanding of the limits of the good they were selling: belonging and social rights were jealously guarded in part because of the very weaknesses of state – because this meant the poor had to rely on other forms of reciprocity.

This leads me to conclusions mired in ambiguity. If refugees are the victims of the nationalised distribution of basic rights, the poor are the victims when citizenship is monetized. While some refugees were able to purchase papers to escape refugee status and build social security, set free by market principles, the corrosive effect of market prices acted to diminish the claims of many poor citizens upon the state. Corruption affected Ugandans too: when rights have a price, why should the state provide them for free? As one women I interviewed reflected, ‘life is the same for poor Ugandans and Congolese refugees, the big difference is whether you are rich, or poor, not whether you are foreign or Muganda…’

In Uganda I saw how resourceful, energetic and ingenuous approaches to citizenship could overcome the bureaucratic failings of state and humanitarian regime, allowing refugees to build a tolerable life in exile. But in the end, I find myself needing to strike a sombre note. This self-crafted citizenship was in effect a privatised citizenship, not eliminating but simply re-fashioning the lines of inclusion and exclusion. The stories of Uganda’s refugees warn us all that if the only choice we create is one between arbitrary exclusion based on nationality, and arbitrary exclusion based on poverty, the promised freedoms of citizenship will remain, instead, the rationed privileges of a few.

The UK migration debate: Lessons from America

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:28:00 +0000

(first published via Open Democracy)

Liberal Britain comforts itself with the idea that, however bad things may get, it’s worse in America. The death penalty; gun control; worker’s rights; healthcare; abortion – how easy to smugly list the ways in which Britain is better, more progressive, more civilised. But there’s one issue on which we’d do well to look across the Pond with far more humility: immigration.

As the US Congress headed into its August recess without an Immigration Reform Act in sight, this may seem an unlikely claim. After all, the future of the Senate bill that would hugely increase the number of visas available and offer undocumented migrants a path to citizenship is uncertain. But living in America over the past six months, it strikes me that even as the UK ‘debate’ on migration grows ever more shrill, America is talking about migration in constructive, rational and often positive terms.

Even if national US immigration reform fails, there are signs that a pragmatic approach to migration is spreading. Ten states now issue drivers’ licenses to anyone regardless of their immigration status. Only two – Arizona and Nebraska – refuse to issue licenses to those brought to the US illegally as children. Yet in the Queens’ Speech this year, the UK Government announced the exact opposite: measures to ensure that the DVLA does not issue driving licenses to any irregular migrant.

That’s not to say there aren’t groups that make UKIP voters look left-of-centre in the US. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, activists havecriticised the Senate Bill for its elitism in trading the green card ‘American Dream’ lottery for high-skilled tech workers’ visas. The $46 billion allocated for border security is absurd – though proof for the Defence Industry that lobbying pays. Many claim that the immigration bill is not enough: just as many claim that it goes too far.

FWD.US: 'Fighting for Comprehensive Immigration Reform'

But it’s precisely the compromises writ large in this Bill that are evidence of genuine attempts to a broker political deal. Mainstream political opinion seems to recognise that it’s the immigration system, not migration itself, that’s the problem. Even if America’s discussion is not yet concluded, the gains not yet certain, it is impossible to imagine leader of the opposition Ed Miliband and UK Prime Minister David Cameron even discussing these ideas, let alone coming so close to agreeing terms. So why are things so different in the UK? And are there lessons we can learn from the US’ grown-up migration conversation?

It’s not just about public education. Both the US and UK public areshockingly ill informed when it comes to immigration. In both countries the foreign-born make up about 13% of the population, but your average Brit guesses 31%. Your average American? 38%. Nor can the difference in political climate be entirely ascribed to differences in public opinion: while survey after survey shows Britons are resolutely opposed to immigration, just over half of Americans also think migration is more of a threat than an opportunity.

Ah, but America is different, the apologists cry: the manifest destiny of its huddled masses is built upon a Great Migration Story. Yet a narrative’s power doesn’t necessarily depend on its truth.

America started legislating to exclude migrants it didn’t like a full 30 years before Britain started to do the same. US Legislation excluded first Chinese women, then all Chinese: by 1924 Jews and Southern Europeans were being added to the list. So we should be wary of using America’s grand migration myths to excuse our own xenophobia. This is not to suggest that the American migration story isn’t compelling, but we should remember too that it was forged despite the constant opposition of (white) settlers who had already arrived. Should we choose to believe it, Britain could write a pretty starrymigration story too, a line from the twelfth to twenty-first century; from Flemish and French weavers through Polish soldiers and Somali seamen to Indian entrepreneurs.

The fiscal argument that Britain’s social welfare system only works with strict migration controls looks shaky after recent studies from the OECD and the Office for Budget Responsibility suggesting the opposite. It is only steady immigration (or radically higher taxes) that can sustain spending without creating unsustainable levels of national debt. Our farmers are equally dependent upon seasonal agricultural labourers to do the work Britons won’t or can’t do. The rising power of Hispanic voters has surely driven Republicans in the US to the negotiating table, but if the US will be a majority-minority country by 2050, most recent demographic projections suggest the UK will not be far behind. Reports last month suggest the Tory party is already concerned that its inability to attract minority voters may cost it the next election.

In other words, there are no fundamental, structural differences between the UK and US that can simply explain or excuse the choice to treat immigration, and not the immigration system, as the problem. Ceding the centre-ground to the reactionary right on migration, as with the now-notorious ‘Go Home’ van stunt, is a coward’s choice. The Republicans and Democratic who have shepherded US immigration reform almost within reach are far more courageous.

Part of the reason they’ve done so, however, is the presence of an articulate and organised pro-migration lobby. This coalition – from A-grade students waiting for the Dream Act to Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook and other CEOs in need of high-tech workers – are an audible, eloquent presence. And here, I think, is a telling difference. In the UK, while there’s plenty of anger and outrage at the current direction of immigration policy, it’s harder to identify groups offering a coherent and concrete set of positive policy alternatives. Too many working on refugee and migration issues are exhausted from fire-fighting. Too many initiatives stick to the safety of broad discourses on identity and multiculturalism, insisting they must remain politically neutral despite this being the most politicized of issues.

Divided families protest outside Home Office. Demotix/ Peter Marshall

Until joined-up policy alternatives do coalesce, it will be easy for those who don’t like immigration to ignore both the evidence and opponents’ howls of outrage in pursuit of short-term popularity. Yet there are issues around which a moderate, proactive platform could emerge. Obvious starting points include revising the family migration rules that have left nearly half of Britons unable to meet the onerous financial requirements for foreign spouses’ visas, lobbying for more visas to help address the chronic shortage of well-trained software engineers holding back Tech City growth, and championing the 120,000 British-born children of irregular immigrants deserving of their own Dream Act. Creative thinking could help to reimagine migration so it’s no longer considered a necessary evil, but becomes a lynchpin of every socially progressive political agenda.

We laugh at US politicians, rolling our eyes at the idea that you can vote not to ban assault weapons, or that you can seriously think the NHS runs ‘death panels’. But now we’re the ones playing fantasy politics. So for those of us who want to see real migration reform, the constructive tones of bipartisan US immigration efforts should be our guide. For surprising as it may seem, when it comes to immigration, America may yet have a lesson for us on how to avoid substituting the cheap but dangerous politics of demagogy for the real responsibilities of democratic government.

Humanitarian Development?

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:12:00 +0000

(This was originally written for LSE's new International Development blog... check it out here at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/internationaldevelopment/)

Where does conflict end and development begin? Who’s responsible for “early recovery” in the messy continuum between crisis and stability, the “relief-development gap”? These are not new questions: the international community’s been arguing over the answers for at least the past fifty years. But they are pressing ones. Not only for those of us whose work defies easy categorisation along the humanitarian–development axis, but more importantly for the millions whose lives are shaped by protracted emergency.

In May, I spoke in Bogota, Colombia at a high-level conference on displacement. For two days, we discussed how to solve the exile of over 4 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have been forced from their homes as a result of the Colombian conflict. Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about the conference was that it had been organised jointly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Hardly revolutionary, you might think. Yet over the past year I’ve been to several conferences discussing similar protracted crises, and development agencies have been notable only in their absence. Displacement, we are told, is not a development issue.

Yet even a cursory glance at the scope and scale of contemporary exile is proof that even if such neat divisions could be made in the past (doubtful), they bear no scrutiny today. Refugee crises begin as emergencies. They end in peace agreements, reconstruction grants and muttered prayers that this time, return will prove lasting. But that leaves years – sometimes decades – between emergency and solution, when lives are no longer at risk from conflict or malnutrition but repatriation is not yet an option. Today, two-thirds of registered refugees and IDPs are trapped in protracted displacement, spending five years or more in exile. This includes at least 3.5 million Columbians.

Donors and policy-makers often talk about protracted displacements as – in the words of the US State Department – ‘some of the most compelling humanitarian challenges confronting governments around the world’. Yet here the challenge is not humanitarian aid. It’s development. Talk to long-term refugees and IDPs, and their concerns and frustrations echo those of other poor communities – livelihood opportunities; access to education and healthcare; security of land tenure. This is especially true for the 50% of refugees who – despite the images that cross our TV screens in times of famine and war – do not live in camps, but in towns and cities.

So the everyday reality of exile for most refugees is not emergency in the camp but poverty in the city. Ask many humanitarian aid workers how you tell the difference between an urban IDP and other poor urban migrants, and you’ll often be greeted with a wry smile. The real answer, of course, is that IDPs are often victims of double discrimination, while refugees are frequently denied the right to live legally in urban areas at all, and corralled into camps. Yet even despite this, displacement can bring development, building new economic networks. Studies show that Dadaab camp in Kenya adds $14mto the regional economy every year. While carrying out fieldwork in Kyangwali refugee camp in Kenya last summer, my fellow guests at the camp hostel were not NGO workers, but grain merchants from Nairobi come to buy the refugees’ surplus harvests.

None of this is to deny the wrong of forced migration. Nor to suggest that “humanitarian” is not a powerful label, able to carve a state of exception from the borders of nation-states that quite clearly saves lives. But over time, bare survival is not enough. In protracted displacement, “humanitarian” is no longer a call to arms, but an excuse for politically convenient inaction, a reason to wilfully ignore the reality of long-term integration that, even if prohibited by law, happens anyway – between and beneath such restrictions.

‘Labels reveal the political in the apolitical’. Agencies – and academics – have vested interest in defining their interests narrowly, in avoiding the complex problems at the edges of their remit. Yet it is absolutely clear that in the 21st century, displacement cannot be seen only as a question of humanitarian aid. Solving displacement increasingly means confronting the problems of urban development. In cities like Bogota, Hargeisa or Juba, the reverse also holds true. Successful urban development will depend on recognising the dynamics of displacement.

So how can we make sure that there are more conferences like the one in Colombia, bringing both development and humanitarian actors to the table? First, we need to be persistent. Some actors have begun to collaborate on forging more innovative solutions for the displaced. More development actorsneed to be persuaded to join them. Second, we need to target not just international and national but also local authorities, especially urban ones, who are often more open to piloting policy initiatives. Third, we have to begin with our own work. As academics we are often guilty of presenting “humanitarianism” and “development” as a dichotomy: “either/or”, not “and”. It may be convenient shorthand, but in using these labels without reflecting on how and why we think like this, we risk simply replicating the structures of power and sectional interests we’re supposed to be studying, rather than challenging the assumptions they underpin.

I still don’t know where conflict ends and development begins. Nor how to broker a political solution that could bring solutions closer for the world’s protracted refugees. But what I do know is that I can’t possibly hope to get close to the answers unless I keep thinking outside those “humanitarian” and “development” boxes, connecting the spaces in between.

A National Health Service? The Migrant Levy - and Why Citizens Should Care

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 00:08:00 +0000

Should foreigners pay to use the NHS? At first glance, it’s not so unreasonable. After all, as Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt points out, it’s a National Health Service. And as the Department of Health’s consultation paper, released today, asks: why should "temporary" migrants receive "free" treatment, unless it’s a public health issue or an emergency? After all, tourists’ hospital visits are already chargeable: this – the argument goes -- is simply an extension of already-existing policy, designed to protect the NHS.

Bullshit.

The Department of Health’s consultation document, for all its delicate wording, is a toxic combination of two of this Government’s favourite pastimes: migrant bashing and privatisation. The former is convenient cover for the latter, especially when whipped into a frenzy by tabloid columnists. The language of nationalism tells citizens they shouldn’t care about this, but that’s a dangerous slight of hand.

First, the evidence: or rather, the lack of it. The Consultancy Paper claims “we know [health tourism] is a significant problem”. Jeremy Hunt has argued health tourism – costs the NHS £200m a year, though he hasn’t offered any evidence explaining this figure and as George Eaton points out in the New Statesman, the cost could well be as low as £12m, or 0.01% of the NHS’annual budget. Compared to the £50bnthat the NHS owes for Private Finance Initiatives (for infrastructure that cost just £11bn to build), the financial rationale for this "coordinated crackdown" seems pretty thin. Especially when you also consider the £16.3bn (net) the OECD estimates that migrants contribute to the UK economy annually (that’s 1% of GDP). Given the paper admits there’s a need for an audit to first understand the scale of health tourism on page 5, and no costing of the administration that would be required to process such a scheme, it’s hard not to escape the conclusion that this is a case of policy before (or regardless) of evidence.

But of course this isn’t primarily financial: it’s political. It’s appealing to Britain’s rising tide of anti-migrant popular righteousness in the hope they won’t notice how privatisation is writ large across this Consultation document.

The most significant proposal is that all those migrants who do not have Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK – something you can normally only apply for after five years – should be asked to pay an annual Migrant Health Levy to access non-emergency treatment, of no less than £200 (‘an appropriate charge might be higher than this’). Students, foreign spouses, skilled workers (including those nurses and doctors staffing your local NHS hospital): all charged more, even after several years in the UK. It’s also increasingly difficult to qualify to qualify for settlement in the UK, (even assuming you’re able to enter in the first place). The Paper estimates that the average annual cost of providing healthcare to someone aged 15-44 (like most migrants) is £700. Yet someone who meets the current minimum salary requirements for a worker’s visa -- £20 300 – will already pay over £3500 in tax and National Insurance contributions in their first year of work. Is asking them to pay twice ‘Ensuring Fairness?’

There is a danger in following the taxation = entitlement link too far, for in discriminating on the basis of wealth, the very reasoning behind a national health system – equality of citizenship – is eroded. Of course, that’s unlikely to bother Hunt and co. too much. There’s a barely disguised assumption that any immigrant worth their salt wouldn’t deign to use the NHS anyway, but ‘may want their healthcare needs to be met by private healthcare’. When the rich opt out of citizenship, none of us gain – apart from the Health Industry. Let’s not forget BUPA made $604m in profit last year.

The Paper starts off with heady promises that the migrant levy will not see anyone refused ‘timely treatment necessary to prevent risks to their life or permanent health’. Yet if you read on, ‘we want to consider further the possibility of charging for emergency treatment’, because it seems, some people ‘expect to pay’. Where this leaves those who can ill-afford to, and who wait till the last moment to seek care (risking poorer outcomes), is an awkward problem – as the document at least has the grace to admit. Buried in the details are other outrages: the suggestion that pre-existing pregnancies should not be covered by any levy charged, for example. So women married to British citizens and who come to the UK to give birth to British citizens may well be expected to pay out-of-pocket for the privilege (given that health insurers tend not to be keen on pre-existing pregnancy either).

Charging migrants turns GPs in unwilling border police, in pursuit of political objectives that only make sense if they’re framed by the wider privatisation project, and the nationalism that distracts from its hard logic. Yet in the end, after all the outrage at East Europeans’ arrival, their rights to use the NHS won’t change. We are European citizens, and we benefit from freedom of movement and access to their healthcare too: not least from Poland’s dentists.

Part of the reason why I’m so angry is that since March I've been living in the US. Now, I’ve seen what privatised healthcare looks like first-hand, and it's not pretty. Expensive insurance policies that still demand extra payments for such fripperies as appointments or prescriptions; over-medicalised middle classes; some of the worst health outcomes in the developed world, for twice the money. But plenty of competition, plenty of choice, plenty of glossy brochures. If you can pay.

The NHS is one of the greatest accomplishments of the twentieth century. Along with those other audacious achievements of that post-War government – national insurance; free education at all levels; child benefit – the NHS is evidence that, sometimes, governments can govern for the people. This narrow-minded petty nationalism is no fit legacy for the ideals that drove those reforms forward. Time and time again the Consultation paper calls the NHS one of the ‘most generous’ health systems in the world. We should be proud of that, not contemptuous. Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we are witnessing the slow dismantling of the NHS.

Jeremy Hunt claims that he’s just protecting our national health service. But while it may be only the foreign mothers of unborn British citizens, the high-skilled migrant tech workers (upon whose shoulders rest chances of British economic recovery), and the overseas students whose inflated fees keep British universities solvent who are billed this time, it’s another low blow undermining the principle of universal health care. And it’s hard not to fear that pretty soon, there won’t be much of a health service left for anybody.

Anti-migration populism does not (whatever David Goodhart and others might claim) protect “our” poor. It’s a smokescreen for policies that intend the very opposite: in this case, profits and private medicine. It doesn’t have to be like this. The consultation is open until 5pm on 28 August 2013: please, read the paper, and make your voice heard.

On Outsourcing

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:38:00 +0000

The idea that Britain is “overcrowded” is an oft-repeated mantra for those who want to see massive reductions in the numbers of immigrants arriving in the UK. Now, Julian Brazier - the MP for my home town, Canterbury -- has offered the latest thinking on how to rid our "Overcrowded Land" of unwanted immigrants, including outsourcing asylum.

Certainly, some facts are true. In the first decade of the 21^st century, the UK population grew by 7%. Between 1991 and 2010, half of the UK population’s increase could be directly attributed to the effects of migration, an extra 2.4 million people.

Yet while growth undoubtedly demands better governance – more investment in infrastructure, better public transport, the building of new houses – it is laughable to suggest that land is a “zero-sum game” or that overcrowding is an absolute truth. We aren’t the Malthusian peasants of the 14^th century: as others have pointed out civil engineering, public health and modern architecture are powerful tools for development. Nor do we actually live in the concrete jungle of our imaginations: in fact, only 10% of England is currently urban (and 80% of those urban areas aren’t built on). Brazier’s polemic twists half-facts with unfounded assertion to arrive at a dystopian vision that ignores the economic realities of how much the UK needs immigration. The demographics can’t be ignored. Unless we all start having many more expensive (in both environmental and economic terms) children, that positive net migration figure is what will prop up your pension and pay for your state-subsidised care in old age (never mind staff the care home).[1]

Brazier’s claims are spurious and ill founded. Yet what has made me most angry in reading this particular “Conservative Way Forward” are his conclusions. In particular, the assertion that:

We must consider making treaties with democratic Third World countries with plenty of space (few are as crowded as the UK) and establishing two or three processing centres abroad. For example, if we could secure a deal with Kenya, it would be worth our while to make a considerable payment per capita to them to provide a haven for Somali asylum seekers, sent from Britain to have their cases examined...

This measure is necessary, apparently, because new plans to prevent people being able to appeal immigration decisions until after they’ve been deported are going to lead to ‘all detected illegal immigrants pos[ing] as asylum seekers’.

For now, I’ll leave aside the baffling leaps of logic required to arrive at this claim. I want to focus instead on the suggestion that we can – and should – ship our Somali asylum seekers to Kenya. Such a move ignores the fact that the vast majority of Somalis in the UK are not illegal immigrants or even asylum seekers (only 663 Somali asylum claims were submitted in the UK in 2012), but instead are legal residents and even British citizens. However it also displays a real lack of understanding about either Kenyan politics or the current sufferings of Somali refugees in Kenya.

Although Britons may believe that we host a disproportionate number of refugees and asylum-seekers, they’re wrong. 80% of refugees are hosted by developing world states. Kenya alone currently hosts close to a million refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons and internally displaced people (a reminder that Kenya’s democratic peace is a fragile one). That’s around 2.35% of the total Kenyan population. It hosts 568,000 registered Somali refugees. Dadaab – the world’s largest refugee camp – is also the third-largest city in Kenya. Refugees and asylum seekers comprise just 0.33% of the UK’s population.

The market evangelists may argue that this proposal wouldn’t add to Kenya’s refugee “burden” (although Dadaab actually contributes $14m into the regional economy each year), because in Brazier’s terms, it’s a mutually beneficial economic transaction, with UK development cash flowing in alongside UK asylum-seekers. Yet the objections are obvious. Turning refugees into commodities stretches the moral capacity of market-based solutions beyond what is reasonable. And while neither the proposals nor the objections are new – Australia’s Malaysia deal, struck down by its High Court on human rights grounds, would have operated on pretty similar principles – the choice of Kenya, whether framed as ‘dumping ground’ or ‘migration management partnership’ suggests an extraordinary level of ignorance on Brazier’s part.

For Kenya is a country where anti-migrant – and especially anti-Somali – sentiment is virulent. I first learned of Brazier’s plans when a friend sent me a link to an East African news site. Many of the comments below the line would make Britain’s far-right proud. It seems like Kenya is already “full” too.

Refugees and migrants – particularly Somali refugees – have for over 20 years been a convenient scapegoat for Kenya’s ills. This is in part a reflection of Kenya’s own national history and lingering suspicion about the allegiances of its own Somali minority. Somalis are subject to suspicion, discrimination and exploitation, particularly at the hands of corrupt Kenyan police. In December, the Kenyan government announced that all urban refugees would be required to leave the city and live in (severely overcrowded) camps. Though this decision has not been enforced, several thousand Somalis have fled Kenya in fear of forced relocation and possible returns to a still insecure Somalia. Given the disruption to the billion-dollar Somali economy centred in Nariobi, it appears to be another case of migration politics trumping global economics. I suspect Brazier knows very little of this.

And while Kenyans may agree with Brazier about the malevolence of asylum-seekers in general, they are opposed to his plan in particular. Britain doesn’t want them: we don’t want them either. The sun set on Empire fifty years ago. To suggest that Kenya should take those we do not want – even for a price – is unavoidably tainted by the wrongs of the colonial past.

The easy response, of course, is that “it will never happen”. Brazier is a backbench MP: his comments aren’t intended to lead to actual policy, only to pull the current UK debate on immigration still further to the right and persuade UKIP voters to back the Conservatives. Yet Brazier’s comments will fuel already toxic fires, both at home and abroad. For they confirm the idea that asylum seekers are the “scum of the earth”: people to be detained, contained, deported, whose value can be calculated – like some form of human toxic waste – in their safe removal and storage. And in having an impact in Kenya, they also underline how the poisonous potency of “overcrowding” myths – peddled here by petty nationalists for Daily Mail readers -- actually form part of a global anti-migration narrative that should shame us all.

[1] This is not to suggest that migration can cure the social system – for that, we’d need one million migrants a year. But it does suggest that cutting the working-age population isn’t exactly rational policy…

Through the looking glass: California, Thatcher and the promise of things to come

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:34:00 +0000

I’ve recently moved (temporarily) to California. Six months in Palo Alto, at the heart of Silicon Valley, where the geeks have already inherited the earth (and drive the fast cars to prove it). California living has already coined too many clichés, but at times cycling through Stanford in the past 10 days there have seemed few other adjectives appropriate to catch this golden, sun-filled privilege, or the hard-edged relentless marketing that means this town is dead by 10pm.

I’m neither migrant nor tourist – I’ll accept my US Immigration label for now and call myself a long-term researchvisitor – but somewhere between participant and observer, I’ve endless fascination for trying to unpick the cultures of Silicon Valley. I’m learning American English: the words clumsy as I try and catch the cadences, the rising intonation. In conversations I can hear long-dormant Canadian vowels inflect my sentences. There are the horrors of the supermarket (endless aisles of high-fructose corn syrup) and the delights of the farmer’s market (fresh, local strawberries in April). It’s a world at once immediately familiar from the cultural imprints of a thousand hours of American TV, and utterly bewildering. We keep turning up at restaurants as they close the doors at 9: the mirror image of those American early-evening diners that perplex all good European waiters. All contradictions and confusions that throw into sharp relief my own British, European identity.

Yet the cultural reflection is also cultural refraction. I’ve been surprised how far away the UK feels. Not family or friends – ye gods of Facebook and Skype have long since tied those bonds across distant time and space. But the wider social fabric, the political project, the “imagined community”. This is on the one hand magnified by the very obvious ways in which I do not belong here, and on the other diluted. Like watching a play through smoked glass, news events unfold at a distance. You wake up, and today’s news has already happened. Read in slow-motion and at arms-length, you see both the emptiness stretching between a thousand comment pieces endlessly dissecting the same event and the bleak narratives they conceal, that few journalists or politicians are brave enough to articulate; Austerity. Inequality. Decline.

Maybe it’s just a trick of the light that makes any of us ever feel we’re much more than an audience for the political games of a chosen few. But in the past few days I feel I’ve become a double observer. I watch American life with curiosity, tempered with occasional envy (oh the sunshine!) and bouts of utter incomprehension (guns, the death penalty, the Evangelical right). But, removed from the immediate vicinity, I’m also watching Britain, observer not participant. This temporary relegation to the side-lines is disarming. From eight hours away, the minutiae of everyday life are muted: what are left are the broad brush-strokes, the grand narratives of history. In contemplative moods, this suits me: as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to edit my work will tell you, I am not a details person.

All these thoughts coalesced as I watched the (British) story of the week, and found myself wondering – 10,000 miles away from the frenzy – exactly what that story was. Yes, Thatcher’s dead. I was born as warships sailed for the Falklands; I remember drinking milk in Reception Class in Newcastle (though, hating to drink milk, this was probably my first experience of the dilemmas you face when politics clashes with personal preference). My politics was shaped in the shadows her policies cast. I distinctly remember at least one childhood nightmare in which I tried to escape a chasing Thatcher figure and her relentless, swinging handbag.

And yet - Thatcher’s dead: but Thatcherism lives on. Privatisation; individualism – for ‘who is society? There’s no such thing’. And above all else, the Market. For the hard, unpalatable truth is that she won. Not just those three general elections: she won the political war. We live in a Thatcherite Britain today, with our privatised NHS, our hollowed-out welfare system, our greed and inequality. What was once radical is now mainstream orthodoxy. There’s no surprise that Ed and Tony honour her politics: they’re Thatcher’s children too.

Hardly revelatory or original thoughts. But perhaps this is ultimately a story less about past legacy and more about future vision. As (most) of the Establishment rush to conform to social norms and pay “respectful tribute”, and the anti-Establishment celebratea phyrric victory-of-sorts, I’m left wondering where this leaves British politics now.

The making of hags and hagiographies can’t disguise the fact that one woman is not, alone, an ideology. But history is ultimately written by the victors. And that’s why I’ve found the outpourings of anger at the wreckage left by some of Thatcher's policies, and the defiant celebrations that have met the Right's pious memorialising uplifting. Because they suggest that before this political memory is written, there’s still something left to contest, something beyond the technocracy of Westminster. A clash of convictions, a sign that Britain has not yet surrendered its soul entirely to Thatcher's market-driven norms. Requiring official acknowledgement that Thatcher's undisputed legacy is not just a transformed, but also a divided Britain.

The challenge now must be, surely, to go beyond the street party, to turn the grave-dancing into a real campaign that dismantles the toxic Politcal Orthodoxy and takes us beyond the shadows of Thatcher. For dead demons (just like dead Saints) shape our culture and our historical memory of the past. But they don’t control our future. That’s up to us: do we choose to stay Thatcher’s children, or not?

And that takes me from Thatcher to Marx (I know, quite a jump). But making sense of California, making sense of Britain – is it enough? The point, after all, is to change it. Yet it seems to me that, more than ever right now, we need the philosophers too. New ideas. Broad sweeps. Before we worry about how we get there, we first need to know where we want to go. And that’s reason enough to spend some time here, observer not participant. The sunshine - just a lucky bonus. Honest.

Natural Humanitarians?

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:43:00 +0000

Today is International Women’s Day: the day after tomorrow, Mother’s Day (in the UK). A juxtaposition I find unsettling. Not because mothers don’t deserve flowers or breakfast in bed – or recognition for all the work they do in bringing us up to be sentient human beings – but because too often, it’s still wife and mother that are viewed as the only socially valid identities. In a world in which an estimated 150 million girls are victims ofsexual violence every year, in which women are still denied access to basic political, civil and human rights, the label ‘wife and mother’ can be a sentence as well as a celebration.

Step forward International Women’s Day – which began, let’s not forget, as International Working Women's Day. Except it is sometimes still implied that the jobs we should wish to do are the ones that suit us because we’re women. Even by those who should know better – like Valerie Amos, who declared this week in Stylist magazine that ‘women are natural humanitarians’.

Humanitarian work undoubtedly attracts many empowered, articulate women. And I’ve writtenbefore about the obvious and overwhelming gender bias in the humanitarian classroom – 75% of my students are women. In the NGO workshops and research conferences I attend, it’s not unusual for female participants to outnumber the men. This engagement of women in humanitarian issues should be recognised and celebrated, not least because it provides a powerful impetus for change to crack that glass ceiling which mean Amos’ rise to the top of the humanitarian pyramid is still so unusual.

Yet so many things are wrong with Amos’ statement that it is hard to know where to begin. But let’s start with the idea that it’s women who are “natural” humanitarians. Is the implication that men aren’t? Surely humanitarianism speaks, if nothing else, to the idea of a common humanity. So either the claim’s redundant – because all humans are humanitarians – or it places the weight of alleviating human suffering in conflict, crisis and disaster upon women, exculpating – and excluding – men.

But "women nurture, women care" I hear the Daily Mail cry. And isn’t that what humantiarians do? Feed the starving babies of Africa? Humanitarians, after all don’t do politics – they do assistance, they do 'nurture and support'. So it’s a very suitable job for a woman. This is the double danger in Amos’ words.

First, the implication is that, even in venturing outside the home, women should remain in the soft caring professions – and outside the hard political sphere. Because this, after all, is what women do best. And it’s precisely this sort of framing that diminishes many women’s ambitions: the idea that somehow, we’re hard-wired to care, not to think.

But second, Amos implicitly selling humanitarianism – and the women who work as humanitarians -- short too. Humanitarianism isn’t nurture, or charity: not when it’s done well. It’s an exhausting, demanding, exhilarating job that often pulls you far away from relationships and family life. It demands confrontation both with impossible moral dilemmas and hard bureaucratic realities. It’s not “natural” sentiment; it’s professional skill.

Humanitarianism should not be reduced to the “natural” outcome of a “natural” emotional empathy that is apparently shared by only half the world’s population. That’s not something to be celebrated. That humanitarianism isn’t ‘unstoppable’: it won’t get us anywhere. It echoes the old ideas that women are best placed outside politics. It reduces humanitarian action to charity and emotional empathy. Worst of all, in playing to the idea that gender roles and talents are hard-wired, it undercuts the notion of common human responsibility as the bedrock of humanitarian action and its capacity to effect change.

The powerful are responsible for the wars and atrocities and terrible death tolls that cling to modern history. And most of the powerful are not, have not, been women. So yes, our interests lie in challenging the structures of inequity and injustice and in reaching through politics. But we have to recognise this in order to understand how our interests align with the disempowered, with changing and not just joining power. That’s why – on International Women’s Day -- we should reject the idea women are “natural” humanitarians, and instead laud the women – no nurture, no nature about it – who have made humanitarianism a conscious, political, choice.

A tale of two Eastleighs...

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:26:00 +0000

The people of Eastleigh go to the polls today, to cast their verdict on coalition government and disgraced politicians. Watching with the rest of the political chorus, it looks like an ill-tempered campaign to fit with the bitter grey February skies: rows over education, Europe and an ‘infestation’ of immigrants. Only UKIP can apparently save us from moral catastrophe: this despite the fact that the 2011 census shows that Eastleigh is 91.8% White British, and that the greatest area of population growth in the past decade has been among the over-65s. 92.6% of Eastleigh’s residents were born in the UK: 3% in Europe.

Many would argue that the result is moot: that it gossip for the Westminster village, yes, but – whether the victor is yellow or blue – the result will change nothing. Yet in reading about the daily manufactured dramas of the by-election campaign, my thoughts keep turning to another Eastleigh. In this Eastleigh, there’s another tale of migration and electoral politics unfolding. And here the election result may matter hugely, and the politics around migration foretell a serious humanitarian crisis.

Welcome to Eastleigh, Nairobi. This Eastleigh is roughly same size as the one in Hampshire (population 2011: 125,200). Yet, unlike its UK namesake, here the migration is very real. This Eastleigh is home to tens of thousands of Somali refugees (as well as some Ethiopians and Rwandas): objects of police exploitation and public suspicion. Are Somalis terrorists? A fifth-column inside Kenya? Or just extraordinarily effective businessmen and traders?

Eastleigh is certainly sometimes a place of crime, chaos and poverty: but studies would suggest that economic livelihoods for the majority of the population here are far less fragile than in many other Kenyan neighbourhoods. For the real story here is one of extraordinary economic dynamism. For ‘Little Mogadishu’ is the centre of global trade network and has seen investment of at least $1.5 billion annually, the commercial realisation of transnational commerce fuelled by remittances. The twenty-first century’s future lies here, not in the greying Eastleigh of Southern England.

But on 18 December 2012, Kenya ordered all refugees to leave the city. Somalis were told to return to Dadaab: the overcrowded refugee camp, beloved of TV news reports, which already holds 500,000 Somali refugees. Although the Kenyan High Court has since issued a temporary staying order upon plans for forced evictions from Nairobi, fear is rife that this is the first step in a plan to push Somalis from Kenya altogether. Many Somalis – up to 20,000 – have already left, many gathering the financial capital to move to other more tranquil settings in the region, particularly Kampala. Rents have dropped in Eastleigh as Somalis relocate and the economy is dismantled.

Why dismantle this business hub? Electoral politics are certainly part of the answer here too. On Monday, Eastleigh Nairobi – like the rest of Kenya– will also go to the polls. Immigrants – especially the sort that undercut Kikuyu businessmen. and may include a terrorist or two in their numbers – are easy prey for politicians concerned with short-term race for nationals votes. The result – if the Kenyan government forces through its plans in the run up or the aftermath of the election – is a potential humanitarian crisis and an economic disaster. As Refugees International's report on the consequences of this uncertainty notes, the only undoubted beneficiaries are the Nairobi police, whose own Eastleigh economy – extracting bribes from the Somalis without strict legal right to be there – has just received an enormous boost. Which informal economy would you prefer?

It is clear – it has been for many years – that corralling refugees in camps is not an answer except in the language of short-term politics. It ignores the fact of integration, the virtues of self-reliance and practises the expensive economics of dependency. The fact of migration cannot be undone: national security will not be served by creating an underground population forced to live beneath the state or face potential encampment and an early return to Somalia. This is not just a humanitarian crisis though: it makes no sense in the language of economics to hollow out Eastleigh and its transnational commerce.

But is there anything that connects the Eastleigh of Middle England to the Eastleigh of Middle Kenya’s imagination beyond a shared name? At surface level, no. The Somali refugee crisis in all its multiple dramatic acts unfold far away from Hampshire. We do not encamp Romanians, however much we may resent them. Yet look more closely, and you begin to see how the narrow parochial interests that paint migration as a bogeyman translate from one Eastleigh to another: a shared language of suspicion that points the finger at foreigners and that ignores the economic contributions made by real migrants – not those we imagine.

We need to see these linguistic connections: global hostility reinforces itself, legitimises actions that are contrary to law or common sense. We know Dadaab isoverstretched, under-resourced, insecure. The UK should be condemning Kenya’s assault on asylum: but it’s hard to do that when you’re running on a similar ticket yourself. Better to send aid to a refugee camp. But in the long run, it is the voters of both Eastleighs who will be the losers: for if you focus on migration, make that the policy problem, poor governance can go unnoticed, declines in service provision unchecked. Keeping out or kicking out the migrants may win votes: but oh, what small-minded, anxious votes, and at what cost.

Stuck on repeat: Cameron on immigration

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:34:00 +0000

If you repeat something often enough, people start to believe it’s true. Just so with David Cameron’s latest comments yesterday that ‘this open and welcoming economy’ must cut legal aid and other benefits for foreign nationals to avoid being seen as a ‘soft touch’. To prevent abuse of services, those who ‘haven't contributed their taxes… should pay when they use the NHS’. Cue applause and hysteria from Tory MPs, the Daily Mail, Migration Watch etc., and howls of outrage from UKIP, rushing to outflank the Conservatives on the right and campaigning to ‘stop open-door immigration’. The “debate” on migration shifts further right: the doublespeak turns half-facts into accepted truths.

I hesitated before starting to write this blog: after all, I’ve written this blog before. So too have others. We get stuck on repeat. But the words need to be scrutinised: the claims called into question. An ‘open and welcoming economy’? Revealing perhaps to use the word ‘economy’ and not ‘society’: when hostility towards immigration is commonplace expression, amplified by tabloid journalism, we’re not an open and welcoming society. But our economy open? That ignores the cries of software firms that they can’t find the skilled staff they need, the protests from universities about ever-more stringent visa regimes leading engineers and economists to look elsewhere for education. As for open-door migration… even if we accept that EU freedom of movement (a reciprocal policy that opens the door to British emigration and a thousand Spanish fish-and-chip shops, let’s remember) is migration, there are still provisions in EU law to ensure that EU migrants cannot become “scroungers”: they must have sufficient resources and sickness insurance.

Easy to pull apart the rhetoric. But there's something more at stake than migration. A week ago Nando Sigona wrote about how the turning of migrants into bogeymen is now affecting citizens: falling in love and building a family with a non-EU foreigner an income-dependent privilege. He's right. However, I also think we can see in the language used to berate migrants’ abuses of public services (that they are very often paying for) a darker story still, one that affects not just the private lives of citizens but the public content of citizenship itself.

Read Cameron’s words again: those who ‘haven't contributed their taxes… should pay when they use the NHS’. But most migrants pay taxes: many British citizens don’t. Income-dependent access to “public” services: who does that exclude? Not migrants per se: the poor. And while the welfare state’s foundations lie in the fictions of equal citizenship binding rich and poor compatriots together, and Cameron needs British voters to believe he’s on their flag-waving side, the austerity decade is already rewriting our social contract in a manner that suggests migrants are not the only group seen as undeserving poor. These are the foundations for a wider attack on the social rights of citizenship. And – with the threats Cameron's recent speech makes to legal aid – the foundations of the British state in the rule of law. What have we become if we are a community in which a stranger is no longer entitled to a fair trial?

The irony is that the hollowing out of citizenship is taking place at the same time as the citizen’s privileges are being shouted about at higher volume and more frantically than for many decades. But that’s the beauty of doublethink. And that’s why we need to keep dissecting the rhetoric, pointing out its inconsistencies and it’s dangerous implications. Because you never know – if you repeat the meticulously researched evidence about the impacts of migration often enough, some people might just begin to believe that’s true instead.

On Citizenship

noreply@blogger.com (Katy) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:59:00 +0000

What is citizenship for? That’s a question I’ve been asking for the last few years in an academicsetting: but it seemed more relevant than ever this week as I listened to commentators debate the logic of the Government’s new Citizenship Test: Too much history? The wrong sort of history? More on this in a moment. But it seems to me that before we can answer this question about what sort of qualifications are needed for citizenship, we need to think a little more about what citizenship itself is supposed to mean.

According to the UKBA, one of the two benefits of citizenship is that you can vote in national elections. Except, of course, if you’re a Commonwealth citizen – Not just ‘White Dominion’ Australian or Canadian, but Ghanaian, Jamaican, Indian or even Pakistani – you can vote already. Very occasionally, the vestiges of Empire work both ways. That just leaves the British passport. Which is really as much about being able to leave as it is about being able to stay. Of course it’s more than that too – an emblem of belonging, a document that will save you bureaucratic form-filling and money as you no longer have to apply – again – for continued leave to remain. But the point is that citizenship should be seen not so much a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but a confirmation of community ties.

But where’s the “British Community”? If the Citizenship Test is taken as indicative, it would appear to lie in the past, the memories of dead Englishmen and comedy groups that – however brilliant – disbanded thirty years ago. The truth – as Christian Joppke’s book Citizenship and Immigration underlines – is that the the story of national citizenships can only be told in the past tense, because the values that supposedly bind us together – tolerance, respect, democracy – are exactly the same as the values that Americans or Germans or South Africans would also claim bind their citizens together. Britain is the elite’s attempts to build a composite of national and regional identities: depending on whether you believe the publicity or the practice, its most powerful quality is either its ability to evolve and incorporate new, diverse belongings or its ability to continue to sustain rule by an Etonian English Establishment. My point is that Britain has always been an imagined community existing more in the minds of civil servants than in the culture of cities or country villages.

So if citizenship is supposed to be a confirmation of community ties, why focus on reinforcing the creation myths of an ultimately hollow “Britain”? Why not on the citizenship of everyday life – paying taxes, your children attending school, queueing in the Post Office. Yes, this requires a working knowledge of English (or Welsh), and understanding of the broad contours of how to interact in modern British society – but given our draconian visa regimes, this is mostly taken care of before you even step foot in Britain, and in the rare cases when it is not, the answer is not a test but tuition. We should, though, be careful not to set the bar too high. As I sit typing this in London, I do not know my neighbours. I cannot make a nice cuppa tea (I hate the stuff). Just as expecting our new Citizens to master a pub quiz in Imperial history ignores the fact that only around one-third of sixteen-year olds sitting GCSEs even take History, and one-third of them don’t get more than a ‘D’ grade, an Arcadian vision of village fetes and street parties and cricket teas is not only fantasy, it’s many other (British) people’s hell.

A common language; a smattering of cultural connections; the reasonable expectation of a livelihood. The desire to become a citizen. Surely that should be enough? After all, citizenship is the most arbitrarily distributed of goods (perhaps even more than wealth). Having the option to choose a different community seems a basic means of redressing the injustices resulting from birthplace or parentage. And what does citizenship mean anyway, when the state is shrinking and social rights being retracted? Moral panic about impending Bulgarian and Romanian floods may distract the masses, but British citizenship means less today not because of migrants, but because the entitlements of Empire are in the past, and the future laid out is one of private goods not public rights.

‘Citizenship’, wrote T.H. Marshall ‘has become... the architect of legitimate social inequality’. My favourite line on citizenship: one that reminds us that citizenship is ultimately a form of co-option, a social safety valve. Citizens are all equal, so the theory goes: so what does it matter whether I am rich and you are poor? It matters a great deal, of course, and the debate surrounding the citizenship test underlines the extent to which citizenship and its social rights are being eroded by a political project that sees power as ‘the privilege of a limited economic class’. Marshall, a great historian, knew well that History is written by the powerful: but also that progress lay in the inclusion of the powerless, the choices we made about what citizenship meant. And that’s why this new citizenship test is dangerous: it spins a British fairytale none of us should believe, just as the Bulgarians and Romanians are being spun a patronising horror story (for the edification of the British media). When in truth, we citizens should be less anxious about protecting our precarious privileges and more concerned about regaining, from our own government, our so easily-lost social rights.